Notes on adaptation

Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) and colorblind casting

A few updates:

• Frank is back to bi-weekly posts. Paid subscriptions will be turned back on, so feel free to manage yours if need be.

• For Them, I participated in a Queer TV March Madness bracket (Lafayette was not included, who would be my winner, btw). I tackled Smithers from The Simpsons versus Willow from Buffy. Also, fuck Hulu for canceling the Buffy reboot.

• Stay tuned for some professional updates… something exciting is coming in May! Unrelated to my forthcoming debut novel, of which I’m currently rewriting the first draft.

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Notes on adaptation and colorblind casting

Cast of Antigone (This Play I Read in High School). Credit: Marc J. Franklin.

I will always remember Diahann Carroll as the grand dame Dominique Deveraux on the 1980s soap opera Dynasty, a series I’ve rewatched at least twice via DVD, since I wasn’t alive for its original ABC run. Dominique was the first Black cast member to join the all-white cast of Dynasty, which was Carroll’s intention. In a 1984 interview from her first day on set, she said, “I wanted to be the first black bitch on TV.” She called her manager and told him to get her a role on the soap. Caroll was known for her historical firsts. In 1968, she was the first African American to lead a TV show that didn’t portray a slave or servant. The show was Julia and Caroll played Nurse Julia Baker.

Despite the landmark nature of the series, it was critiqued for its “evacuation of cultural specificity for racialized characters, also known as racial colorblindness,” according to Kristen J. Warner in her book The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting. Warner shares insights from Emory University Professor Beretta E. Smith-Shomade on how Julia’s sanitized view of the 1960s ignored the systemic racism of post-Jim Crow America: “Julia never alluded explicitly to this phenomenon or to the civil and social unrest raging on American streets. This became one of the most potent criticisms leveled at the show from both the media and outside advocates. The show implied that… harmony could be achieved if we could all just get along.”

Racial equity, rather than harmony, is the main reason colorblind casting exists in the first place, particularly on series like Julia, more recently on Shonda Rhimes fare like Bridgerton, and also in the theatre. In 1965, Sidney Poitier told The New York Times, “I’d hate for my gift–or whatever to be circumscribed by color. I’d like to explore King Lear, for instance. I don’t want to be just an Othello or always linked with A Raisin in the Sun.”

I have to imagine actor Calvin Leon Smith feels similarly, as he currently stars as Haemon in Anna Ziegler’s Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) at the Public. In an adaptation for The Public Theatre, Smith gets to portray the doomed fiancé of Antigone. He is the only Black cast member. (Not the only non-white lead, however, Tony Shalhoub portrays newly minted king Creon). I’m not anti-colorblind casting, or at least, I didn’t think I was until I saw this production. Ziegler’s play adapts Sophocles’ 440 BC tragedy into a modern setting, as told by a white woman named Chorus (Celia Keenan-Bolger). In Sophocles’ version, Antigone defies Creon’s laws to bury her brother Polynices, a Traitor to Thebes. In Ziegler’s version, Antigone (portrayed excellently by Susannah Perkins, for whom I’d recommend seeing the play despite my distaste for the adaptation) defies Creon’s laws in order to have an abortion, which he has just outlawed in Thebes.

Within the play are modern pop culture references, technology, and arguments about reproductive rights in place. Ziegler doesn’t refer to it as a “modern adaptation,” however. In an interview with Town & Country, she says, “The language is modern, but the concerns are evergreen. That ambiguity is intentional. It’s not a modern update, so much as a conversation across time, allowing ancient voices to speak directly to us now.”

If this were a production of Sophocles’ play, I wouldn’t have been left so wanting by Smith as Haemon. After all, the Greeks performed with masks so that men could portray the roles of women. Race and gender aren’t particularly important when presenting the classics, but adapting the classics? Race should kinda matter. For an adaptation that has so much to say about our current world and its politics, it’s glaring that race is evacuated from the text. Smith’s Haemon is also presented as queer, which is barely touched upon aside from a single monologue, so strong is his devotion to Antigone, who is secretly plotting to abort his child. At one point, someone says the unborn child would be a “spitting image of Antigone.” Actually, the child would be Black as well. I can suspend my disbelief in the theatre. Recent interest in a stage adaptation of Sinners has centered around solving the “problem” of two twins on stage, as if theatregoers care about that kinda of thing. Lupita Nyong’o and her younger brother, Junior, most recently played twins in The Public’s Twelfth Night. But somehow, we’re only supposed to suspend our disbelief that in a post-racial world, every other societal issue still manages to exist.

I know the IP is centuries old, even older than Wuthering Heights (which is in the public domain, so who cares if Emerald’s movie is bad? It is, but you could make your own version literally today). But I do think that Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) misses the mark as a modern adaptation of a classic. Smith is fantastic in the role, by the way. But it reminded me of what Viola Davis said recently on Sam Fragoso’s Talk Easy podcast about how Juilliard trained her to be a “perfect white actress.” Davis said, “It’s technical training in order to deal with the classics — in order to deal with the Strindbergs, and the O’Neills, and the Chekhovs, and the Shakespeares. I totally understand that, to get your voice … but what it denies is the human being behind all of that.”

According to Ziegler, this adaptation is about “what happens when governing collapses because the body of the state is pitted too bluntly against individual bodies. The play is also interested in how hard governing actually is. In that sense, it’s about competing truths. Antigone isn’t simply right, and Creon isn’t simply wrong—they’re both acting from convictions that cannot coexist.” Perhaps that’s where I’m left in the instance of colorblind casting. It’s not simply the answer, but it’s not always the answer either. When Antigone says “my body is fate” in the closing moments of the play and shows off all of the parts of her body that have been with her since she was born, all I could think about was the body of the Black person behind her, whose race we were supposed to ignore. Yet, there’s no place on this planet where your race is not your fate.