Clarion University Forced to Cancel Play Over Actors’ Race
14th November 2015
Student actors and the stage crew at Clarion University arrived Tuesday evening for one of the final rehearsals before next week’s campus opening of “Jesus in India” only to learn the off-Broadway production they had spent months on had been canceled.
The reason they were given was race: theirs.
Three of the five characters in the production are Indian, but on the mostly white state university campus, two of those characters were to be played by white student actors and a third was being portrayed by a mixed-race student.
Lloyd Suh, the playwright, told the university through his literary agent Monday that he was uncomfortable with any notion that he supported Caucasians portraying Indian characters in his play, said Bob Levy, chairman of the visual and performing arts department at Clarion.
I was under the impression that an actor’s job was to pretend convincingly to be someone he is not. Apparently I was misinformed.
The Korean-American playwright wanted the parts recast, Mr. Levy said, and ultimately pulled the university’s right to stage the production after being told that finding Asian replacements was not practical given the play was to open next Wednesday on a campus in rural northwestern Pennsylvania where Asian or Pacific Islander students account for 0.7 of 1 percent of the university’s 5,368 students.
Sorry, reality, you’ll have to take a back seat to the political agenda.
I think the playwright needs to be pressured to change his name from ‘Lloyd’ to something more ethnic. Suk Deep, perhaps.