At the end of my 2014 summer-season review, which tallied the gender imbalance in the area’s professional theaters, I wrote, “I could also do a column about playwrights, directors and actors of color on the region’s stages. But it would be awfully short.”
By which I meant that I didn’t see many people of color represented, nor expected to this past year, either. Sure enough, out of 200-plus performers in the 40 plays and musicals I saw in the Valley and Berkshires last summer, just 21 were people of color, plus a few more in walk-on roles and musical chorus lines; and the backstage numbers were even lower. Most of the actors were African Americans, with Hispanics and Asians being even less-well represented. But those rare appearances include some of my most cherished memories from last year’s theater. So here goes.
Photo by Enrico Spada.
Shakespeare & Company has for years followed a “color-blind” casting policy. It was firmly in place for The Comedy of Errors, in which the sisters Adriana and Luciana were played by blonde Kelley Curran and black Cloteal Horne, and both of the Antipholus twins by a Latino, Ian Lassiter. Red Velvet, also at S&Co, about the first black actor to play Othello, starred the volcanic John Douglas Thompson, who has himself played the Moor as well as a number of traditionally white roles with the company. Red Velvet also featured Ravin Patterson, a miracle of silent eloquence as an impassive maidservant to rich white folks.
That play was written by Lolita Chakrabarti, an Indian-Englishwoman, and Comedy was directed by Egyptian-American Taibi Magar — two of the very few playwrights and directors of color represented on area stages this season. Two more were Dominique Morisseau and Ruben Santiago-Hudson, the author and director of Paradise Blue at Williamstown Theatre Festival — the summer’s only play with an all-black cast, set in a Detroit blues bar and starring Blair Underwood.
Other examples of color-blind casting brightened summer stages. In the Berkshire Theatre Group’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, the captivating Angel Desai, of Indian/Filipina parentage, was half of a tentative love duet between two lonely New Yorkers. In Barrington Stage Company’s world-premiere musical A Little More Alive, African-American Nicolette Robinson played a hospice worker-become family intimate with an enticing insouciance.
In the large cast of Barrington’s Man of La Mancha, there were a couple of actual Hispanics, plus African-American Felicia Boswell as Don Quixote’s illusive lady love. The company’s Butler featured Maurice Jones as a fugitive slave with a determined mind and a sardonic wit. That Civil War drama is on this winter’s calendar at the Theater 
Project’s Majestic Theater, where last fall’s A Streetcar Named Desire featured three actors of color and an (unscripted) interracial marriage.
WTF pulled not a color-blind, but an open-eyed change-up with Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten, written about white farmers, but recast, in both senses, as African-American sharecroppers. Audra McDonald played lonely, sharp-tongued Josie Hogan, with Glynn Turman and Howard W. Overshown as her father and brother, and McDonald’s real-life (white) husband, Will Swenson, as her love/hate interest, giving the period piece an interracial frisson.
Here in the Valley, the Ko Festival of Performance mounted a season of five plays on the theme of “new homeland,” four of them performed by actors of color. Nadia P. Manzoor explored her London upbringing in a Pakistani Muslim family; hip-hop performer Sokeo Ros traced his family’s journey from the killing fields of Cambodia to the mean streets of America; the Chinese Theatre Works ensemble looked at the struggles of expatriated Peking Opera artists; and Onawumi Jean Moss paged through the scrapbook of her life from the Jim Crow South to the Civil Rights movement to her emergence as an empowered activist-poet.
Carolyn Brown photo
For over a decade, New Century Theatre has made a point of including plays about people of color in its summertime mix, from the racially charged Spinning Into Butter to an all-black Glass Menagerie to the controversial Clybourne Park. The company’s long-term record of putting work onstage that portrays the lives and voices of people of color is unmatched by any theater in the region. All four of last season’s plays included African-American actors: Maggie Miller and Mark Hawkins in The Little Foxes, Greg Alexander in Luna Gale, and Kyle Boatright in both Seminar and Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play. •
Chris Rohmann is at StageStruck@crocker.com and valleyadvocate.com/author/chris-rohmann
