The Mikado Strikes Again

Last spring, I did a piece regarding the proposed (and, since, executed) production of Gilbert and Sullivan's classic operetta "The Mikado" by the Lamplighters, a repertory theater company in San Francisco.

As you will recall (read the link if you have not yet, please), a local protest by the Bay Area community of Asians in theater -- after having been asked for their input in good faith -- led to the expected result.  The professional protestors insisted that all the roles go to ethnic Asians, so the Lamplighters simply re-staged their proposed production to an Italian setting, cheating some number of Asian-American actors out of professional roles.

The New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players (NYGASP) is a similar company that performs the Savoy operas in New York and on the road as well, but far more frequently during the year.  Since "The Mikado" is one of the classic three operettas of the series, they couldn't drop it from their repertoire, nor could they do anything as drastic as changing the setting to Italy.

Their attempt at a solution included a casting one -- trying to get more Asian-American actors to audition for the company, which was, I have heard, the most difficult of all aspects to do.  This, among other things, was documented in the current issue of the New Yorker magazine, linked here.

This is the quote from the piece that I found most curious:

"After an additional round of auditions, focussed [sic] on “diverse” casting, Viet Vo, a lapsed business major, was hired into the ensemble, and three Asian-American actors were given key roles. A recent study found that, in the 2014-15 theatre season, only four per cent of Broadway and off-Broadway roles were filled by actors of Asian descent. After N.Y.G.A.S.P.’s recent round of hirings, ten per cent of the company was made up of Asian-Americans."

If ethnically appropriate casting matters, it matters.  If it doesn't matter, then it doesn't.

So apparently it does, because the people at NYGASP decided to do something, in the form of engaging a Chinese-American assistant director (curiously, the article mentioned him at least a dozen times without once mentioning the name of the actual director) and three "Asian-Americans" in key roles.

We don't know their names (I couldn't find a link), so I'm not sure if any of the three is actually an ethnic Japanese, but the two names I did see were the assistant director and the "lapsed business major."  One of them is ethnic Chinese, and the other Vietnamese, neither of which, at my last analysis, equated to being any more suitable to lend their talents to make the production more Japanese than I am able to.

I see a lot of things in black and white, of course, but there are shades of gray for me -- when shades of gray are appropriate.  This is not one.

First, how are the protestors supposed to be satisfied with an assistant director and three or four actors in the production being "Asian"?  Is this about authenticity, or is this about winning some kind of battle?  Either the whole company needs to be ethnically authentic or the protestors should not be satisfied.  If the complaint is about authenticity, and it had better be, then nothing short of a full cast of racially suitable actors should be OK.

Second, I don't know how to say this any better, but all Asians are not the same.  Chinese culture is not the same as Japanese culture.  Koreans are not Vietnamese.  Some groups hate each other with a white-hot passion that ... you get the idea. There are obviously language differences, but the cultures are unique, and the racial distinctions are certainly noticeable across the continent.

So how exactly does it satisfy anyone's checklist to say that a Vietnamese-American actor can play a Japanese character, even when the character is only "sort of" Japanese (the characters are meant to represent and satirize Englishmen, in the attributes Gilbert lampooned in "The Mikado", by using a Japanese setting and what I can only call "faux Japanese" characters).

In other words, if (A) you object to "Mikado" because of its portrayal of Japan and Japanese people; and (B) you believe, somehow, that your objection can be satisfied by casting racially suitable people, then how the heck can it possibly satisfy you to have a handful of ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese actors -- not even half the company -- enough to withdraw your protest?

Here's the thing.  Any self-respecting Japanese person, even a Japanese-American, can tell a Japanese from a Vietnamese.  I mean, I can, and I'm a European-American.  My wife is Italian all the way.  Suppose that someone made a movie of Sylvester Stallone's life and cast a blond, obviously non-Italian actor like, say, Owen Wilson, dyeing his hair and making his face up a bit more olive.  Let's face it, Stallone is stereotypically Italian-looking.

Would my wife scream about the casting?  I don't know, maybe, but plenty of other Italians sure would, and some of them live in New Jersey and you don't want to cross them.  Now, I don't know if Asian-Americans of any ethnic background would readily see the difference, but plenty of people would be plenty unhappy.

My point in all this is that parsing ethnicities is a slippery, slippery slope.  I feel that protesters in this case, if somehow they decide that NYGASP's casting solution is acceptable, are totally hypocritical, even if I am somehow rationalizing what the Asian theater people in San Francisco did in insisting on a full casting of Asian-Americans (hint: I'm not; I didn't say they were right, just that they were consistent).

Now -- the facts of this case are (and I checked) that before the production was announced, NYGASP proactively took many steps to ensure that the Asian community in (at least) New York would feel like it had been reached out to.  Props to NYGASP for working very hard at this after the lesson from San Francisco!  Certainly the show did not get the protests before opening night that forced the Lamplighters on the other coast to Italianize their own version.  And NYGASP did work hard with the various purported representatives of Asian New York to show that they truly cared, which they did.
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All this reminded me that earlier this week, the Japanese prime minister, Mr. Abe, was at Pearl Harbor for ceremonies marking the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on the base there.  Lots of news reporters commented, "Ooooh, he didn't actually apologize for the attacks!".

I didn't care.  It's 2016 and the Japanese are our friends now, and my father was in the Army when those bombs dropped.  Anyone who flew a Zero that day and is somehow still alive is over 90 years old and didn't issue the attack orders anyway.  Those who were complicit in the decision to attack us are all dead now.  Their successors have no more need to apologize to the USA or to the families of the lost servicemen than I, who have no ancestors in the USA prior to 1880, have to apologize for slavery.

I digress, but only a little.  Happy New Year!

 Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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