University Place

[gentle music] - Norman Gilliland: Welcome to University Place Presents.

I'm Norman Gilliland.

The many worlds of Shakespeare's plays have always provided a rich variety of roles for actors, and as the 20th century passed into the 21st, casting directors became even broader in their thinking about which actors could play which roles.

We're going to discover, for example, an entire world of Spanish language Shakespeare, and we're going to get some insights into the whole phenomenon of 21st century casting from my guests.

They are Baron Kelley, professor of theater and drama at the UW-Madison, and Micha Espinosa, professor of acting and directing in the Department of Theater at the UW-Madison.

Welcome to University Place Presents.

– Baron Kelly: Thanks, Norman.

– Micha Espinosa: Thank you.

- It's a big topic to get into the question of how casting Shakespeare has changed as we've gone from the 20th century into the 21st, but give us kind of the big picture, each of you, if you can.

- Well, there have been many social movements in the United States, which started from the late '50s with the civil rights movement, with Joe Papp in New York City and in the southern states of trying to make the casting more inclusive.

You know, so there were all these designations that started to come out because the NEA funding and all of that, societal casting, colorblind casting, color conscious casting.

And that's where it all really started, you know.

- Although, as I think we'll find out, there were exceptions much earlier, but what would you say, Micha?

- Well, I just think that those are a lot of terms, colorblind, color casting, conscious casting.

And they're quite different, and they-- Those controversies are continuing right now as to what one should do.

It's a complicated thing.

Colorblind, it's as if you don't see color.

And so, think of-- I'm trying to think of a television show, the one, Shonda Rhimes, the, it's very popular.

- Oh, Bridgerton.

- Bridgerton.

It's very-- That's a colorblind cast.

Anybody can do anything.

Color conscious is where you're aware of putting somebody of color into that role, will change the story.

It'll change the narrative in a very specific way.

So, I think it's important to define those terms.

- Yes, that's a big distinction, isn't it?

There's one thing, if it's kind of neutral, it doesn't matter what color the person is who plays, I don't know, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or something.

But if you turn it, in some of the other characters, then, yes, the story line does change, doesn't it?

– Baron: Yeah, and there are some directors that like to punch up particular themes in plays and particular relationships in plays by making a particular point of putting certain actors in roles so that it becomes a little bit more right in your face.

They do.

- Well, I know, in 1936, Orson Welles did a famous Black cast Macbeth, which he had on Broadway.

He was certainly making a point there.

- He called it Voodoo.

- Yes, that's right, yeah.

He had real voodoo artists... - Drums and all that.

- ...as part of the show.

Orson Welles never did anything halfway.

But there must have been a very long tradition, off and on, at least, of, let's say, for starters, Black actors playing parts that traditionally were white.

- The one that started it all was Ira Aldridge.

But all of this really came up from the definition of Black and white during the Renaissance and what that really meant.

The interior of the person displaying itself outside.

So, then, you know, you had-- When people think about Moors in these plays, or it's sort of like, you know, going back to the 1950s when you see cowboys and the Native Americans and Indians.

They knew what they were gonna get when they saw the Indians.

And so, when they would see Moors, oh, these were the bad guys, you know.

But Ira Aldridge was actually the first person to start this whole ball rolling with non-traditional casting.

– Norman: And where did he come from?

How did he break in?

– Baron: He was born in New York City in 1807.

And when he was a young man, a teenager, he was part of something called the African Theater Company.

And he realized that he couldn't have the opportunities that he wanted here.

And with a British actor by the name of Henry Wallack, gave him a letter of introduction.

And he went to London 'cause Wallack said, "You could have a terrific career in London, believe it or not."

And that's what happened, you know.

- What sort of roles would he play?

- Well, you know, at that time, the sort of melodramas, Isaac Bickerstaff and all of this, but then, eventually, he knew that he was going to play Othello, and that, of course, you know, that's, you know, that became, like, one of his signature roles.

And so, it took a while because, you know, the pro-slavery movements were happening in Britain at that time, and you had the anti-slavery movements with Wilberforce and all of that.

So, he was a great example of someone that is, you know, can do things if they're given the opportunity.

– Norman: He developed, though, as primarily a Shakespearean actor?

– Baron: Yes, but he also did melodramas and various other sort of musical ditties, as they would call them.

And he knew how to play to the audience's sensibilities and all that.

- Did he stay in England?

- Yeah.

Yeah, he never came back to the United States.

Never came back.

His wife had him promise that he would never come back to the United States.

And he actually, about a year or so before he died, he signed a contract to come back to the U.S., but I think he would have been killed if he would have tried to come back here.

But he died in 1867, so he never-- He had signed the contracts, but he never came back.

- Micha, was there any kind of a Spanish thread at this time in this country?

- You know, I can't speak to that history, but what I can speak to is that latinidad is complicated.

So, there's this whole thing of it wasn't until the 1980s that people identified as the ethnicity of Latino.

So, there have been Latinos doing Shakespeare for a very long time, passing as white.

– Baron: Mm-hmm.

- So, that history is very complicated because it really hasn't been until recently.

I mean, we were talking about, earlier about Jos Ferrer.

Now, he was very interesting because he did all sorts of roles, played Iago, but he was never viewed as Latino because, at that time, those terms didn't really exist.

And it wasn't really until Raul Julia came around that Latinos-- I think it was because of the strength of his cultural voice.

Latinos tended to change their voices in order to fit in, in order to assimilate into a white world.

- It is kind of interesting, if you look at it, 'cause we're looking at stage primarily, but if you look at film, in the era of silent film, you could get away with almost anything, couldn't you?

I mean, because nobody's gonna pick up on your accent.

- That's right.

- And then, the flip side of that, in radio, where, of course, you couldn't see what the person looked like.

And it was a time when accents were all the rage.

The more accents you could do, the more successful you were going to be.

And you couldn't tell, for example, that the guy who played The Great Gildersleeve was actually Portuguese-American.

– Baron: [imitates Gildersleeve] Yeeesss!

You know, Harold Peary.

And a lot of actors, you couldn't tell.

I mean, even Black actors.

- Amos 'n' Andy.

- Well, yeah, that's true in radio, although I think varying degrees of how convincing they were... - Yeah, right.

- ...in carrying those roles.

But, you know, you would hear a character, and you think, "Oh, is that person, you know, Latin or is that person Black?"

But you really couldn't tell that well in radio because they were such chameleons.

- There was a great show on in the 1940s, late '30s, 1940s, produced by Roi Ottley, a New World A-Coming.

And he would have historical dramas on there where various actors, a young Earle Hyman, Canada Lee, and others would play these historical figures like George Washington Carver and all these, you know what I'm saying?

And people knew that these were stories dealing with Black history and such.

- And there was, yeah, there was a radio series on from about 1948 to '49 written, produced by Richard Durham.

– Baron: Oh, yes.

- Destination Freedom.

– Baron: Oh, yes.

- That was almost entirely Black actors.

– Baron: That's right.

- Unless occasionally the part called for a white person, then they would have a white person play.

But it's just been really interesting over the years how these things have flipped one way or the other.

And then, of course, you mentioned Amos 'n' Andy, for a time on television, there was an all-Black cast version of Amos 'n' Andy.

- That's right.

- And so, you never knew what you were gonna get from one year to the next, but there were some, as you mentioned, Baron, by the time we get into, say, the late '60s and into the '70s, there were some breakthrough shows and breakthrough actors.

And you mentioned Earle Hyman as being one of those who, actually, even before TV came along.

- Oh, yeah, well, he had a dream.

Most of the people watching this will remember him as being Bill Cosby's father on The Cosby Show, Russell Huxtable.

But Earle, even in the 1940s, had a dream of, you know, he wanted to be in the theater.

He wanted to be on the stage as the way that Katharine Cornell and all these other great people had companies performing, but there was no space for him.

And he used to walk around with a book of Shakespeare under his arm, and some of the other actors would say, "You crazy?

Nobody's gonna cast you in that."

Eventually, they started to.

But I mean, that's exactly right.

There was no space for him.

There were some wonderful actors that were performing, but the kind of work he wanted to do was more an ensemble, more classically oriented kind of work.

- How did he develop then as he went along, Earle Hyman?

- Well, I mean, the actor that I mentioned, Canada Lee, Earle had won a contest called the John Golden Awards and Eli Wallach's wife, Anne Jackson, they went to school together, actually, in New York.

She won it, Earle Hyman won that.

And that gave him entre into, like, small roles in radio and then eventually on the stage.

Yeah, that's how it started for him.

But he had a dream of-- He was 12, 13 years old the first time he saw an Ibsen play.

He didn't understand all the stuff.

- That's understandable.

[laughs] - But I mean, that's what he wanted to do.

He wanted to learn the plays in the original language.

Can you believe it?

- So, he picked up Norwegian?

- He started-- That was a lifelong, you know, lifelong gift and passion of his, you know, to do that.

Yeah.

- And so, he played predominantly in Norway?

- No, he played here.

He was always between here and Norway.

But he became a big star in Norway.

A lot of people don't realize that, you know, he became, in Norwegian, the "bestefar," grandfather Cosby, bestefar Cosby.

And he became a widely acclaimed, well-decorated actor in Norway, you know, for the kinds of things that he was doing and the teaching he was doing.

They'd never seen anybody like him.

Tall, light-skinned Black man.

You know, of course, speaking both dialects of Norwegian.

That was incredible.

– Norman: Where did he go from there?

I mean, obviously, because he eventually came back over to this country.

– Baron: Oh, yeah, yeah, he did Broadway, did shows.

He did some television and such, but he always-- He bought a house over there.

So, he was pretty much over there six, seven months out of the year.

I mean, you know, they loved him.

- A different kind of history of acceptance than he would have found here.

- Well, he knew that-- Somebody heard him speaking in Norwegian, an artistic director, Brianna Anderson, and heard him speaking during an interview.

And he was in Norway-- you know, in Norwegian.

And so, Brianna Anderson got this brilliant idea that maybe he would wanna do Othello.

And that's where it started.

What was that-- Kennedy was assassinated in '63, so this would have been like, '61, '62.

And he wasn't sure, and came back to the United States and did a production of Othello with John Lithgow's father, who was the artistic director of a theater.

And one day, he started speaking in Norwegian on the stage.

And so, I mean, you know, it just started coming out of him.

And so, he figured he was ready.

- Did he play other Shakespearean roles, though?

- Oh, sure.

He's played most of the great roles in his career, everything from King Lear to Hamlet.

He was quite an extraordinary actor.

I saw him when I was maybe 15.

I got to know him.

I was about 15 and I saw him in one of the last performances that he gave of Othello.

- I met him, I met him when I was on The Cosby Show.

- Mm-hmm.

– Norman: You were on The Cosby Show?

- Yeah, just as a, it was one of my first jobs when I first arrived in New York City.

And I was, you know, just as a, like a featured extra kind of thing.

But it was a great first job.

And so, I got to show up to The Cosby Show and be in all the scenes and meet all the actors.

– Baron: Was he gracious to you?

- He was very gracious, very gracious.

- And what did that lead to for you, Micha, working on The Cosby Show?

- It was an opportunity to learn.

I was very young, had just moved to New York City, and I also got to meet Raul Julia during that time.

And actually, what that led to was having been on, you know, a featured, you know, a part, a costar, one little two parts here, there, there, working as a working actor, but I just wasn't happy.

I wasn't happy, 'cause at the time, casting was very specific.

And I went, and Raul Julia was speaking, and he told me, "Go back to school, go study Shakespeare, go study language, go study."

- Get out of that niche.

– Micha: Get out of film, television, modeling, trying to fit into a box, and expand yourself.

So, I did.

I auditioned for Yale, and I auditioned for NYU and UCSD and got into all these schools and made a decision, and it was good.

- I guess we could get into a long discussion, and it wouldn't necessarily be a digression, as to the advantages versus disadvantages of being, as an actor, a specialist versus a generalist.

– Micha: Mm.

- I mean, you know, the big extreme in terms of the generalist might be somebody like Fredric March, who you weren't gonna ever go see a Fredric March picture.

You would see a picture that had him as one of the stars playing who knows what part.

Whereas there, of course, there were always character actors who would do very specific roles.

And, but you indicated you weren't that happy with your experience in that kind of niche in The Cosby Show.

And you wanted to get out and become a generalist, do the Shakespeare and everything else.

- I think every actor dreams of taking on these universal stories that have been translated.

So, Shakespeare in Spanish has been happening, you know, for a long time.

So, and in the teatros all across the United States.

- I was just telling some students this, that I'd be in an audition for whatever it was, commercial or something, and then I'd hear, "Baron, can you be like Eddie Murphy?"

[all laugh] "Could you be a little bit more like Eddie Murphy?"

And I'm like, "What are you really..." - What are you implying there?

[Baron laughs] - And this takes us back to casting and stereotype and moving beyond stereotype.

And there are archetypes that are wonderful to fulfill and to be able to dive into what that archetype could be.

The king or the queen or the... But to-- But I think what often happens to actors of color is they get stereotyped.

And so, I think, the fact that actors are going to other places in order to avoid that is very interesting.

- And I suppose there's also something that doesn't necessarily show to those of us in the audience, and that is the economic incentive for playing one kind of role versus another.

I mean, in other words, is it possibly kind of a seductive thing to be a typecast actor?

And well, there's the part, there's another part there.

They need a person playing whatever it is, you know, an athlete or a doctor or something.

And just to kind of fall into that and give up the diversity, is that part of it?

- Oh, sure.

I mean, but there's a-- I think getting cast is so hard.

– Norman: Well, there is that, right?

- To begin with, that I think that finding that thing that you do really well is a wonderful thing to have that in your bag.

But then, when you can expand, I think that's why people love to do theater.

In television, it's a little harder.

And in film, it's a little harder to change your type.

- You know, I think also a lot of theaters in this country also have had to... ...learn how to train their audiences for certain kinds of plays and certain kinds of casting.

I remember in California, I'm not gonna mention the theater, when an artistic director who I'm very close to still, he's no longer the artistic director of the theater, told me they had cast an Asian American actress in the role, the female lead for A Christmas Carol.

It's a major theater in California.

And they got letters.

"How dare you do this, to put this person--" And he told me, he said, "You know what, Baron?"

He said, "We don't need 'em.

We don't need those people."

I mean, the people that wrote those letters.

– Norman: That's not the ones we're talking to.

- Yeah, yeah, we don't need them.

If that's what they, then we don't need them here in this theater.

So, you know, you needed people like that also.

And some of these other Shakespeare companies have had to learn of how to, you know, train their audiences because, you know.

- Well, the temptation must always be, though, to push the envelope a little bit if you've done a certain play or set of plays... - Britain has-- - ...year after year.

- Britain is like about 30, 40 years behind the U.S.

They've had major controversies when they've cast-- - Norman: Really?

- Oh, sure.

– Norman: That's surprising.

- When they've cast a Black actor in the role of a king.

Oh, sure, of what that means, you know, and then Henry VI, Henry V. Although, in 2016, for the first time in the Royal Shakespeare Company's history, they had a Black actor play Hamlet.

2016.

And right around then, they also had a Black actor play Iago.

- An endless set of complications or possibilities when you're trying to do casting is not just, oh, I think I want this person for that role.

It's not like you always get exactly who you want anyway, right?

- There have been theaters here in the U.S.

that have really led the way.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Public Theater.

– Baron: The Guthrie.

- The Guthrie, Joseph Papp.

- Sure, in Minneapolis, mm-hmm.

And then, in terms of full-on Shakespeare with complete Latin casts, there are wonderful theaters in Texas that have done incredible things.

The Alley, Dallas Theater Center, many theaters that are telling these stories so that their audiences see themselves reflected.

- Right, yeah, it's a kind of a match for the place.

– Micha: Yeah.

And the United States is becoming more and more Latino.

There are some scholars that say that we're a Taco Nation.

And, so, whether we realize it or not, latinidad, Latinness is everywhere in the U.S.

- I have to wonder a little bit how difficult it would be to translate 17th, late 16th century English into Spanish.

I mean, plus we're talking about the sheer poetry of Shakespeare.

- Well, Spanish is also extremely poetic.

- It's a loving tongue, as they say.

- Exactly.

And so, actually, those translations are wonderful.

They're absolutely brilliant.

And now, there are so many.

So, I am the author of a number of collections of monologues and scene books, monologues for Latino actors, scenes for Latinx actors, and a book called Latinx Actor Training.

In my newest book, Scenes for Latinx Actors 2, I have a whole section on re-envisioned classics through the Latinx lens.

So, now we have playwrights that have taken these classics, and not only-- So, they're tradaptations, they're translations.

– Norman: Yes.

- Or they're adapted, and then there's translations embedded.

It can go either way.

So, these tradaptations are interesting because they have English, they have Spanish, they have Spanglish.

- Well, yeah, and I know, for example, that there's been a production of Cymbeline that was set, what, in the American Southwest.

– Micha: Mm-hmm.

- And... But Shakespeare is still in there, you're saying.

- Oh, oh, yeah, yeah.

Shakespeare exists in Spanish, so the verse can be a little different, but these translations have existed since we have it in print.

- I would think.

– Micha: Yeah, so... - I mean, you know, Cervantes being translated into English and Shakespeare into Spanish, purely contemporaries.

– Micha: Exactly, so the teatros across the United States and in the Americas have been doing Shakespeare.

And so, now I think what's interesting about Shakespeare now is how it's being adapted for a modern audience.

- And I mean, one degree or the other that's been done, you know, for a long time, hasn't it, with like, for example, doing it in contemporary costumes and maybe even changing elements of the plot to fit current situations.

So, I'm guessing that, well, even back in the, what, early in the 19th century, they put a happy ending on Romeo and Juliet and all kinds of-- - Baron: King Lear.

- Yeah, adaptations.

You know, no end for one reason or another.

So, it's not like this is a totally new phenomenon, these adaptations and moving the plays around.

But it seems to be really a phenomenon now in terms of the Spanish-language Shakespeare.

- Have you heard of original pronunciation?

So, the original pronunciation is-- Ben Crystal, David Crystal and Ben Crystal, a father and son type duo, have figured out what Shakespeare sounded like.

- Oh, I've heard of that, yes, yeah.

- Yes, the original pronunciation.

So, "zounds" and, it's very-- - Rougher.

- Yeah, it was much rougher, but it also had very particular rhythms.

So, when Latinx actors and Latinx theaters are doing these translations and adaptations of Shakespeare, let's take a Comedy of Errors, Comedia of Errors.

Those... It sounds a little bit like, sometimes like the original pronunciation when the cultural voice is welcomed.

When the cultural voice is welcomed, you go back more to those original pronunciation rhythms.

- Yeah, that's an endless study, too, isn't it?

It's a fascinating thing to somehow recreate the actual sound of Shakespeare.

As we know, English was pronounced very differently in Shakespeare's time among all classes.

- Well, even with, you know, the way people spoke here, people in the early days when sound came into the movies, most of these people were coming from the theater, and then it was that sort of faux, you know, not British, but-- - Norman: Mid-Atlantic.

- That's right, that's right, that's right.

And then, that's all changed.

Even in Britain, it used to be RP, received pronunciation, so everybody sounded like they were coming from the BB-- British Broadcasting.

But now, everybody's regionalisms are welcome on the stage, you know what I mean?

So, it's all changed now.

- Well, you know, if you're going to be Bottom the Weaver, does it make sense to sound like you're working for the BBC?

- Well, you know, but I mean, not like you're, you know-- It's a class structure in Britain more so.

– Norman: Oh, for sure.

- And people can tell, you know, how somebody is speaking by their class.

So, I'm sure that all of the, you know, the mechanicals, somebody could have been Welsh, somebody could have been Cockney.

- I was gonna say, a Cockney Othello is kind of beyond me.

- You know, yeah, well, no, no.

Well, they've had different flavors of Othello with, you know, with different African and West Indian or Jamaican.

- Have they ever actually done a white Othello?

- Yes, Patrick Stewart.

- Oh, Patrick Stewart did an Othello?

- Patrick Stewart did what people refer to as a photo negative production that was done.

[Norman laughs] It's true, he was the only white character on the stage.

- Oh, they flipped the whole thing.

- Yeah, he was the only white character on the stage.

Yeah, at the Folger.

And so, that was interesting.

- Well, endlessly fun, isn't it, though, to experiment.

– Baron: Oh, when I was in drama school, one of my classmates wanted to flip.

He wanted to play Othello, and I said, "Well, okay, if you wanna play Othello, I'll play Iago."

So, I mean, you know, that was fun.

That was fun.

- There has to be a lot of training involved.

I mean, especially when we're talking Shakespeare primarily here.

And to get, whether it's Spanish or English, the diction to come out right in a Shakespeare play, and then you have to act on top of that, and you have to also be physical on top of all of that.

And I mean, I've seen actors, for example, who looked like they might not have the best center of gravity, let's say.

And yet, nonetheless, I saw a scene with you in it, Baron, where you were with another actor, our friend, Charles Hall, who did not have the classic heroic shape for an actor.

But he was hunched down during much of a scene and then popped right up like that.

And then I found out later, well, he actually teaches... - At Shakespeare and Company.

- ...getting fit... - That's right.

- ...for a role or for any role.

- Yeah.

- And that would be true with your work, too, I assume, Micha.

- Absolutely.

I have been a voice coach for many years, and the work is... I say it's ten years of being on the ground.

– Norman: Really?

- Well, it takes ten years for anything to be an expert at it.

But you develop the articulators, you develop the muscularity of the articulators.

But the key is now to very much own your home sound and your home language so that you're not removing yourself.

You know, you bring up received pronunciation.

So, that term, received pronunciation, means received from the queen.

So, you're speaking like the queen.

The same thing has happened in the Spanish language that it is-- there are levels of how you speak Spanish.

- Oh, Castilian versus any number of others.

- Exactly, let's say Caribbean Spanish.

- Right.

- So, there's all these different forms of Spanish.

And the thing that I try to do is to empower my students in their identity.

We're talking about casting, we're talking about identity for a community, we keep circling around identity in our conversation.

And so, in training, in training an actor, you're helping them fine-tune their own identity development.

- And that, when you're working with young actors in particular, we're gonna say college age or even younger, they don't know what that is, do they?

What their core identity is necessarily, what their kind of home base is?

- Some do, and have rejected it, or are trying on new identities.

- Trying to get away from that by acting.

- Exactly, or trying on new identities.

Because they're fun to try on.

- Well, sure, everybody likes make-believe.

- There's a wonderful actor, Hctor Elizondo.

People will know who he is, probably if they watched that movie Pretty Woman.

But he's a wonderful actor.

He's been in a lot of things.

– Norman: Julia Roberts.

– Baron: And he grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, so he picked up a lot of different accents.

And, you know, when I would watch him on stage or on film, 'cause he used to live up in my neighborhood.

I used to see him in the store all the time and in New York, and we would talk about this.

And he was saying, you know, he just had a facility of doing that 'cause he's an actor.

So, he wanted to always try to have that opportunity, you know, to play different kinds of characters with the way that they spoke with those particular dialects.

- As long as you mentioned the Big Apple, Baron, let's digress enough to get into your trajectory as an actor.

Very unusual beginning for an actor with the Metropolitan Opera.

- Yeah.

Children's Chorus in the Metropolitan Opera.

And all I knew was that when I was 10, 11 years old and, you know, I went to a very multicultural, you know, school, grade school.

And so, a couple of my friends, a Greek kid and an Italian kid, they were talking about auditioning for the Metropolitan Opera 'cause we sang in the chorus.

And all I knew was I wanted to be with my friends.

I didn't know what an opera was.

And so, my mother brought me down.

I told her I wanted to do that.

You know, she came up and talked to the teacher, and the teacher gave her the information.

My mother took me down to the Met.

And I remember going into the room with Zubin Mehta and the rehearsal pianist, and my mother put a little clip-on tie on me with a white shirt, had glasses on.

And so, Zubin Mehta, at that time, he said, "What are you going to sing for us?"

And I said, "'America.'"

- The Leonard Bernstein.

- Amer-- 'Cause we sang in the chorus, and that's how that started.

But being exposed to all those languages, the spectacle, all of that was, I think, you know, just got into my bones.

And that's where it sort of started for me to really-- But I loved watching old movies on television as well.

Yeah, yeah.

– Micha: I wanted to mention that, you know, it's interesting because the laws of the United States around language really affect Latino actors and their development of their skill.

- How so?

- So, for example, when I was young, I was put into a little corner and told not to speak that language, right?

In school, there are English-only laws in states like Texas, Arizona, that still exist in the books.

- And Texas is, what, about 40% non-Latino?

- Exactly, so you would think that bilingual education would be something that would really be embraced.

And it's not.

In Arizona, these English-only laws are very strict even today, unless you're in a very specific bilingual program.

But what that's done is-- And parents were terrified.

They did not want their children speaking Spanish.

– Norman: Well, I mean, it's kind of the oldest story in America, isn't it?

– Micha: Yeah.

- That the first people over do not want their children speaking the home language.

– Micha: Exactly.

– Norman: To the point where it's lost within a generation or two, often.

- And they want them to assimilate more.

– Norman: Of course, it's always about assimilation.

Yeah, which happens surprisingly quickly, doesn't it?

- Yes.

And so, training today's multicultural actor is very much about reclaiming, reclaiming language, reclaiming culture.

And I go back to the books I created because the reason I created them was I had done a study to see what happens to Latinos when they enter the Eurocentristic environment of theater.

And what I found was that people didn't know the canon of Latinx or Latin theater.

They didn't know any of the playwrights.

They didn't know the experiences the students were having in terms of their identity development.

And there was no resources for them.

So, let's say you're a young actor and you wanna get a monologue.

You could go and pick up a book, 1,000 monologues, and you open it up, and how many monologues were there for Latino characters, Latina characters, guess in this book of 1,000?

- Yeah, well, I know there's like, only maybe one in all of Shakespeare, and that's a bit of a stretch.

[all laugh] - So, yes, so there was one in this entire book.

So, I decided to make-- to change that and create these resources so that students could see themselves reflected, learn who these playwrights are.

There are incredible playwrights doing, really, what I call the new American theater.

It is theater that reflects the communities.

- You're succeeding with that?

They're getting into it?

- Yeah, the books are a success.

And I think that, as you said, there are companies all across the country doing really exciting work.

I can tell you about a few shows.

The one that I just finished coaching was called The Night Shift Before Christmas, and it's the Christmas Carol told through-- One Latina plays all the characters and tells the whole story of A Christmas Carol through somebody who's stuck working the night shift at a Happy Burger.

- That's a clever premise, isn't it?

Because, of course, it gives the setup for one person doing all the parts.

- And then, I-- I often get called in to do these bilingual productions, whether it be a bilingual Our Town, or I'm working on-- I'm not sure how-- I don't think it's gonna be bilingual, but I bet you for sure there'll be sprinkles of Spanish in Laurie Woolery's-- She's the director of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I'm doing that in the spring at Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

- And so, how would you frame a play like Midsummer Night's Dream with sprinkles of Spanish in it?

Do you change the setting at all?

Or do these people just happen to be Spanish speakers?

- Well, I think that by allowing-- I think it's who you cast in the roles.

You don't necessarily need to change anything.

Let's say that you've got a Latino Oberon, and he happens to have the cultural voice of somebody who is a Latino.

We automatically understand.

We can see that, we can hear it, we can feel that.

– Baron: That was the beautiful thing about Raul Julia.

I mean, I saw him on the stage growing up.

I mean, he was wonderful.

He was so, so in his voice and who he was as a person that those rhythms came out.

It didn't matter whether he was doing Shaw, Shakespeare, Threepenny Opera, Brecht.

I mean, you know, that's fabulous to see that.

You know, it was exciting to see that.

- When you get into this realm of Spanish-language Shakespeare or whatever else it might be, you still have to teach this baseline way of speaking English, though, right?

Because that's still where the biggest audience is gonna be.

- So, I teach phonetics, and phonetics are the sounds that, it's a system of writing sounds down.

So, [clicks tongue] has a symbol, [smooches] has a symbol, [rolls R] has a symbol.

And so, when people learn more about the instru-- their own instrument and how to play it, they can then shift without losing their own voice and their own identity.

They're building skills.

So, we're not training to a target sound, which used to be, it used to be a white sound.

- Right.

- And it no longer is.

So, in voice training, it used to be that it was prescriptive.

Here's a prescription to change who you are.

And that really becomes a problem.

And instead, now, it's descriptive.

Now it's, what are you doing?

How are you doing it?

Let's add more.

Let's bring more of that out.

And then, let's see what else we can add.

- And that's been a big trend over the years.

When you use that word, prescriptive.

Advertising used to be the same way.

I'm going to tell you what's good for you.

And then it started changing in the '60s.

And it's not that.

It's like, "Oh, my friend, "let me tell you what my experience has been and how this worked for me."

It's more collegial.

And even the study of grammar.

If we're talking about language, there's prescriptive, which was 150 years ago, and now it's more descriptive.

It's like, this is where grammar is going.

- The great Laurence Olivier, he always said, 'cause people-- When he changed verse speaking, you know, in the 1930s, 'cause Gielgud was doing a certain kind of thing, and then Olivier brought it back down to earth, as it were, instead of more sung, you know, the way that the Brits used to do it.

And he always said and he's been quoted, you know, in the books about finding the truth through the verse.

So, whatever that truth is, to find it through those mechanics in that verse, you know.

- If you're speaking in iambic pentameter, there are certain, I guess, built-in constraints, aren't there?

- That's right.

- Yeah.

- That's right, that's right.

- And if you're gonna be constrained, there are much worse ways than iambic pentameter in Shakespeare.

- It still goes on that people want to-- Because right now, the materials that are available are, many of them are coming from England.

So, when students are listening to Shakespeare, if they're getting assignments where, in their English classes to listen to a play or to watch a play, they're primarily watching it through, through that British lens.

And so, then they come into class and we're working on a Shakespeare monologue, and suddenly they're doing these not-so-great British accents.

- It's the worst, isn't it?

– Micha: It is, yeah.

[laughs] - There's some notoriously famous-- - I know where you've been watching.

- Dick Van Dyke had one of the most notoriously bad British accents in all of film, I think.

– Micha: Exactly, exactly.

And my job as an acting instructor and as a voice and speech coach, is to help that student find their voice through the text, through the meaning, and find the meaning for themselves and allow themselves to be seen fully for who they are.

Because sometimes that voice, that fake voice that they're putting on, doesn't match the phenotype.

– Norman: So true.

Yeah, there's a limit to how far you can get outside of yourself.

Let's talk about instruments then, the voice that you're born with.

Must be some casting limitations if you have a person with a very high, inevitably a little, squeaky voice, not likely to play-- Well, might play Lear in one of his last moments, but not likely to play, you know, a Mark Antony or something like that.

- Well, I guess it depends on what the director wants, because there have been-- I mean, there have been productions of A Doll's House where, you know, Torvald is a little person.

And, you know, Nora's, you know, 5'11".

- I kind of like that image, though, since it's all about this kind of power play between the two of them.

- So, I mean, it depends on what the director wants.

There have been some recent productions of Our Town that have flipped the switch on all this.

And I think, you know, Britain is really opening up.

There's a production right now of Arthur Miller's All My Sons.

Bryan Cranston's playing the father, and Marie Jean-Baptiste is playing the wife, and she's Black British.

And the two sons are Black British.

– Norman: Well, at least that makes sense.

- No, but I mean, that has never been done before like that on the British stage.

And so, I mean, you know, people are opening up and getting used to seeing things that they've never seen before, you know.

- Well, it seems that so often, not always, I'm sure, but so often, that the themes are universal.

And it doesn't matter if the suffering of this character is out of a white character, a Latino character, or a Black character that those suffering shortcomings, whatever they may be, mistakes, are universal.

- It's wonderful to see artists being given the opportunities now to do things, and it's because of the directors and the producers that are coming out of school and their sensibilities now.

I mean, but what's happening on the stages in Britain, that wasn't happening 20 years ago, 25 years ago.

As a matter of fact, in Britain, there was a show called The Black and White Minstrel Show, which was-- [laughs] which, from 1958 until 1978, '79, every Saturday, people would be in front of the television set watching people in blackface on Britain.

Oh, yeah, that was a big show.

20 million people watched that show.

People enjoyed that kind of variety show.

- They did, they did.

- You know what I mean?

- And not that long ago enjoyed it here, actually.

- Exactly, and so, you know, so Britain's gone through a lot of changes.

You know, it hasn't been all roses, but we've had more social movements in this country to make sure that certain people are gonna be able to have a platform.

You know what I mean?

- The voice is the invisible limb.

So, we think that it's quite settled in, like, "I have a voice and that's my voice."

But actually, just like you can develop your leg or your arm, you can develop your voice.

So, people have-- I mean, the vocal instrument itself and the sounds that we can make.

That's why some people have great facilities with accents.

And you can train to have your voice do all sorts of things.

- Well, singers do it all the time, don't they?

Opera singers.

- Exactly.

But to your point, there are voices that the cultural voice we hear, and there are some we accept and there are some we don't accept in the United States.

– Norman: Oh, yeah, interesting.

- It's true.

- So, for example, we don't hear a lot of Asian voices on television.

Think about ads that you hear.

You don't hear that.

- You'll see Asian faces, but not the voices.

– Micha: You don't hear the voice, that voice very often.

Now, because we're Taco Nation, [laughs] we are hearing a lot more voices that sound Spanish.

Antonio Banderas is, I think, a buzzing bee.

You hear his voice all the time.

- In pop music, sure.

– Micha: On all sorts of ads and through, yes, through pop music.

And, because 18%, 20% of the United States is now Latino.

So, you hear that much more often.

But it used to be that you didn't.

The only voices that you heard were Speedy Gonzales.

– Norman: Well, Ricardo Montalban.

- Exactly, they were very, very few.

- Ricky and Lucy.

- Exactly.

- Well, yeah, yeah.

Desi Arnaz.

- Exactly.

But they fell into stereotype.

Now, casting reflects our much more multicultural society and the social movements that we've seen.

- Are you still teaching accents for, say, a native English speaker who needs to be playing a role of a person of another nationality?

Does that happen at all?

- I-- Yeah, yeah, people learn accents now, yeah.

– Norman: Do they still?

- Yeah, absolutely.

But in terms of-- Once you learn phonetics, once you understand you can do anything because you can play all of those sounds.

Once you master all of those sounds, those are all the sounds that are in every language.

And it can get quite complicated.

So, it can go with tones up, tones down.

So, it can help you with facility with all languages, not only accents.

- Is it just more likely now that, you see it more in film, you have over the years, for like the past 50 years or so, that if you're going to have a Native American or you're gonna have a Mexican, or you're gonna have a French, is it more likely that, given the choice, the opportunity, that you would cast a person of that nationality in that role?

– Micha: Absolutely.

And that comes down to the social justice of casting, that there is a social justice aspect to casting, and that comes from the fact that there are so few jobs that you wouldn't want to take that role from that actor who has so few opportunities.

So, you see now actors who could play that role, that have that ability to do that accent, stepping down and saying, "Nope, this isn't right for me.

"This isn't for me.

Let's go ahead and allow someone who is of that--" - Is germane to that, that's right.

- Exactly, mm-hmm.

- For whom it's going to come more naturally anyway.

And you're not going to have to worry about a clunker in there somewhere in there when their accent drops.

– Micha: That too.

But there's an assumption there.

There's an assumption.

So, I'll give you an example.

I played Camila in In the Heights, which is Lin-Manuel's show that's set in New York City, up in... - Washington Heights.

- ...Washington Heights.

I was playing a Puerto Rican.

I'm not Puerto Rican, I'm a Chicana.

I'm a Mexicana from Arizona.

– Norman: Mm-hmm.

- I needed a voice coach.

- Wow, to go-- I suppose so.

- I needed a voice coach.

- To be really authentic, yeah.

- Exactly.

Those are completely different rhythms.

Completely different sound.

And so, I needed to make sure that I was honoring that sound.

And so, that's the key.

And now that the audiences are educated, they demand.

If I had come out there with a Mexican accent playing Camila, that would have been very odd.

And the audiences now know the difference.

- Well, yes, because again, more of them have that background in the first place.

- Yes.

- But I suppose audiences generally are a little more sophisticated about reality in terms of the casting.

But if you don't have the luxury of having just the right person for that, you've got to find the next best and really work with that person, whether it's a student or a professional?

- Yeah, and what's wonderful is when companies like APT does an excellent job of making sure that there's a vocal coach on staff, working with all of the performers and making sure that everyone's in the same world, and that those actors have the resources that they need in order to really go into the vocal dramaturgy of the play, to be able to not only physically bring it to life, but vocally bring it to life.

- If they're all gonna be Irish, they've all got to sound the same kind of Irish.

- Right.

- Well, there are regionalisms in Ireland.

- Well, that's right, yeah.

Are you gonna be, you know, Galway?

- Barry Fitzgerald, the little Irish... - [laughs] That's right, you can't get away with just putting on a generic Irish accent anymore.

I don't know what happened to all those Irish cops anyway, but I guess we don't have to worry about casting those.

But it's been a real pleasure just touching bases with the two of you in terms of Shakespeare in the 21st century and some of the challenges and the joys of casting and acting.

– Baron: Oh, yeah.

- Wonderful talking to you, Baron Kelly, and to you also, Micha Espinosa.

- Thank you, Norman, thank you.

- I'm Norman Gilliland, and I hope you'll join me next time around for University Place Presents.

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