The characters are Norwegian immigrants, but director Sharon Ott has, to put it mildly, cast against type. The band of hardy Scandinavian farmers in her current Berkeley Repertory Theatre production of Amlin Gray’s Kingdom Come is played by a mix of black, Asian American, Hispanic and white actors.
This multi-ethnic production is distinctively different from the first staging of the play, at Milwaukee Repertory Theater in 1983, which Ott co-directed with John Dillon. The drama, inspired by O.E. Rolvaag’s classic novel Giants of the Earth, about immigrant homesteaders starting new lives in the American Midwest, went on to tour Wisconsin and the region, often playing to audiences whose grandparents and great-grandparents had lived the experience of the play.
The bold use of non-traditional casting in Ott’s new production, which runs through March 3, illuminates a sensitive issue that remains unresolved in the American resident theatre movement. Are theatres doing enough to fully integrate their acting companies? Are professional actors of diverse racial backgrounds significantly involved in regional companies without the offensive air of tokenism? How does a director go about attracting and casting non-white actors in material that is geared toward the white majority, or that is not race-specific at all?
Sharon Ott has given much thought to these questions, and has begun to find answers. When she arrived to take up her new job in Berkeley last year, Ott was eager to draw from the ethnically and culturally diverse pool of actors in the San Francisco Bay Area. Because of its theme of cultures in transition, Kingdom Come offered a good place to start.
“It’s a piece that is really about the larger issues of cultures being uprooted and going through drastic change,” Ott explained. “Although the book on which it was based centered on Norwegian immigrants in the plains area of the Midwest, this kind of cultural shifting is happening very much now on both U.S. coasts with Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Haitians, Cubans, Vietnamese, Cambodians. It seemed more and more interesting to throw it open to include people who are part of the current migrations out here.”
Originally Ott simply hoped that a large number of non-white performers would appear at Berkeley Rep’s open audition call. When the minority turn-out proved disappointing, she tried more direct measures. “At first the project was not taken seriously,” Ott admits. “It wasn’t until there was personal contact from me, with particular actors invited to audition, that people really decided to take it seriously.”
Ott found help in finding experienced minority actors from Benny Ambush, artistic director of the black Oakland Ensemble Theatre, Dennis Myers of the Asian American Theatre Company, Stanley Williams of the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre and others—though at times she had to combat the notion that she was ransacking these vital, smaller groups for talent. In the process of auditioning, she became aware of another difficulty in assembling a multi-ethnic cast, a problem that plagues many minority actors when they audition for theatres which present a bill of both classical and contemporary works.
“Only two of the actors who auditioned for me had ever done Shakespeare,” recalled Ott, who asked each performer to present two contrasting monologues. “Some of the others were very nervous about the classical audition. It’s a kind of ‘Catch-22’ for them—they haven’t had the training or experience in the classics, but where are they going to get it if they can’t get cast? I find that if they can do other things well, it’s worth it to a theatre to make the initial investment in them.”
Ott eventually cast four minority actors in Kingdom Come. Geneva Baskerville, Peter Fitzsimmons, Mare Hayashi and Paul Santiago had all appeared frequently with smaller Bay Area companies, but none of them had performed before at Berkeley Rep. Ott carefully emphasizes that casting minority actors in a single show here and there is not enough:
“This is a way to begin,” she says. “It’s going to take more time to find people who will become company members, and eventually it also involves season planning. Down the road it gets very interesting, especially in the area of involving playwrights who will create roles for an integrated company.”
To that end Ott has scheduled a new play by Philip Gotanda (author of Song for a Nisei Fisherman) about an interracial couple, to be presented in Berkeley Rep’s Playworks staged reading series. She has also cast minority actors in several important roles in Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime, which opens at Berkeley Rep on April 24.
Alternative theatre ensembles like the San Francisco Mime Troupe often have been more successful in their attempts to create truly multicultural collaborations than have most mainstream regional theatres, Ott observes. She believes that the rewards for the larger companies in doing so go far beyond the area of liberal “do-goodism.”
“I think we’re dealing with larger spiritual and cultural concerns,” Ott comments. “It is a very rich thing to have happened to our company, because these actors bring with them a totally different energy. That’s exciting for us, and for the audience too. We can only change the current situation by trying to generate another, truer kind of theatre for America. The task is a big one—to reflect the true composition of our audience.”
Misha Berson is executive director of Theatre Communications Center of the Bay Area.
Viva Video
It is a common sight to find a crowd of pedestrians glued to a video screen in front of a movie house watching previews of the current attraction. If the success of a similar experiment with the musical play Quilters has any impact, the video hawker could soon lure passersby into purchasing theatre tickets in the same manner.
Before Quilters arrived at Washington’s Kennedy Center prior to a New York run, the show’s press agent Patt Dale was concerned that the show’s authors would have to do TV promotion in New York without accompanying footage of the production. Traditionally, television shows running reviews or interview spots about plays have been required to send camera crews down to the theatre to film rehearsal segments to accompany the TV coverage. Hampered by the fact that Quilters was playing hundreds of miles from New York, Dale decided to do the filming herself.
Ignoring the majority of naysayers who predicted a flat union rejection, Dale approached Actors’ Equity with a committee from the Association of Theatrical Press Agents and Managers. The committee, which included Mary Bryant and Diane Judge, requested that a show be allowed to tape its own promotional footage, asserting that such footage is the modern publicity equivalent of promotional still photographs. With the okay from Equity and the stagehands’ union, Local 1, IATSE, Dale went ahead and taped segments from Quilters during its run at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. The footage was used not only to accompany the TV interviews, but also was run continuously on a video screen in the Kennedy Center lobby during its engagement there.
Dale described the results as “overwhelmingly positive. The Kennedy Center has thousands of people walking through every day just because it’s a national monument. It hadn’t occurred to many of them to see a show there, but suddenly they saw this videotape of the current attraction. A lot of people would then go up to the box office, make inquiries, and end up buying tickets.”
The other great advantage for the promoters taping their own footage, Dale discovered, is that it relieves the TV stations of an often laborious responsibility. “I have gotten a very warm response from the TV people. One of their problems is that the stage unions have made it so difficult for TV crews to arrange to come in and film—the logistics are always so complicated. And I am thrilled that the unions understood that this new way of working serves to help keep union members employed.”
Dale thinks that theatre is long overdue in catching up with the promotional tools long practiced in other entertainment fields. “We all know what the TV commercial did for Broadway. What we’ve not had is the equivalent promotional strategies for talk shows and news shows already used by the TV, music and movie artists. The audience for entertainment lumps all of these fields together when they are making a choice about how to spend their time and money, and if you look like you’re boring because you don’t have a TV clip on Johnny Carson or Live at 5, you won’t get the business.”
Rigors of Rep
In a major move in the Oregon Shakespearean Festival’s two-year plan to improve production quality, the Festival signed a new contract with Actors’ Equity Association. The contract is a significant advance in the agreement which Oregon has utilized since 1959, which enabled the company to employ up to 20 Equity actors under a Guest Artist Agreement. The OSF company generally varies between 50 and 60 actors.
Under the new contract, non-Equity actors appearing at the OSF will have the opportunity to convert to Equity status. OSF general manager Paul Nicholson described the obstacles that faced them under the old agreement: “One of the major problems was that we too often lost our best non-Equity actors. Often we felt as if we had held certain people’s careers back. They would stay with us for two or three years and feel good about their work, but as we were not able to offer them credits toward their candidacy, once they left they may have lost two or three years toward getting their Equity card.”
The new Equity contract has its roots in an existing contract designed for the League of Resident Theatres. Nicholson explained that the Equity contract was much more sympathetic with the Festival’s complex repertory schedule. “The LORT contract does not lend itself to a repertory house. With our intense repertory design, we can be rotating as many as nine plays at one time. Equity has been incredibly cooperative and sensitive to our needs since we began working with them in 1959.
“Another bonus of the new contract is that it puts everyone on their mettle. We can now get the best non-Equity people because they know they have a chance to get their card and continue with us, and the Equity people know that there will be all of these aspiring non-Equity people breathing down their necks.”
