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November 07, 2005
"Any Color As Long As It's Black: August Wilson, 1945-2005"
In the more exposed medium of film, for example, Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet clearly felt obliged to pay lip service to the theory, but in the end, rather than risking an African-American Polonius or Horatio or even Rosencrantz, confined the black actors to the extras, dotting them among the Norwegian soldiers and Danish servants. However, Wilson’s rejection of color-blindness is even dottier; in insisting that black actors can only play black roles, he’s mounting an assault on the very foundations of the profession. Acting is what it says: an act. It’s not about being what you are, but about being what you’re not. To that end, you wear costumes, you slap on greasepaint. For Wilson to exalt one criterion above all others is to mock the very notion of acting. If black actors cannot do Chekhov, who can? Russians? Is the defining qualification for Macbeth that you be Scottish? Or a regicidal maniac? The more one considers Wilson’s assertions, the more it sounds as if he should be working in some other profession altogether. The salient fact about James Earl Jones is not that he’s black, but that he’s James Earl Jones. As such, he’s more persuasive as Timon of Athens than as, say, a gangsta rapper: his limitations are not imposed by his color.
"Any Color As Long As It's Black: August Wilson, 1945-2005," Mark Steyn, The New Criterion, March 1997
Posted at November 7, 2005 06:22 AM | Categories: Bigotry