Peak Absurdity In The Woke Theater
/Considering that I live in Manhattan, I’m sad to report that I don’t take all that much advantage of the large amount of “culture” on offer. Perhaps one, or at most two, Broadway or Off-Broadway shows per year; the Opera or Philharmonic even less frequently. (OK, I do sing in a choir that performs several times per year., sometimes even in Carnegie Hall). But I pay enough attention to know that wokism has become a bigger and bigger problem in the performing arts.
What do I mean by saying that wokism is a problem? I mean that the overarching guilt and desperate need for atonement by the elites, particularly on issues of race and gender, has become all-pervasive to the exclusion of anything else about a work or performance that might be significant. It must be that a substantial part of the audience is seeking out this atonement as a reason for going to performances. I do not understand why. For me it is a definite turnoff.
Readers may be interested in recent data points as we head toward peak absurdity. Here are a few:
The Daily Mail reports on July 16 that American soprano Angel Blue, scheduled to sing in Verdi’s opera La Traviata in Verona, Italy on July 22 and 30, has decided to resign. The reason? In another Verdi opera, Aida, scheduled to be performed contemporaneously at the same festival, the lead role of the Ethiopian princess is to be played by a white Russian singer, Anna Netrebko, who will wear blackface makeup. Ms. Blue released a statement strenuously objecting to the planned performance by Ms. Netrebko. Excerpt: “[The use of blackface makeup] is offensive, humiliating, and outright racist. I was so looking forward to making my house debut at Arena di Verona singing one of my favorite operas, but I cannot in good conscience associate myself with an institution that continues this practice.” Meanwhile, Ms. Blue was to play the Parisian courtesan Violetta, clearly a white character. Any problem with that? Not that anybody mentions.
Out there in the world of theater, TV and film, the taboos become more numerous and more strictly enforced with each passing year. Not only whites can’t play blacks, but straights can’t play gays, non-Asians can’t play Asians, and so forth. Those who violate the taboos must perform their humiliating penance. For example there was the white actress Jenny Slate, who for the first three seasons voiced the part of Missy, a black seventh-grader, on the Netflix series Big Mouth. After protests, Ms. Slate resigned in 2020, saying, among other things: “Black characters on an animated show should be played by Black people.” . . . Slate said that as a white woman playing a Black seventh-grader, she “was engaging in an act of erasure of Black people . . . . [My playing this role] existed as an example of white privilege and unjust allowances made within a system of societal white supremacy. . . .”
And then there is Hamilton, for many years now the biggest hit on Broadway, now finishing its seventh year since opening in 2015. Nearly all of the roles are played by black actors — not just Alexander Hamilton, but also George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Aaron Burr, the Marquis de Lafayette, and others. That has continued to be true even as the original cast has rotated out and other actors have replaced them. I’ve never heard anybody even mention the racial makeup of the cast as an issue. By the way, I’ve seen the show, and it is terrific.
And now for the peak of peak absurdity. Each summer the New York Public Theater puts on a festival of Shakespeare plays in Central Park. Currently running is Richard III. I’m no expert on Shakespeare, and I’ve never seen Richard III; but almost everybody knows some of the basic plot elements, including that Richard is deformed and that that fact is significant in the plot, and that he kills his predecessor as king and then tries to woo the guy’s wife. In this version Richard is played by a black woman named Danai Gurira, who has no visible disability. But lots of other actors in the play do have disabilities, including multiple who are deaf (and apparently use sign language — how does that even work?), and a little person. The woman whom Richard woos uses a wheelchair. Here is a picture of that scene:
The problem here is that Shakespeare on the stage is hard enough to figure out when the production is actually striving to have it make sense. As to this production, Johnny Oleksinsky reviews it on July 11 in the New York Post. His main point is that the whole thing leaves the audience confused and befuddled: “[The Central Park production of] Richard III is . . . aimless . . . [a]nd . . . awfully confusing. Our befuddlement begins straightaway and never lets up.”
Playbill here has a long list of other reviews of this production. Most of them are very good reviews. Is that because the production is actually good, or because this production is too politically correct to pan? Hard to say without going to see it myself, and I can’t say that I am tempted to do that. Many of the reviewers also have strongly positive things to say about Ms. Gurira’s talent, but on the other hand she’s been put up to a nearly impossible task to try to pull off in this one.