Steppenwolf Theatre Company Blog – Chicago Theater, World-Class Ensemble

Hello – Tina here, the director of The Tempest. I’m thrilled that this conversation is being had on our blog – so thank you to all of you who have contributed.

I’d like to respond with a general account of how I cast this play and why, and then by addressing some specific comments.

Brant Russell wrote in his entry, “Tina, when casting the play, looked at the ensemble and thought about who might be best for each role. Skin color was not a factor in these decisions.” Well, that is only partially true. First I thought about who might be best for each role – and then I thought long and hard about how cast members’ skin color might sway meaning, shape concept, and influence readings of the production.

In casting The Tempest my imperative was first and foremost what I always try to do at Steppenwolf: cast as many ensemble members as possible (having learned over time the extraordinary benefits of working with ensemble – a topic worthy of its own blog, but not here.) For each available role I thought about who in the ensemble might be able to play that role and what qualities they would bring to it – and for each ensemble member who was available and interested I thought about where I might be able to place them. For this first round of my process, while I was certainly aware of race and gender, I excluded those as determining factors. For instance, for Gonzalo, I thought about Lois Smith (female) as well as Austin Pendleton (male). For Antonio I thought about James Meredith (black) as well as Tom Irwin (white).

For Caliban, K. Todd Freeman came forward very early on with an expressed desire to play the role; I thought it was a great idea and cast him instantly. I was aware that in casting K. Todd as Caliban we were entering into a long history of discourse about the character, his role as a slave, monster, son - as well as a debate about to what degree and in what ways Shakespeare’s play is about colonialism. (I learned in my research that up until the 1960s, Caliban had traditionally been played by white men, signifying to audiences a variety of meanings contingent on current political and cultural trends – and that it was only in the latter part of the 20th century that Caliban was adopted, most vocally by writers from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa, first as a symbol relating to imperialist North America, more recently as an emblem of colonized native populations.)

An interesting side note: in contemporary productions of The Tempest it’s most common to find a man of color playing the role of Caliban, with many productions underlining racial themes - while a recent university production garnered criticism by casting a white actor in the role, thereby inviting accusations of willfully ignoring the racial dynamics of the play. I started wondering if any way of casting this character would invite its own controversies. I wondered if the topic of race is unavoidable in a play like this (which repeatedly uses the words “slave” and “master”) in a country such as ours. Perhaps it is impossible for our audiences not to approach the relationship between Prospero and Caliban without thinking of the human injustices of slavery and apartheid..?

For Ariel, I knew he or she had to sing, do aerial work, be mercurial, playful, unpredictable, sexy – and I really only thought of Jon Hill from the get-go. Jon and I have worked together on four productions in the last year plus some, and he’s become for me an invaluable collaborator and muse.

From the ensemble I very much wanted to work with Alana Arenas and while I thought Alana could play a couple of roles, I also thought that she was the only ensemble member who could play Miranda. I thought about what it would “mean” to have a white Prospero and a black Miranda, and to cut to the chase here, I decided very little (for those eager to pin down naturalistic logic it worked because we never meet Miranda’s deceased mother, and for those willing to receive it in a less literal but more emotional mode, it worked because Alana possesses the right spirit, energy, and connection with our Prospero, the already cast Frank Galati.)

Once I had lists and it came time to make offers, I began to more deeply consider the ramifications of my somewhat color and gender “blind” casting. Which is why I love the term coined by Brendan Averett in his entry: color “aware” casting. I realized that I could ask who the best ensemble member is for a given role and cast it without limitation to race, gender, age –but I could not, in all honesty, pretend that it didn’t matter, that it wouldn’t still have consequences, cause questions to emerge and meanings to be conveyed. Whatever choices I made would elicit interpretations (some of which I might anticipate or mean, others of which might surprise or even upset me.)

This is true of all artistic choices, whether in casting, design, music, action, etc. The question I’ve asked myself as a director is: can I control how people respond to the choices I make, and do I even want to try to do so…?

Here’s an interesting for instance: the two roles for which I thought James Meredith best suited – purely in terms of temperament and what gifts James brings to the stage – were Antonio and Stefano. In my “color blind” mode I could see him playing either role. However, when I took the next step to consider reverberations based on race, I realized that if I cast James as Stefano, the drunken butler, then the three black men in the cast would all be playing servants. I didn’t want to do this UNLESS I was working from a decidedly “colonial” concept for the production, which I was not. (For some examples of productions that have done so you could check out Jonathan Miller’s 1970 production at the RSC or his 1988 Old Vic version, George Wolf’s 1995 production at New York’s Public Theater, Kate Whoriskey’s 1995 version at D.C.’s Shakespeare Theater, or this year’s RSC production directed by Janice Honeyman.)

Additionally, I realized that casting James as Frank’s brother was more interesting, if perhaps more thorny. My initial dream was to have an Antonio that looked like a mirror reflection of our Prospero. The more I thought about what it said to have an Antonio that didn’t look at all like our Prospero, the more I understood how this could support the play’s themes. I was interested in creating a world on stage where things are not always what they seem and, even more so, where true essence lies beyond what a person or thing looks, sounds, or dresses like. I understand Shakespeare’s play to be partially about the tension between illusion and reality, between appearance and substance, between what things look like and what they are. For me, James as Frank/Prospero’s brother helped express a play-world that is fluid and layered.

So, I was about to sign off on casting, and then it struck me one day, “Oh my gosh, James is not playing a servant but he is playing what some could see as (although I am not one of them) the villain, the bad guy. Are people going to read this as a comment on black men as bad guys and white men as good guys….?!” I then played a game where I cast James in all different roles in the play, and discovered a possible reading which might appall me in every single case – at which point I landed on this realization:

Someone is going to read something into everything. Every single configuration I make of how to cast our African-American ensemble members in this play could be read, if one chose, as insensitive or politically incorrect or even racist. Casting these roles with these actors will be loaded – for someone, somehow. What I am left to do now is to consider as many layers and meanings as I can find, take responsibility for them, be as true to my own open heart as possible, and, well, beyond that… I cannot control how people will construct meaning out of my choices (no matter how clear or articulated my intentions are to me!)

I mostly agree with Brant when he writes, “The Play is what happens in the space between the actors onstage and the mind of the viewer – it’s what happens when the event’s ephemeral bursts of information are received and incorporated into a lifetime of experience… During post-show discussions, people often begin questions with ‘What is the significance of…?’ or ‘What did it mean when…?’ I am always tempted to answer those questions with another question – What was its significance to you? What did it mean to you?” Like Brant, I’m always eager to hear audience responses to the work because I’m always amazed at the multitude of opinions, the myriad ways in which people read or react to the very same work on the very same night – and often with radically contradictory assessments, or analyses that startle me. I learn from this. (More on this shortly.)

Ok, now what I disagree with entirely in what Brant wrote:

“The four roles played by black actors are Miranda, Caliban, Ariel, and Antonio. All of these characters are, in some way or another, bound to Prospero.” While it’s undisputable that Caliban and Ariel are bound to Prospero, I do think Brant stretches it by identifying Miranda’s and Antonio’s attachments as more significant than the ways in which we are all always bound to our blood relations, especially in the case of child to parent. Additionally, when Brant writes that Antonio “is bound by Prospero’s emotions,” he’s making a statement that could be true for just about any character in the play. The entire course of action in The Tempest is swirled into motion by Prospero’s controlling magic (stemming in part from his desire for revenge) and every single character in the play falls prey to both his emotions and his spells. I find the idea of “thematic connections” between these four particular characters to be forced, so I just can’t buy Brant’s question, “Do the thematic connections between these characters (that is, if I’m not reading too much into it) beg some kind of interpretation when one considers that they are played by the company’s black actors?”

Ok, now I’d like to respond to two comments posted here. I meant it when I wrote above that “I learn from you.” I find both Nakyra Solis’ and Marvita Jones’ posts enlightening because they offer me an unexpected perspective on the impact of one of the production’s key moments.

Nakyra writes, “But when Ariel expressed his frustration with Prospero by doing a short minstrel jig, I was appalled by just how much it had been considered. In other words, the director and actor clearly recognized implications of the casting choices and then the production all but patted itself on the back for being so witty.” I’m not sure how we patted ourselves on the back for being witty as much as we noticed something critical in Shakespeare’s text and found a way to express its truth for us. When working on the four lines of text,

Before you can say ‘come’ and ‘go,’ | And breathe twice and cry ’so, so,’ | Each one, tripping on his toe, | Will be here with mop and mow. | Do you love me, master? no?

Our verse consultant Rob Clare pointed out to us that at this moment in the play Ariel switches into a meter and use of rhyme that is found nowhere else in the text. It is a radical formal departure for the character. The structure Shakespeare uses at this moment is more akin to that used by Puck in Midsummer – a kind of short ditty with bounce in its rhythm – so, Rob suggested, perhaps Ariel here is quoting a form, and throwing a child-like sing-songy response back in Prospero’s face. He suggested that this is how Shakespeare’s audience might have perceived these lines: as a kind of mockery. Additionally, we were struck by how Ariel here goes on, and on, about how extremely quickly and willingly he will execute his orders, leading to our sense that Ariel is here over-compensating (for his previously established resentment of Prospero.) As we were talking, it became clear that Ariel needed to speak-sing this so that it was not a song like his others in the play but rather a commentary on a type of song. When we played with subtext here, Jon found himself saying a version of “yes sir, yes sir, you bectha sir”… which led to our decision that day to try the four lines as a “minstrel jig,” as Nakyra puts it.

I’ll never forget when Jon played this out fully as we sat there at the table. There was stunned silence. Many of us had tears. It hit us like a blow to the stomach. Which, of course, is also what Ariel is trying to do to his master at this moment. Ariel is perhaps breaking verse structure so as to remind Prospero of a way of looking at their relationship that is always present but never expressed. As if Ariel were saying to Prospero, “look at me – look at us – for all of the trappings of what our wonderful little relationship looks like it really can all be stripped away to the hard cold facts of your being a master and my being a slave – look at me, at how I behave with you, and what you’ve participated in turning me into: a horrifyingly acquiescent and pandering creature, pretending my life of servitude is all ok…”

Nakyra believes that “the production created a race issue where one did not exist before.” We believed that we followed Shakespeare’s lead toward revealing a racial and relationship dynamic that was always there but had remained publicly unacknowledged by these two characters up until this point. Additionally, I would guess that placing our black Caliban in chains, (which is not called for by the text but was a production choice) could not help but bring up for most people images and reminders of America’s terrible past with slavery.

Yet, and finally, when Nakyra writes that “A black person who goes to see a Shakespeare play where the racial tensions are purposefully enhanced through casting choices doesn’t need it to be spelled out to them,” I thought: ah, okay - there is no question that this moment in our production brings racial tension to the forefront in a sudden and very bald fashion. This is why I’ve loved it. This is why Nakyra finds it “inconsiderate.” I get this. And I thank her for allowing me to see this point of view, which I had not.

You might all think I am trying to have it both ways, that on the one hand race doesn’t matter (for instance in casting Alana, James, and Frank as family) and that on the other hand it does, or might, suddenly. As Marvita Jones describes it: I might have made “several inconsistent choices…” I might have. There’s a phrase I use in rehearsal, that I’ll offer to the actors to open up possibility: “Everything – and its opposite.” There’s a phrase actors sometimes fall back on to limit their available choices: “My character wouldn’t do that.” I believe that most people are capable of, and contain, most things. That people are essentially contradictory. I do work in rehearsal to reveal and incorporate as many layers as possible. Sometimes this means a character says and does opposite things, or that a relationship is both loving and hurtful. I believe people are inconsistent, that life is inconsistent, and the theater becomes deadly when we apply rules to it that are more controlled, narrow, or logical than what we experience in our daily lives. My experience is that life is messy, discrepant, unpredictable – and I hope that the realities I create on stage can reflect that. I understand that the risk I run is that some might find my work lacking cohesion.

I also believe that when creating a role for the stage actors should not shrink that character’s range and size. Often actors will want to grab and hold onto a core idea for a character (it’s understandable), or they’ll want to determine how that character’s experience is just like their own. I hope that actors I work with are able to find the parallels between the characters’ experience and their own (so as to personalize) and that they are also able to reach (through the gifts of empathy and imagination) into realms of experience that might be beyond their own.

All this by way of saying that, while working on The Tempest, we neither limited ourselves to our actors’ life experiences (age, ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, etc.) nor did we exclude them. We found, as we always do in theater, that it is near impossible to deny the self - the body’s and soul’s reactions when encountering a new drama. The question becomes, when an actor’s personal experience or lived-in culture becomes part of what they’re feeling about a moment in the play, what do you do with that? Do you ignore it or allow it? How do you channel or use it? When is it helpful to the production and when not? On The Tempest, individual actors and I made choices daily and on a case by case basis. Which is why one would find inconsistency in not highlighting race around our black Miranda being our white Prospero’s daughter and yet highlighting it around our black Ariel’s ditty to same Prospero.

You know, clearly, I could go on and on… But I better stop. This probably no longer even qualifies as a blog post. Aren’t they supposed to be of a certain brevity…?

Thanks for the conversation, and for challenging me to think even harder and deeper about these most important issues.

This entry was posted by Tina Landau on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 11:03 am and is filed under The Tempest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.