Three Stories from the OnStageBlog, Part 2: The Professional World

Curmie is finally getting to write the second half of his two-parter on stories from the OnStageBlog.  This one involves the casting of the musical Elf at Broadway at Music Circus in Sacramento.  OnStageBlog’s founder Chris Peterson often gets what Curmie’s grad school mentor would call “foam-flecked,” and his editorial here is no exception.  But he does have a point.  Sort of.

The company came under criticism when they announced the cast list for Elf; although a number of the leads were non-white, the entire chorus (seen above) looks pretty vanilla, i.e., white-passing. Actress (or is she the “social media manager for major hotel brands”?) Victoria Price is one of those who led the charge, pointing to the difference between the Broadway ensemble and the one in Sacramento, and noting that any comments critical of the casting were being deleted.  (Curmie assumes she’s telling the truth about this.)

Tony nominee Amber Imam joined the fray, writing that Price’s criticism of both the casting and the removal of negative comments was “absolutely right.  A show that takes place in NEW YORK CITY cannot… CAN NOT have an ensemble that LOOKS LIKE THIS!!!  Do better.  Have you learned nothing?????”

The company’s CEO Scott Klier issued a response that made the situation much, much worse: “cover-up worse than the crime” worse.  Here’s part of it:

Inclusivity has been and remains my casting and staffing goal for every production.

I fell short of that goal for ELF. There is an uncomfortable truth here: Our industry as a whole has largely failed to attract, train and foster the artists necessary to meet today's demand, and I fear this conversation will continue until it does. It will unfortunately take time. The painful reality of ELF’s casting process was that both the casting submissions and audition attendance revealed few candidates of color and, while those few were undoubtedly talented, they did not meet the dance, music and acting criteria set by our team.

Hoo boy… Claiming inclusivity as a “goal” and then going 0-for-15 at fulfilling it?  Blaming other people while admitting the decision was yours?  Admitting there’s a “demand” and then ignoring it? 

Price responds that the standard for Broadway is surely higher, but they managed to assemble a significantly more diverse cast.  True, but one might also note that the talent base is considerably both wider and deeper in New York than in Sacramento, which is not exactly the first city one thinks of when contemplating the American theatre.

Price then accuses Klier of “writing lies,” and asserts that “we will continue to be here and not just be here, but excelling in everything we do bc (as you basically said in your response) we are expected to be TWICE as good as our white counterparts to even be SEEN.”

Ultimately, she launches into a rather odd commentary, complaining about tokenization.  So having one black ensemble member is somehow a bad thing… even worse than having none, perhaps?  I don’t get it.

So let’s talk about casting decisions.  They’re sometimes extremely complex; other times they’re easy.  There are some shows that require actors of a particular race to play a particular role.  When Curmie directed “Master Harold… and the boys” a few years ago, Hally had to be white, and Sam and Willie had to be black.  Full stop; no discussion.  When he did Trojan Barbie, the male roles had to be played by two blacks, one white, and one Latino; the women’s roles were much more flexible in terms of race.  The majority of roles in most plays, of course, can be played by actors regardless of demographics, with the only considerations being things like blood relatives being of the same race (and that’s only true in realism).

Is casting the actors the director (or producer, or whoever is making the decisions) honestly believes are the best available an ethical strategy?  Of course it is.  Is attempting to employ a cast that represents the time and place in which the play is set reasonable?  Again, of course.  In this approach, it doesn’t matter which actors are white or BIPOC, only that some of the latter are included somewhere.  If you’re going to claim diversity as a goal, then an all-white chorus is probably a bad idea.  The key word here just might be “probably,” however. 

Often—by no means always, but often—there are two actors who are essentially equal.  For his last twenty-something shows, Curmie was always casting at the same time as a colleague, and we were discouraged from casting the same actor twice in a semester.  Unsurprisingly, we’d often want the same actors, leading to negotiations: “you can have Actor X if I can have Actor Y.”  But I remember one time in particular when I said “I need one of these four actors.  You can have whichever three you want, but I get one of the four.”  In this sort of toss-up situation, a director who doesn’t need to accommodate a colleague might reasonably think, “why not make a choice that adds to the diversity of the cast?”  

That said, sometimes one actor is just flat-out better than another in auditions.  A director would be remarkably stupid not to cast that person.  The thing is, there’s no way of knowing whether the actors cast in the Elf ensemble were clearly the best, or whether Klier’s interest in inclusion extends no further than a marketing blurb. 

Is there still some racism in the business?  Of course, there is.  Does Klier have a spotless reputation in terms of providing opportunities for non-white actors?  No.  But is Price’s claim about black actors having to be twice as good to even get noticed a gross exaggeration?  Yes, at least in terms of the industry at large.  And we might reasonably suspect that she’d be less insistent on an authentic depiction of the people who’d be in a particular place at a particular time if a production of Fiddler on the Roof had a couple of black folks in a small town in Tsarist Russia.

Curmie recalls overhearing one actress telling her friends that the reason I hadn’t given her a callback was because she was black.  I called back ten women; three were black.  She didn’t make it four because… wait for it… her audition wasn’t very good.  And, as Curmie wrote a couple of years ago, his “own experience as a director has included both casting BIPOC actors in roles obviously first played by whites and ending up with all white actors when he went into auditions thinking he’d almost certainly get a multi-racial cast. It works out how it works out.”

In other words, the original casting decisions might have been—as opposed to were—inappropriately exclusionary to non-white performers; the fact that there was some diversity in the leads mitigates but does not squelch the criticism with respect to the ensemble.  Some of Price’s arguments were legitimate; others were overblown at best.  Klier’s response to the controversy was sufficiently incompetent that he made matters considerably worse.  It’s rather a mess; Curmie suspects that the one objectively true statement in all of this is Klier’s claim that a reasonable resolution “will unfortunately take time.”

The good news, such as it is, is that the production got a positive review on the Broadway World site.  But there is not a word about the ensemble; indeed the list of principals is said to “round out the incredible cast.”

<Sigh.>

A Response to the Cruz Amendment

Over at Ethics Alarms, Jack Marshall excoriates Senate Democrats for not supporting an amendment by Senator Ted Cruz that would deny federal funding to any college or university which “discriminates against Asian Americans in recruitment, applicant review, or admission.” Jack closes his piece with this: “There is no persuasive argument to be made in defense of those 48 Democrats. I challenge any reader here to present one.” 

The following started out as a comment to his post, but sort of kept going long past comment length.  I won’t clutter his page with this missive, but perhaps the following may be at least a partial response to his commentary...

I’ll take up that challenge, Jack. Sort of. 

That is, I would suggest a couple of reasons to be skeptical of this proposed legislation. They require a little more abstract reasoning and a little more knowledge of the way admissions operations work than the average politician is likely to be able to muster. I hasten to add that I am not defending the rationale that diversity is such an inherent good that it overrides all other considerations, but (for example) discussions of The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World or Fires in the Mirror in my Advanced Play Analysis class have always benefited enormously from the presence of students with different demographic profiles. 

But to the matter at hand… First off, it’s difficult to assert with any authority that discrimination is actually taking place, since no one can agree on what elements of a student’s record ought to be weighted more heavily: grades? class rank? standardized test scores? extra- and co-curricular activities? recommendations? interviews with admissions personnel and/or alumni? Should legacies count? Should the ability to pay tuition without institution-funded financial aid? Should the inability to do so count? All of these elements are part of the admissions evaluation process at universities, especially those at the elite level. (At my university, a student with a certain class rank and/or board scores is automatically offered admission. But we’d ultimately end up accepting probably 95% of the students rejected by Harvard or Yale.) 

Grades are “objective”; except of course, they aren’t. Students take classes with different degrees of difficulty. Someone who gets a 90 in calculus and a 75 in phys ed is a better student than one who gets a 95 in phys ed and an 80 in algebra, but will have a lower average. Moreover, it almost goes without saying that the #20 student in a class of 400 at School X might be better or worse than the #1 student in a class of 40 at School Y. Using sports as an example: I happen to live in the small city where one of the top half dozen soccer players in US history went to high school. He was, of course, all-conference, etc. But an all-conference player in that league today might be lucky to get a scholarship to a Division II university, let alone even hope to become a star for the national team. So how do we compare, if all we know is “all conference”? 

Of course, pols of both parties seem enamored of standardized testing as the ultimate arbiter of student (or teacher) success. The closest thing to an objective means of comparing students is to give them exactly the same test under exactly the same circumstances. But even such an endeavor is problematic, even apart from such considerations as recognizing that Student X is fighting off a cold, or student Y’s mother just got diagnosed with cancer. Someone, a mortal, designed that test, and the questions are almost by definition going to favor someone who knows precisely those concepts, terms, or formulas over someone who may have mastered different, but equally important, material. I remember a question on one of those tests that asked me to figure out the Earned Run Average of a baseball pitcher. The question provided the formula, but because I knew baseball and statistics, I could glance at the multiple choice responses and determine the right answer in perhaps two seconds. Someone fully as adept at math but who didn’t know baseball would have spent a lot more time, and perhaps been rushed at the end of the exam, omitting questions or not having time to really think them through. 

So it’s perfectly possible that a student taking a standardized test would score better or worse, perhaps even appreciably so, were they to take the exam a week earlier or later. But this isn’t even the biggest problem. Those who argue for significant weight for SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT (etc.) scores do so based on a fanciful belief that performance on standardized tests measures skill or intelligence. It does not. In fact, they measure test-taking ability. To provide just two examples from my own personal experience as a standardized test-taker: 

I was pretty good at math when I was in high school, so in my junior year I was among the 15 or 20 students who took a standardized test under the auspices of the American Mathematical Association, or some organization like that. The test was difficult; no one could be expected to finish it in the appointed time. And it was scored like Jeopardy: harder questions were worth more points, and you literally lost points if you answered a question and got it wrong. I got a negative score! Still, I was asked back the following year, after several months of taking a class with the worst math teacher I ever had, and a couple of months with the next-worst. I adopted a different strategy… and got the highest score in the history of the school. Was I as bad as my junior year score? Nope. Was I the best math student in however long my high school had been administering that test? Not even close. 

Skip ahead a few years. I took the GRE some five or six years after the second of the two freshman-level math courses (Calculus I and Intro to Finite Math) I took in college. It was 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday. I’d had about four hours of sleep, and I was more than a little hungover. Perfect conditions, right? I got a perfect score in math. Is it plausible that I deserved such a score? I suppose so. The test I took, unlike the subject exam in math, didn’t really test anything past algebra and a little introductory probability. But no rational person would think that my math skills exceeded my verbal skills (my verbal score was good, but not perfect). 

But, as they say on the late-night infomercials, wait, there’s more. There are studies that show there is little correlation between board scores at one level and performance at the next. More to the point in the current discussion: I remember reading about (as opposed to reading) studies which concluded that the average African-American student with a certain board score would outperform the average white student with that same score. I forget the exact figures, and I’m not sure I could find them now, but the following provides the general idea: on average, a black student with a 1080 SAT score would get better grades in college than a white student with an 1100. I don’t recall that Asian-American students were included in the findings, but I would suspect that the same principles would apply. So should we be comparing the scores themselves, or their predictive value? 

Of course, multiple studies have shown that these tests tend to privilege affluent white males: precisely the stereotype of the GOP pol. Were I of cynical disposition (perish the thought!), I might be tempted to suspect that the Republicans are using Asian-American rights as a front for their attempts to codify white preference. Wait, Republicans being as virtue-signaling and contemptuous of actual reality as the Dems? Surely not! 

Be it noted: for all my distaste for standardized tests to measure, well, anything, I still use them in considering whether a particular student should be admitted into our program or receive some of our sparse scholarship money. This is different, however, from believing that a higher score on the SAT or ACT makes for an inherently better student. Taken as part of an overall assessment, a good score will do a student more good than a bad score will, but by itself it’s merely a statistic. Another sports analogy: the best shooter in the NBA will never have the highest field goal percentage, because he’s shooting a lot from 3-point range, where 40% is excellent, but there are centers and power forwards shooting well over 50% because they never take a shot from more than 5 feet from the basket. 

So if the question is whether discrimination is a good idea, the answer is of course not. But the phrasing of the amendment opens up a lot of questions without answering any of them, especially about what, exactly, constitutes discrimination. Catch phrases and gotcha politics on either side of the aisle aren’t going to solve any problems. An admissions policy which privileges class rank over SAT scores would probably benefit African-American students over Asian-Americans, but it is not inherently discriminatory, any more than a strategy that reverses those priorities would be. And certainly a procedure which attempts to predict success at the collegiate level rather than judging success at the high school level doesn’t seem to me to be problematic, although it could be called discriminatory, I suppose. 

I don’t want some federal judge to decide how my alma maters, my employer, or indeed any other college or university runs its admissions process, absent clear and convincing evidence of actual discrimination as opposed to simply that which could be construed that way. I’m not suggesting that we ought to break existing laws to advance a cause. There are no doubt cases in which the disparity in qualifications between accepted applicants of Group X and rejected applicants of Group Y is so profound that racial discrimination (against Asian-Americans, perhaps against whites) is the only plausible explanation. In such cases, the legal system does indeed need to be employed. 

What I am suggesting, however, is that the Cruz amendment smacks more of politics—“look, we got the Dems to vote against equal rights!”—than of ethics. It seems too broad a statement to ensure just administration without further clarification. In something like collegiate admissions, one person’s discrimination is simply another person’s (ethically legitimate and comprehensible) difference in priorities. 

As a career educator at the college level, I’d probably have voted against the Cruz amendment, too… although I’d be fully aware I was walking into a trap.