Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Isaiah Wooden

We certainly missed your warm presence! It was a rather magical evening. To say that I was thrilled to share the stage and to be in productive conversation with the inimitable Joe Morton is to understate just how psyched I was and still am about the event. The event, I should say, was the brainchild of the incredible Aimee Meredith Cox, a Professor of African American Studies at Fordham and a truly luminous light in the academy. Aimee envisioned the evening as an opportunity for Joe and me to share in community some of the work that’s energizing us and to engage in a discussion about that work as well as our different trajectories as theater artists.

It has been a while since I’ve stretched my acting muscles; as such, I asked one of the gifted undergraduates at Fordham, Courtney Williams, to open with a performance of Ed Bullins’s 1967 play, The Theme is Blackness. I used the play, which tasks spectators with sitting in the dark for twenty minutes (we did a shortened version), as a way to launch a discussion about and to offer a précis for my dissertation research. I was interested in highlighting some of the questions that Bullins’s text invites and noting the importance of those questions to my project.

Joe is presently at work on a stage adaptation of Athol Fugard’s novel Tsotsi: he relocates Fugard’s tale of gangs and survival to New York City and opens space to think critically about notions of choice and agency in the adaptation. He performed snippets from the piece, and it was nothing short of spellbinding. Words cannot even begin to capture just how elegant a performer he is. It was rather moving to watch! Indeed, I was still trying to collect my thoughts during the beginning of the question-and-answer section! The crowd in attendance was quite diverse and, thankfully, came game to engage us in a conversation that shuttled between the philosophical and the practical, the abstract and the actual. We covered a lot of terrain. The questions posed included: When did it become clear that theater and performance would be the fields in which we would settle? What particular paths did we take to get to where we are in the field? How do particular modes of work—acting, directing, teaching, scholarship, for example—allow us to investigate notions of blackness? And, is it helpful for students to engage coursework across disciplines? It was an invigorating discussion. Darnell [Moore, writer/activist at The Feminist Wire], of course, moderated with aplomb. Towards the end, we were collectively brainstorming about additional ways that we might forge community.

Since you’re a director-dramaturg, perhaps you can give your own perspective on the casting of actors of color in theater—or the lack thereof, as in the case back in July of this year with the La Jolla Playhouse in CA for casting non-Asian actors in The Nightingale, which is set in ancient China, or the Royal Shakespeare Company casting just three Asian actors in one of the most famous plays in Chinese history, The Orphan of Zhao. Where’s the point when a director can and should go for casting actors in theatrical roles regardless of race (like Denzel Washington as Brutus in Julius Caesar when it was on Broadway in 2005) and when should the director go for a casting actors of colors in roles specifically described as a person of color, like Paul Robeson or Chiwetel Ejiofor in Othello?

Page 2 of 5 | Previous page | Next page