I am Elizabeth Bennett

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that if you are a Jane Austen fan (or Austen-ite), then of all the female characters in Pride & Prejudice you will most identify with Elizabeth Bennett. Or at least you will WANT to be Elizabeth Bennett. The other female options are just not real options for those of us who live and breathe the Austen aura. Mary? Too pedantic. Kitty? A follower. Lydia? A thoughtless, narcissistic flirt. Mrs. Bennett? A grown-up, hypochondriac Lydia. Caroline Bingley? Stuck up bitch. Jane Bennett? Too sweet/good/anemic.

That really leaves Elizabeth. She's willing to walk three miles with mud up to her ankles to tend to her sick sister at another person's house. The fault laid against her by her friends and family is that she is not quite as pretty as Jane and (more telling) that she is too apt to speak her mind. She reads (but doesn't consider reading more important than other livelier pursuits). She plays the piano (although not quite well). And she values people not for their rank, position, or wealth but the quality of their character (and their kindness).

Now, none of us can truly be Elizabeth. She's a fictional character of another era (Regency Britain of the late 18th C). Sure she's rendered into celluloid life by both Jennifer Ehle (6-hour BBC version) and Kiera Knightley (major motion picture release). And actually it's these cinematic renditions that I want to talk about. Because of course, on film, you want to render things realistically--which means you pick people who are white and British (or who can do a passable British accent--and I'm thinking of you Gwyneth Paltrow) and you put them in period costume and throw in some ducks and geese and pigs to show how "real" life was back then.

But in the theater? Well, theater is a different venue altogether.

Now for those of you wondering (where the heck is she GOING with this in a blog called "Mixed Race America") this is what I mean.

Yesterday I saw a theater production of Pride & Prejudice. And like with many Shakespeare plays, this one engaged in color-blind casting. Which means, they weren't trying to cast everyone "authentically" as British or white. No one even tried to do a British accent (well, actually, one actor did). But it also means that there were four roles who went to visible people of color: Kitty was played by an Afro-Latina actress (I say Afro-Latina because her appearance suggested African American but her name suggested Latino influence). Mr. Binghley was played by a South Asian American actor and his sister, Caroline Binghley, was played by an African American actress. And most astounding enough, the lead--THE LEAD--was played by an Asian American (Filipina if I had to guess by both name and appearance) woman.

That's right. Elizabeth Bennett was Asian.

And while I can't vouch for the actual production (lets face it--it would have had to have been SPECTACULAR for any Austen-fan to think it was better than either of the films I mentioned above, let alone the novel itself), as I was watching Elizabeth deliver her lines (she wasn't bad, by the way--the actress that is), I imagined the following imaginary scenario:

You are an Asian American girl in High School and your English teacher assigns Pride & Prejudice. You and your girlfriends love the book and talk about wanting to be like Elizabeth. Your class takes a field trip to see a theater production. Lo and behold, you see the actress and realize that you actually CAN be Elizabeth Bennett!

This is why I went to see this play. Not because I love Pride & Prejudice, but because when I saw the stills from the production, I saw that Elizabeth was played by an Asian American woman. And I wanted to have that experience--of seeing someone who could be me, portray one of the most beloved of Austen's heroines on stage. I wanted, briefly, the idea that I, or someone like me, could be the protagonist--the hero--the one who everyone cheers for (and claps for) at the end of the performance. For the first time in my experience, Asian Americans, along with African American and Latinos, were put into the British literary canon in a really tangible, visible way.

And I though: well it's about time!

Color Blind Casting

NPR did a story today about the opening of yet another GREASE: the musical revival on Broadway--but this time, the twist is that the leads of Danny & Sandy (played in the film version by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John) were selected from a reality tv show called "I'm the One that I Want" in which (ala American Idol) viewers selected the winners of the show, who would then go on to be the leads in the Broadway production.

I didn't watch any of the show, but I did remember seeing a promo for it and in the original cast of wannabe Sandys and Dannys there was an Asian and black face among the crowd. They were not the winners--and I guess it doesn't surprise me that it fell out this way. Yet, it did make me think about color blind casting and the decision of the tv producers to put these visibly marked non-white contestants in the show. Was it to highlight the idea of color-blind casting? One of the guest judges of the show, who is also a producer of the Broadway production, said that she was gratified to see the winner of the reality show be a brunette because it proved that viewers had more imagination about who Sandy was--that she didn't have to be a blonde or look like Olivia Newton-John. But of course, this is a musical set in the 1950s--could we really expect Sandy to be anyone other than a white woman? Could Danny be Asian? If color blind casting were truly a reality, wouldn't we be seeing more visibly non-white faces on Broadway? For all the Audra McDonalds who have broken down doors, there are still too few roles that go to black and other non-white actors because of the perception that the role was either originally conceived as "white" or because of a certain default to whiteness in our collective imagination.

But how do we get more actors of color out on stage? And on tv? In my version of GREASE, Danny would be Asian, Sandy would be black, Rizzo would be American Indian, Kienickie would be Latino, and Frenchy...well, Frenchy could still be white--after all, in color blind casting anyone is free to play Frenchy.