Multi-Racial perspectives on the changing face of theatre
As part of EMACT's ongoing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, we recognize the importance of centering marginalized voices in our community. To this end, we are reaching out to performers, directors, technical theater staff, and others in Massachusetts community theatre to share their experiences and their insight. We hope to continue highlighting these voices so that they may enrich all our efforts to bring vibrant and relevant theatre to our communities.
Have a story to tell, or want to be featured? Let us know at [email protected]!
Have a story to tell, or want to be featured? Let us know at [email protected]!
Justin Budinoff
June 4, 2021
Tell us a bit about yourself, where you're from (local or otherwise), what are your mixed races?
My mom is from the Philippines; my father's background is white, from an Eastern European Jewish family. While he served in Vietnam, they met and married. I was born outside Columbus, Ohio. We moved with the military a lot until I was four, when we settled in Massachusetts. I was raised in all-white neighborhoods with no guidance as to how to deal with being the only non-white kid in the school class & neighborhood. Mixed-race families were much rarer in the suburbs of the 1970s than today and single-race adults generally had no awareness of how best to support either multiracial or single-race children in this situation. Being biracial thus ended up a pretty fraught thing for me. I felt an amorphousness around my identity that I didn't resolve until well into my twenties, when I came to understand that biracial is a legitimate identity in and of itself and I don't need to be more one race or other if that doesn't feel right to me. Barack Obama, for example, identifies himself in the media as a Black man of mixed descent, which is informed by a lot of historical meaning. But that doesn't mean I have to look at my biracialness in the same way. I do wonder how much the fact that I grew up speaking english without an Asian accent has influenced my castability.
How did you come into theater? Why has theater been an important part of your life?
I was drawn to theater around age 9 when I joined a youth acting program. It just looked like pure fun, and participating in storytelling felt like a next step after knowing how much I enjoyed reading fiction. I was never specifically drawn to being an actor; I became addicted to just being involved in the storytelling with audience feedback, in capacities from backstage to acting to writing/directing. Sadly I have little talent for design!
Was there a moment in your theater life that affected you because of race? And what happened and what did you learn?
A couple of brushes with West Side Story were key for me. Early on, I was in a revue that included the Quintet from the show. Everyone involved were friends and the cast was hired based on a variety of previous work rather than auditions. I was assigned to sing Bernardo. At that time my voice was suited to Tony's range and I loved his part in the number, so I asked the Director and Music Director if I could audition for Tony's part. I could tell from their reactions that they had never even considered me for it, though it seemed like every male actor had been considered for all other male parts (none of which were from shows that specified race). I soon realized that they had just immediately slotted me in to the latino role because of my looks without thinking any more deeply about it, despite the fact that I was just as non-latino as the rest of the actors. After I auditioned, they did have me sing Tony. So it was a lesson learned all round.
Later the same company did a full West Side Story, and could not find enough Latinx people for all the Sharks. So they called and asked me and other people they felt looked vaguely ethnic enough. This was long ago and I did not yet have the more mature language and talking points we have today about racial issues in theatre. I did the show because we were friends and I knew they had made long, genuine efforts to find a Latinx cast and were genuinely stuck. It would have been sad to cancel the show and take away the opportunity from the Latinx actors they did have.
These two experiences were formative in my determination to advocate for myself to play white parts despite looking generally "ethnic", but also to bring personal experience to Asian-American parts when offered. This could help in raising awareness about racial issues in those with casting power, without it being about just "shaming" them. I've gone on to play everything from race-neutral Shakespeare to Scrooge's nephew to a German king to an ethnically ambiguous Happy Loman in an otherwise all-white Death of a Salesman family, to Thuy in Miss Saigon, and nobody in the audience has had a problem so far. I have a lot of directors to thank for being open and unproblematic about diversity in casting.
Have you been told that your "looks" are ambiguous, that you "could play anything," etc, and how did that impact your outlook on theater casting? Did it inform your audition strategy? Why?
I've sometimes been told outside of theatre that people could not tell by my looks what racial background I have, and it didn't feel problematic, just a mere statement of fact, since no value was being assigned to one particular race or other. It was different the two times I've been told in acting that I could "play anything", as the persons telling me that did not understand that it is still pigeonholing me into non-white parts, not "anything", when productions are naturalistic. So it's hardly something to cheer. Being told I have a leg up on being cast as "Street Dealer #3" when I won't even be auditioned for Walter White or Jesse Pinkman does not feel celebratory.
I made a decision at the start to audition for anything, no matter whether the part had historically been cast as white, because I personally don't need my entertainment to be 100% naturalistic, just emotionally realistic - unless race is integral to the story, as in August Wilson for example. Whether or not I was cast, it would mean the director/producer had to ask themselves whether race had anything to do with their decision. The harder question is what happens if, for example, I audition for an "Oklahoma!" general call and get offered Ali Hakim. I am certainly not Persian or otherwise Middle Eastern. I would have to ask if the theater really had no option for a capable Middle Eastern actor, and whether I believed they had made an acceptable effort to find one. It's ultimately about holding a theater producer accountable for understanding that they have a duty to be racially aware.
With all of this growing education and awareness of making theater diverse, inclusive, and equitable, how do you see the theater landscape changing in the immediate future/long term?
You could see the trend of diversity in casting start with the idea of "color-blind" casting years ago; I think the best thing about the current direction is how people are now recognizing that it's less about the casting and more that theatre companies as a whole need to be color-aware and choose diverse works to produce. Rather than just saying "Let's cast Morgan Freeman and Steven Yuen as Salieri and Mozart" for example, they need to be saying "let's commission a play about the Beijing Opera or the Cotton Club the same season that we present Amadeus". As the trend continues, we need to make sure that multiracial characters, both lead and supporting, and their stories are also kept on the radar screen just like characters of diverse single races.
Please feel free to share any other thoughts.
It's interesting to look ahead and ask... what happens when casting a non-white person in a specifically white role? I, for example, have no problem with a production of The King & I that ahistorically casts a Black or Asian Anna alongside a latino or white Louis Leonowens and a biracial or indigenous or middle eastern Captain Orton. But does that then mean it should be OK for the Thai characters to all be cast with multiple races as well? If we get to some point in the far future when society has achieved actual equality of opportunity on the creative, crew and business ends, and widespread education about actual racial history and context, I think that might become acceptable. I also wonder if actors of fully Asian background feel like I have any advantage over them in the number of parts I'd be considered for. I feel like I do.
At the community theatre level, it feels to me like actors of color all get equally few parts to go for that are specific to a certain racial identity, including biracial, but like that is just starting to change. I do feel there has been lots of openness to nontraditional casting for "white" roles for years now. There is not as much of the desire that persists in TV and movies to centralize white casting for lead roles. But we need to continue to make sure all races feel welcome and represented in the scripts themselves so that we can reach the point where population demographics, educational/socioeconomic opportunity, etc. are the real barriers to be worked on in encouraging BIPOC folks to get involved, not story bias or discrimination on the part of theatre producers, workers, etc.
June 4, 2021
Tell us a bit about yourself, where you're from (local or otherwise), what are your mixed races?
My mom is from the Philippines; my father's background is white, from an Eastern European Jewish family. While he served in Vietnam, they met and married. I was born outside Columbus, Ohio. We moved with the military a lot until I was four, when we settled in Massachusetts. I was raised in all-white neighborhoods with no guidance as to how to deal with being the only non-white kid in the school class & neighborhood. Mixed-race families were much rarer in the suburbs of the 1970s than today and single-race adults generally had no awareness of how best to support either multiracial or single-race children in this situation. Being biracial thus ended up a pretty fraught thing for me. I felt an amorphousness around my identity that I didn't resolve until well into my twenties, when I came to understand that biracial is a legitimate identity in and of itself and I don't need to be more one race or other if that doesn't feel right to me. Barack Obama, for example, identifies himself in the media as a Black man of mixed descent, which is informed by a lot of historical meaning. But that doesn't mean I have to look at my biracialness in the same way. I do wonder how much the fact that I grew up speaking english without an Asian accent has influenced my castability.
How did you come into theater? Why has theater been an important part of your life?
I was drawn to theater around age 9 when I joined a youth acting program. It just looked like pure fun, and participating in storytelling felt like a next step after knowing how much I enjoyed reading fiction. I was never specifically drawn to being an actor; I became addicted to just being involved in the storytelling with audience feedback, in capacities from backstage to acting to writing/directing. Sadly I have little talent for design!
Was there a moment in your theater life that affected you because of race? And what happened and what did you learn?
A couple of brushes with West Side Story were key for me. Early on, I was in a revue that included the Quintet from the show. Everyone involved were friends and the cast was hired based on a variety of previous work rather than auditions. I was assigned to sing Bernardo. At that time my voice was suited to Tony's range and I loved his part in the number, so I asked the Director and Music Director if I could audition for Tony's part. I could tell from their reactions that they had never even considered me for it, though it seemed like every male actor had been considered for all other male parts (none of which were from shows that specified race). I soon realized that they had just immediately slotted me in to the latino role because of my looks without thinking any more deeply about it, despite the fact that I was just as non-latino as the rest of the actors. After I auditioned, they did have me sing Tony. So it was a lesson learned all round.
Later the same company did a full West Side Story, and could not find enough Latinx people for all the Sharks. So they called and asked me and other people they felt looked vaguely ethnic enough. This was long ago and I did not yet have the more mature language and talking points we have today about racial issues in theatre. I did the show because we were friends and I knew they had made long, genuine efforts to find a Latinx cast and were genuinely stuck. It would have been sad to cancel the show and take away the opportunity from the Latinx actors they did have.
These two experiences were formative in my determination to advocate for myself to play white parts despite looking generally "ethnic", but also to bring personal experience to Asian-American parts when offered. This could help in raising awareness about racial issues in those with casting power, without it being about just "shaming" them. I've gone on to play everything from race-neutral Shakespeare to Scrooge's nephew to a German king to an ethnically ambiguous Happy Loman in an otherwise all-white Death of a Salesman family, to Thuy in Miss Saigon, and nobody in the audience has had a problem so far. I have a lot of directors to thank for being open and unproblematic about diversity in casting.
Have you been told that your "looks" are ambiguous, that you "could play anything," etc, and how did that impact your outlook on theater casting? Did it inform your audition strategy? Why?
I've sometimes been told outside of theatre that people could not tell by my looks what racial background I have, and it didn't feel problematic, just a mere statement of fact, since no value was being assigned to one particular race or other. It was different the two times I've been told in acting that I could "play anything", as the persons telling me that did not understand that it is still pigeonholing me into non-white parts, not "anything", when productions are naturalistic. So it's hardly something to cheer. Being told I have a leg up on being cast as "Street Dealer #3" when I won't even be auditioned for Walter White or Jesse Pinkman does not feel celebratory.
I made a decision at the start to audition for anything, no matter whether the part had historically been cast as white, because I personally don't need my entertainment to be 100% naturalistic, just emotionally realistic - unless race is integral to the story, as in August Wilson for example. Whether or not I was cast, it would mean the director/producer had to ask themselves whether race had anything to do with their decision. The harder question is what happens if, for example, I audition for an "Oklahoma!" general call and get offered Ali Hakim. I am certainly not Persian or otherwise Middle Eastern. I would have to ask if the theater really had no option for a capable Middle Eastern actor, and whether I believed they had made an acceptable effort to find one. It's ultimately about holding a theater producer accountable for understanding that they have a duty to be racially aware.
With all of this growing education and awareness of making theater diverse, inclusive, and equitable, how do you see the theater landscape changing in the immediate future/long term?
You could see the trend of diversity in casting start with the idea of "color-blind" casting years ago; I think the best thing about the current direction is how people are now recognizing that it's less about the casting and more that theatre companies as a whole need to be color-aware and choose diverse works to produce. Rather than just saying "Let's cast Morgan Freeman and Steven Yuen as Salieri and Mozart" for example, they need to be saying "let's commission a play about the Beijing Opera or the Cotton Club the same season that we present Amadeus". As the trend continues, we need to make sure that multiracial characters, both lead and supporting, and their stories are also kept on the radar screen just like characters of diverse single races.
Please feel free to share any other thoughts.
It's interesting to look ahead and ask... what happens when casting a non-white person in a specifically white role? I, for example, have no problem with a production of The King & I that ahistorically casts a Black or Asian Anna alongside a latino or white Louis Leonowens and a biracial or indigenous or middle eastern Captain Orton. But does that then mean it should be OK for the Thai characters to all be cast with multiple races as well? If we get to some point in the far future when society has achieved actual equality of opportunity on the creative, crew and business ends, and widespread education about actual racial history and context, I think that might become acceptable. I also wonder if actors of fully Asian background feel like I have any advantage over them in the number of parts I'd be considered for. I feel like I do.
At the community theatre level, it feels to me like actors of color all get equally few parts to go for that are specific to a certain racial identity, including biracial, but like that is just starting to change. I do feel there has been lots of openness to nontraditional casting for "white" roles for years now. There is not as much of the desire that persists in TV and movies to centralize white casting for lead roles. But we need to continue to make sure all races feel welcome and represented in the scripts themselves so that we can reach the point where population demographics, educational/socioeconomic opportunity, etc. are the real barriers to be worked on in encouraging BIPOC folks to get involved, not story bias or discrimination on the part of theatre producers, workers, etc.