At Town Hall
By Robert SimonsonThere wasn't a riot inside Town Hall on Mon, Jan. 27, but there was almost one outside.
For weeks, the talk surrounding the August Wilson-Robert Brustein "discussion" on cultural power had been building, until what could easily have passed by unnoticed--another dry academic exercise--evolved into a bona fide event.
Tickets sold out. And if a bomb had dropped on the Town Hall, the American theatre would have had a lot more to wring its hands over than color-blind casting.
John Guare was there, seated with novelist William Styron. So was George C. Wolfe. Also in attendance were producer Rocco Landesman, actress Lois Smith, playwright and scholar Eric Bentley, and what seemed like the entire New York critical establishment, from Frank Rich on down.
Outside Town Hall, 15 minutes before the debate was to begin, under a shower of wet snow, the swarming cognoscenti buzzed and jostled each other with a sense of the utmost urgency. More than one member of the crowd compared the scene to a Who concert. Another said it was like a Tyson fight.
If people weren't trying to squeeze through the single open door, they were struggling to claim their tickets. "Howard! Howard!" the bewildered New York Times drama critic Ben Brantley called to The Daily News' Howard Kissel, who was closer to the press rep. "Can you get my tickets!?!"
As the evening moderator, Anna Deavere Smith, said in her opening remarks, "Who would have thought that a rap on race, a rap on culture, would have drawn such a crowd on a Monday night?"
A War of Words
The seeds of the Town Hall skirmish were planted more than
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six months ago when Wilson delivered the keynote address at the Theatre Communications Group's national conference at Princeton University.
In the speech, titled "The Ground on Which I Stand" (later reprinted in the September issue of American Theatre), Wilson assailed the dearth of African-American-oriented theatres, pointing out that, of the 66 LORT theatres, only one--Crossroads Theatre in New Brunswick, N.J.--could be called black.
"Black theatre doesn't share in the economics that would allow it to support its artists and supply them with meaningful avenues to develop their talent and broadcast and disseminate ideas crucial to its growth," Wilson said at that time. "The economics are reserved as privilege to the overwhelming abundance of institutions that preserve, promote, and perpetuate white culture."
Wilson furthermore stated that black and white artists "can meet on the common ground of theatre as a field of work and endeavor. But we cannot meet on the common ground of experience. We cannot share a single value system if that value system consists of the values of white Americans based on their European ancestors."
The most inflammatory section of the oration, however--surprising whites and blacks alike--was Wilson's attack on color-blind casting, which he called "an aberrant idea."
"For a black actor to stand on the stage," he said, "as part of a social milieu that has denied him his gods, his culture, his humanity, his mores, his ideas of himself and the world he lives in, is to be in league with a thousand nay-sayers who wish to corrupt the vigor and spirit of his heart."
An all-black production of "Death of a Salesman," he asserted, would be an assault on African-Americans' presence.
Robert Brustein, artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., had sparred with Wilson before, taking exception to his plays. After reading the speech (in which Brustein was invoked, unfavorably, by name), he took up the pen again.
Writing in The New Republic, he called Wilson's speech a "rambling jeremiad," which called for "subsidized separatism."
"I don't think Martin Luther King ever imagined an America," Brustein wrote, "where playwrights such as August Wilson would be demanding, under the pretense of calling for healing and unity, an entirely separate stage for black theatre artists. What next? Separate schools? Separate washrooms? Separate drinking fountains?"
Brustein's response inspired a rebuttal by Wilson, and that, a reply by Brustein. By the end of January, it seemed everyone had something to say on the subject and was saying it. The New York Times' Paul Goldberger published his thoughts, as did The New Yorker's Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Finally, Smith called for a forum ,and both parties agreed.
Once Again, With Feeling
Brustein and Wilson, like boxing opponents, entered from opposite sides of the stage.
In their individual opening remarks, neither man did much more than reiterate the stand he had already taken in print. And, unfortunately, they went on to do little more than that during the ensuing half-hour exchange.
The dialogue was, however, more contentious and staccato, and was sometimes reduced to sniping.
Coming out swinging, Brustein--implying that Wilson's identification with his enslaved ancestors was outdated--said the playwright had "the best mind of the 17th century."
"The fact is that things have changed over 300 years and particularly in the last 30 years," argued Brustein. "I'm just asking that you acknowledge those changes."
"I make my own self-definition," Wilson responded, "When you're looking at me, you're looking at all of the Africans that came over from Africa, even the ones whose bones are at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. When you're looking at me, that is what you see."
The exchanges were often as fiery as this, but each speaker stuck close to his previously stated platform. Both decried the lack of funding for black theatres, though Wilson went on to object to money going to "white" theatres to finance the production of works by minority artists.
Wilson contended that art had a social and political purpose, that "art changes individuals and individuals change society." Brustein, meanwhile, said that "art changes consciousness, but not society.
"People are turning to culture to change society because politics have failed," he opined. "But you only end up corrupting and abasing culture."
Late in the discussion, Brustein challenged Wilson to single-handedly alter the state of black theatres, by awarding an African-American house one of his world premieres or by starting a black theatre on his own.
"I myself am personally a playwright. I am not interested in starting a theatre," Wilson replied, in an answer greeted with some disappointment by the crowd.
& A
The Town Hall audience seemed loaded for bear from the word "go." The stage was consistently bombarded with groans, hisses, comments, and impromptu questions. The topics at hand, apparently, were not ones anyone in attendance was prepared to take sitting down.
The crowd, however, was to be credited for providing what turned out to be the liveliest and most pointed part of the discussion: the question-and-answer period.
Wilson initially stated that he preferred not to discuss color-blind casting--a significant part of his disagreement with Brustein. The audience, however, wasn't having it, and several questions (submitted on cards) addressed the issue.
"Can blacks do Chekhov?" Smith queried at one point.
"I much prefer they do art of their specific ethnic genre," Wilson replied, adding that color-blind casting "denies the person on stage his own identity."
Brustein countered that the main purpose of nontraditional casting was to "get the best possible actor in a role regardless of race," not, as Wilson said, to afford employment for minorities.
One audience member stated that he had been raised in a predominantly Chicano neighborhood by a father who was African-American, with traces of Scottish, Irish, and Native American blood, and a mother of European-Jewish heritage. "Where," the questioner asked, "do I fit in in the American theatre?"
In reply, Wilson rather obliquely referred back to his "personal definition" of himself, adding: "However that person wants to define themselves, fine. If they define themselves as black, then I personally think it is wrong for them to participate in the theatre that is something other than a black person's theatre."
A following questioner asked Wilson, "You object to black actors playing white roles; should gay actors be relegated to playing only queer roles?"
Wilson contended that "race is a much larger category than sexual preference," and answered Brustein that while he had no objection to women writing about men, he did not approve of whites writing about blacks.
Perhaps frustrated by all the cultural hairsplitting taking place on stage, someone in the audience at this point shouted, "Maybe we should go back to wearing masks!"
Late in the evening, expressing a thought that was perhaps at the very root of his differences with Wilson, Brustein mentioned that he was older than the playwright and had grown up with the civil rights movement.
"We fought hard to break down the barriers between the races," he said. "To think that we have to go back to separate but equal appalls me."
The night, including the delays and the intermission, lasted a mere three hours. Perhaps if the discussion had been allotted more time to run its course, the forum might have amounted to more than a personal recapitulation of positions.
But, as it was, Brustein and Wilson both said that all that they had learned from each other was that the other was a gentleman, "a man of quality" in Brustein's words. The official discussion is over. Meanwhile, the general airing of these issues has perhaps on