Magical Actor Glue and Casting in the Performing Arts
It’s fair to say that color-blind casting is a subject of controversy and debate. Does it add to a production? Does it detract? I think it’s interesting that the conversation in the performing arts and performing arts education seems to be moving toward color-conscious casting so that when you ask an actor of color to perform a certain role, you’re well-aware of all of the kinds of optics, coding and signatures of that casting. There’s a sensitivity and an intentionality around that.
And then there’s that notion that you would discover somebody — that you would find somebody completely arresting and unusual.
One of the very early roles that Meryl Streep played was in a piece called “Taken in Marriage” by an American playwright called Thomas Babe. She was in a small theater at the New York Shakespeare Festival, now known as the Public Theater, for six months or so when she had this role.
And where and how she chose to laugh in that production was so unusual that I looked at that young actor in that part and knew I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I was going to be seeing a lot more of her.
I think casting directors look for that serendipity of something in the body and the rhythm in the voice, in the thinking process that is somehow unique and of that moment. I think there’s a temporality, a sense of this person for the zeitgeist, which is important, as well.
And when you get it right, you can overcome all sorts of other things that might be problematic in a production. I think casting directors are among the many unsung heroes of the profession in the work they do to help directors and producers get it right.
I sometimes call this serendipity actor glue. I know that a new play has been so beautifully cast and the roles so exquisitely realized in ways beyond what is even on the page that I am unlikely to ever see a production of that play that good again because in future productions some of the work that didn’t get finished in the writers’ room is going to become more apparent without that magical actor glue.
The concept is hard to explain in online performing arts education or in a classroom, but we benefit from it when we get to see it in an original production in New York.
