Actors are often left speculating about the fine points of casting. And when a script specifies a particular ethnic type for a role, political ramifications can further complicate the casting process. Consider Dael Orlandersmith's Yellowman, currently at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. The two-actor drama about a "high-yella" man and a woman with a moderate tone of skin shows how "colorism" within the African-American community affects relationships. According to Orlandersmith, the nuances of skin shades escaped the casting directors involved in the production. She recently told the San Francisco Bay Guardian, "Here in New York I had to describe to a casting person what a light-skinned black man looked like. … [M]any casting people cannot tell the difference between a light-skinned black person and a dark-skinned black person."
Can this be true? I called Amy Potozkin, Berkeley Rep's casting director. Yellowman was originally staged in New York and then recast for the Berkeley production. Potozkin and director Les Waters attended auditions in New York, arranged by the local CD (they had all previously met to discuss the play's needs). The script clearly requires the female lead to be medium-brown, the male light. "The casting director in New York didn't want to be the one to decide she's a little too light, he's a little too dark; they wanted to bring us the best talent they could and have Les and me determine ultimately the needs for our production," Potozkin explains. Thus there were times when Potozkin and Waters said, for example, "This actor is too dark." To Potozkin, the needs were common sense. "We had to take into account all the specifics for this play, given these two characters and the world they created," she says. "I feel it's my job to illuminate what the playwright has in mind when it's that specific."
It seemed like common sense to me, too, but might I, and other white people, be missing some subtleties of distinction?
Velina Brown and Michael Sullivan, a married couple currently appearing together in John Brown's Body at Denver Center Theatre, are similar to Orlandersmith's star-crossed pair in that Brown is dark-skinned and Sullivan is light-skinned. That they're currently playing a married couple (Civil War–era slaves) is unusual for them: In commercial work, if Brown is paired with a man, he's always dark-skinned. "White people, generally speaking, draw a blank when you talk about shades," Brown says. Yet with black actors, degrees of color is indeed a big factor. "What is black, or black enough, or not too black, or not really black?" Brown asks rhetorically. "'Is this person white enough?' is not a question that's asked much. What does it mean when someone says, 'I want you to be more black'? I'm obviously of African descent. So when someone says to me they want to see 'a little more blackness,' they're talking about the stereotype of how a black person carries themselves, speaks, whatever. There's a combination of the skin color issue and also the class/education issue. I often get caught in between. I'm not a light-skinned babe type and I'm not the dark-skinned, heavy-set mammy type."
What type is she? Lately, on-screen, she has been cast in a professional/supervisory Anita Hill–like category. She has also often played nurses and military types. She notes that on TV, a middle-class black mother will usually be played by a light-skinned woman, but if the character is a welfare or ghetto mom, she will more likely be played by a dark-skinned actor. "If you're dark, but more slender than heavy, and you [speak in educated tones], they can't figure out what to do with you," Brown says, but she adds, "I don't want to get into a whining thing. I do work."
Sullivan observes, "In the culture we're in, black women are supposed to be lighter than guys, while black men are supposed to be dark and virile and dangerous." According to unconscious assumptions based on received cultural aesthetics, a black woman is beautiful if she's light, with non-African facial features. That way, says Sullivan, she can be exotic without being a clear descendent of Africans.
Sullivan also observes that his wife often gets cast as an angry black woman. "If you're a dark woman, you're either angry, or you're the mammy," he says. "You can't just be a lawyer—you've got to be a pissed lawyer!"
Although Sullivan says it's harder for casting directors to figure out what to do with Brown, he's in an odd position, too. "If I were either lighter and had different [straighter] hair, or were darker, I'd fit into some kind of stereotype for audiences," he says. "They'd know exactly what type of person this is—it's a kind of racial shorthand. But I have a natural, and I'm not getting rid of it." Rarely has he been cast opposite a darker-skinned woman; one of the few times he was, he was meant to be the "pretty, upper-class guy, civilized, which somehow translates into light-skinned." His co-star was the dark-skinned, backward village girl.
Another married couple, Margo Hall and Peter Callender (who is currently appearing in August Wilson's King Hedley II at San Francisco's Lorraine Hansberry Theatre), are the reverse of Brown and Sullivan: She's light-skinned, he's dark. Hall finds that for the media, she's not black enough. "I'm constantly aware when I go to a TV or film audition, and I'm the only light-skinned woman there, that they're looking for someone brown," she says. She thinks that casting directors understand the basic differences in skin tones but says that black people are much more aware of it than are whites. "A casting director might be more likely to delineate on the basis of facial features or quality of hair," she opines. "It depends on who's casting and what they see as African-American. They might look at me and say, 'She's mixed.'"
Hall and Callender met in a production of Playboy of the West Indies, in which, says Hall, "Everyone in the cast was brown-skinned except me. I was very aware of being light. Because I'm light I often feel I have to prove how black I am. I have to know my black history. They see me and think, 'She's going to speak white.' But that's not me at all. For those ethnic roles, I have to prove I'm a sister; I'm black, too."
She agrees with Sullivan's observation that dark-skinned women are expected to be angry and adds that, conversely, light women such as herself are expected to be much less so. She also mentions the cliché of black women being constantly cast as maids, noting that those roles go to dark-skinned actors. "I can play the maid, too!" she says. "It's hard when you're up against another black woman, and you feel that competition—who are they looking for, light or dark? If they want someone light-skinned, then that means they want me to [act] a little more white. It's so confusing. I think they should just pick the best person for the role. But … politics!"
Hall further points out that preferred skin color can be a flavor-of-the-month thing. "Right now light-skinned men can't get arrested," she says. "Brown is in, like Wesley Snipes."
Back to the question of whether casting people, being mostly white, understand skin color differences: Sullivan thinks that it has less to do with perceiving the difference between, say, himself and Sidney Poitier, and more to do with understanding the importance of the issue of colorism to black audiences. "The fact that Huey Newton was light-skinned informs us about his personality," he explains, "what he experienced as a child, and more. A black audience will recognize those dynamics right away, and a white casting director [won't]."
"Every which way, the lack of knowledge about that dynamic is very, very strong," agrees Brown. "[Skin color] is a very big deal for the black community." Playwright Orlandersmith, in her Bay Guardian interview, characterized that lack of knowledge as "a simple matter of bigotry"—strong words indeed. Brown, for her part, finds it unsurprising that casting directors might not understand the importance of fine distinctions of skin color. She notes that until recently, makeup artists were clueless about what colors to use on her face. She says that if she were a makeup artist and didn't know what colors worked for a brunette as opposed to for a blonde, she'd be fired. The bottom line, she says, is, "We have to know more about you than you have to know about us." And that's a sad state of affairs. BSW