We live in a world full of ethnic others: Jews and Arabs, Hutus and Tutsis, Serbs and Bosnians, black and white. Actors often play ethnicities that are not their own—even ethnicities perceived as in conflict with their own.
For the current Israeli film The Band's Visit, about an Egyptian police department band invited to play at the opening ceremony for an Arab cultural center in a small town in Israel, director Eran Kolirin was faced with the problem of casting eight Egyptian band members. Due to political tensions, there is no cultural exchange between Egypt and Israel. Because the Egyptian characters speak Arabic, Kolirin assumed the best actors to cast would be Palestinians, even though the Egyptian accent is different from the Palestinian one. As it turned out, the lead role of the stoical, uptight Egyptian bandleader went to Sasson Gabai, an Iraq-born Israeli Jew whose mother tongue is Arabic. "At the end of the day," says Kolirin, "I had to answer a lot of questions other than what ethnic group the actor belongs to: his range of emotion, what he brings to the movie."
Meanwhile, one of the Jewish Israeli roles went to Rubi Moscovich, whose parents are Egyptian Jews. Moscovich, who grew up in Israel immersed in Egyptian culture, spoke the Egyptian dialect better than any Palestinian on the set. Kolirin is married to a Jew from a Moroccan family. "So my kid is half Arab, you could say," he comments.
All this is to show just how amorphous the idea of the ethnic other is. The question of ethnic identity, as Kolirin points out, is complicated in the Middle East, where it is "more fluid, more flexible than you might think from just looking at it from afar." Gabai, playing an Egyptian Arab at a time of great ethnic conflict in Israel, was thrilled to be cast, because he got to speak his native language. "Sasson's nuances and approach to the character are much more from his own experiences, his family, not from research," says Kolirin. "Research can bring actors not closer but further away from their characters."
Ethnic identity can be an amorphous thing stateside, too. Actor Kathleen Antonia, who has a black mother and a white father, is often cast as ethnicities other than her own, such as South African or African American. She says a lot of directors and writers veer toward racial stereotypes, and, like many actors, she has often been directed to "act blacker—a disturbing and sad experience." That's because for women, acting "blacker" usually means sassier. "I think so many actors want work so badly that they're willing to step into these caricature things," Antonia says. "So many actors of color get put into caricatured roles that we may lose our way to playing a real person." You have to find a way to get yourself in there, she says: "It's about playing a human being under different circumstances—but still a human being."
The problem, though, is that people generally tend to think of whatever races are not their own as the other. Says Antonia, "That's a hurdle in a realistic portrayal." She is also a playwright and thinks that as an actor writing for different ethnicities, it might be easier for her than for other writers, because she understands how much actors bring to a script. "Writers sometimes are a bit blatant in showing a character is a different race, when that's not always what it's about," she says.
Last fall, Ali Pourtash appeared on stage in Los Angeles in a political drama called Benedictus playing a Persian Jew. Pourtash, from a Muslim family, immigrated to the United States from Iran in 1978 and applies the same rule to all the characters he plays (including, on a weekly Persian satellite-TV comedy that opposes the current regime in Iran, an 86-year-old woman): He never judges them. "Even if I were a Muslim fanatic who hates Jews and had to play a Jew, it is my job to put my prejudices or special interests aside and not judge my character," he says.
As for his Benedictus role, Pourtash says, "It's a universal character. He's a survivor in a tight situation—he could be Muslim, African, white—that's all I cared about. I don't want to hear he's Jewish, he's Muslim, he's good, he's bad." Instead, Pourtash simply wants to know his objective. "I have nothing against Jews but a lot against the regime of Iran," he adds. "They've ruined my country, and I'm in exile. No Jew ever did anything bad to me. I was happy to play a character that I might never have had a chance to play."
In a completely different vein, actor Jack Willis is currently appearing in Athol Fugard's two-hander Blood Knot at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater, where he is a member of the core company. In the play, he and African-American actor Steven Anthony Jones play mixed-race brothers in apartheid South Africa. Willis, who is white, plays the brother who passes for white; Jones plays the darker-skinned brother who doesn't. Willis says his first concern was nailing the dialect, but his eyes were opened to all sorts of other aspects of the play when he and Jones traveled to South Africa for research. From there he wrote on his blog, "I am so, so, so pale. I have to admit, it's weird. And weirdness runs very deep. What is color? I keep asking that. What is race? What is tribe? What is family? What is blood? Really, what is blood?"
In South Africa, Willis developed a better understanding of what it means there to be "colored," like his character—the idea that anyone who isn't a pure white European or pure African receives that amorphous designation, which includes Asians, South Asians, Semites, and others. Willis says Blood Knot is the hardest play he's ever done, but he considers it a unique opportunity to play a race other than Caucasian. He did play Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in college, though he knows he'll never again play a Native American.
Arab-American actor-playwright Betty Shamieh is cast as various ethnicities, such as Latin American and Israeli. "As an actor," she says, "I tend to work from the emotional life of the character. But as a playwright, I do more research."To write from a viewpoint other than her own, she spends a lot of time getting to know the "other" community. "If you're going to write about that group," she says, "you need to have friends there, people you care about in that group, to create the characters."
In her plays, which have run Off-Broadway and around the country, Shamieh is committed to casting actors of color no matter what ethnicity she's written for a character, and to cast Arab Americans in at least half the roles. "Theatre is artifice," she points out, "and the idea that you have to be authentic in casting the exact ethnicity of the character is to me kind of anti the magic of theatre." She notes that some of her playwright friends disagree; they feel you must cast actors who are the same ethnicity as their characters. "I want someone who captures the essence, the emotional life of the character," Shamieh declares.
When I tell her about the mixed casting in The Band's Visit, she muses, "So, Egyptians and Israelis can't be cast together. But the imagination can go where the world can't." Well, not yet, anyway. In the meantime—and eternally—we have actors, who are all about finding the universal humanity in their roles.