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ABSTRACT
This essay examines the ethnic and racial factors that inform the casting of BIPOC actors as Shakespeare's royal and authoritative characters. Utilizing an ethnic category – that of the U.S. designation of Hispanic/Latinx – rather than a racial category, and the specific case study of King Lear, the essay argues that notions of vocal command, sensuality, and the challenge for Latinx actors to be cast consistently in main roles all work against the necessary element for the role of Lear: gravitas. The essay details a theatrical and filmic history of Latinx actors and adaptations of King Lear to illustrate that in order to play King Lear, the Latino actor must be associated with the perception of having accrued gravitas, a capacious characteristic that functions in contrast to mainstream U.S. perceptions of Latinx.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Thompson, ‘The 2021 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: On Protean Acting: Race and Virtuosity’, 1129.
2 LatinxShakespeares.Org also includes bilingual and semi-bilingual productions, as well as Latinx themed and/or authored adaptations of other canonical works.
3 Cuban-American playwright Brandon Urrutia’s La Cafetería de la Reina transposes Lear to a Cuban-American setting in Florida with the Lear figure as a Cuban woman. I am indebted to Brandon for allowing me to read his unpublished script, and I look forward to this play being staged in the future. To note, plays are added to LatinxShakespeares.Org once they have a professional reading or staging or a university staging.
4 For an expanded definition of ‘Latinx Shakespeares’, see Della Gatta, Latinx Shakespeares: Staging US Intracultural Theater, 1.
5 Hispanic/Latino was being considered to move from an ethnicity to a race for the 2020 Census. Krogstad, ‘U.S. Census Looking At Big Changes In How It Asks About Race and Ethnicity’. This change was not made, and the debate has already been renewed for the 2030 Census. See Cadava, ‘Should Latinos Be Considered a Race?’
6 ‘Middle Eastern & North African’ (MENA) is currently being considered as an additional ethnic category for the 2030 Census. See ‘QuickFacts: United States’.
7 Brownness embraces the communality of community in feeling Brown and/or being perceived as Brown, taking up the language of colour (e.g. Black, white, etc.) and making space for Latinx in this vocabulary. See Muñoz, The Sense of Brown.
8 García Peña, Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective, 8. ‘Latinidad’ translates directly to ‘Latinity’. It is a presentist term that encompasses Latinx cultures, presence, and aesthetics.
9 For examples of such colourism and anti-Blackness, see Espinosa, ‘“Don’t it Make My Brown Eyes Blue”: Uneasy Assimilation and the Shakespeare-Latinx Divide’ and Espinosa, Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism, respectively.
10 Newstok and Thompson, eds., Weyward Macbeth.
11 For the list of Latinx-themed Macbeth productions and adaptations, see LatinxShakespeares.Org/Tragedies. For ‘the West Side Story effect’, see Della Gatta, Latinx Shakespeares, 23–24.
12 Latinx are 19% of the general U.S. population and 29.8% of the incarcerated population; Black people are 13.6% of the population and 38.6% of the incarcerated population. ‘Inmate Statistics’, Such grotesque disproportionality is the result of centuries of both purposeful and unintentional legal measures and racism; in turn, the disproportionality is then the cause of continued tropes of Brown and Black people as violent.
13 In the archive, there are only three history plays: a bilingual but not Latinx-themed Ricardo II, a non-Latinx themed play inspired by 1 Henry IV, and only one Latinx Shakespearean adaptation: Herbert Siguenza’s El Henry.
14 See Della Gatta, Latinx Shakespeares, 42, for a discussion of pipeline issues. See Lee, editor, Shakespeare and ‘Accentism’, and Massai, Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance, for accents.
15 Cuban-American actor Raúl Esparza was scheduled to play Hamlet at Chicago Shakespeare Theater in 2019 (with no Latinx setting), but due to scheduling conflicts, he canceled and was replaced by Black actor Maurice Jones (in a show without a Black or African American setting).
16 Thompson, ‘The 2021 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: On Protean Acting: Race and Virtuosity’, 1141.
17 Other tropes for Latinx actors that are not based on sensuality include the bandido, drug dealer, housekeeper, and spitfire. See Ramírez Berg, Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance. Also see Reyes, Viva Hollywood: The Legacy of Latin and Hispanic Artists in American Film.
18 See Szoenyi, ‘It’s Complicated: Latinx Stereotypes and the Stars Who Play Them’.
19 See Vale, ‘Why Hollywood’s Typecasting of Latinos is No Laughing Matter’.
20 Such stereotypes and bias are a result Latinx positionality within white U.S. American culture. See also Moreno, ‘16 Times Latinos Were Brutally Honest About Hollywood’s Lack of Diversity’.
21 ‘Gravitas’, Cambridge Dictionary.
22 ‘Gravitas in American English’, Collins Dictionary.
23 The Oxford English Dictionary only offers ‘gravity’ as a definition. ‘gravitas, n.’. OED Online. Newton, ‘Gravitas Is a Quality You Can Develop’.
24 Henderson, ‘Get Serious’. See also Newton.
25 Heberle, ‘Neoliberalism’, 205.
26 See He, et al., ‘The Effect of Aging on Facial Attractiveness: An Empirical and Computational Investigation’. See also Ebner, et al., ‘An Adult Developmental Approach to Perceived Facial Distinctiveness’.
27 Hewlett, Executive Presence: The Missing Link Between Merit and Success, especially 82–96. This also holds true for women and actors of colour who wish to portray Shakespeare’s leading kings. For how sensuality affects executives in the business world, see Hewlett, especially Chapter 6.
28 See Santos DeCure and Espinosa, Latinx Actor Training.
29 One of the few Latino actors that mainstream audiences deem to have gravitas is Edward James Olmos, who is not a Shakespearean actor. He too had a role of authority, as El Pachuco in Zoot Suit (1978 play, 1981 film, both directed by Luis Valdez), in which he demonstrated expert vocality and command of the stage. His character sang, spoke in multiple languages, and could start and stop the action onstage. Yet sensuality was also part of the role, with Olmos as El Pachuco lauded as ‘charismatic’ and the role as ‘stylishly played’. Aaron, ‘Zoot Suit by Luis Valdez’.
30 Jones has since played numerous authoritative roles, narrated an additional eleven films, and he voiced the commanding Darth Vader in the Star Wars films. Black actor Morgan Freeman is likewise deemed to have gravitas, and he has voiced the narrator and authority in films such as The Shawshank Redemption and March of the Penguins. He played God in Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty, and his Shakespearean roles consisted of Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew and Gloucester in Lear.
31 After he played Lear, Abraham played Barabas, Shylock (twice), and has been featured in dozens of films, television shows, and onstage. While I recall him as the voice of the Leaf in the Fruit of the Loom commercials in the 1970s, today’s audiences have heard his voice in animated series and films, including the Moon Knight miniseries that is part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
32 Howard played a pimp aspiring to be a rapper, and the song, ‘It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp’, that garnered the Oscar also became widely popular outside the film.
33 Sicola, ‘Want to Sound Like a Leader? Start by Saying Your Name Right’.
34 Ko, ‘The Sound of Power: Conveying and Detecting Hierarchical Rank Through Voice’. For example, after being mocked for her high-pitched voice as the first woman in Parliament, Margaret Thatcher famously received vocal training from a speech coach at the Royal National Theatre before her run for Prime Minister. Her public relations adviser, Gordon Reece, ‘softened and lowered the voice, to a mournful contralto, and planed the accent to normality’. Pearce, ‘Obituary: Sir Gordon Reece’.
35 Lear was published as a history play in 1608 and it derives, in part, from Holinshed’s chronicles. See Wells, The History of King Lear, Introduction.
36 Plastow, Interview with Barbara Bogaev, ‘Shakespeare in Africa’.
37 Della Gatta, ‘Outtakes from the Oral Histories: How Things Have Changed’.
38 This production was co-produced by the Folger Theater in Washington, DC.
39 LatinxShakespeares.Org/Romances. The seven other productions and adaptations of The Tempest listed in the archive did not include a Latinx actor in the Prospero role.
40 Peter Holland makes an important intervention in adaptation studies, arguing that what matters is how Broken Lance (and other so-called adaptations and works inspired by Shakespeare) ‘changes King Lear, not how it is supported by it’, Holland, ‘When is King Lear Not King Lear?’, 69.
41 The practice of brownface makeup, even for those portraying a character from their own heritage, was common at the time; for example, Puerto Rican actress Rita Moreno famously was required to wear dark brown makeup to play the Puerto Rican character of Anita in the film West Side Story (dirs. Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, 1961). Jurado received an Academy Award nomination for her role in Broken Lance, becoming the first Latin American or Latina actress to be nominated for an Oscar. Moreno became the second, for West Side Story, and she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 1961 for her role in West Side Story.
42 For connections between Broken Lance and King of Texas, see Kapitaniak, ‘Negotiating Authorship, Genre and Race in King of Texas (2002)’. For an analysis of King of Texas in a post-9/11 world, see Lehmann, ‘The Trump Effect: Exceptionalism, Global Capitalism and the War on Women in Early Twenty-First-Century Films of King Lear”. For the cinematic construction of a lack of empathy in King of Texas, see Frederick Luis Aldama, ‘Race, Cognition, and Emotion: Shakespeare on Film’.
43 In Kapitaniak’s exploration of race in the film, he focuses on how the inclusion of a Black slave named Rip (David Alan Grier) alters the story, but the ethnic relationship of the Mexican character Menchaca, to Claudia, Lear, and the others, is not discussed.
44 In 2017, Milo Ventimiglia and Russ Cundiff sold a drama, Cordelia, that was a contemporary Lear story with a Cuban family and set in Miami to FOX, but the show was never produced. Andreeva, ‘Milo Ventimiglia To Produce King Lear-Themed Drama, Michael Jacobs Comedy & Couples Reality Project for Fox’.
45 This series followed in the wake of the white setting of the sitcom Arrested Development (FOX, 2003–06; Netflix, 2013, 2018–19), which had echoes of King Lear. More recently, Lear served as an integral influence in the white setting of the series Succession (HBO, 2018–2023). It was also the blueprint for the Black setting of the music-infused melodrama Empire (FOX, 2015–20).
46 Idato, ‘King Lear Meets The Godfather’.
47 Friedman, Steambath, 34.
48 Ibid., 34.
49 Ibid., 45.
50 In addition to its short-lived theatrical run, Steambath generated a (short-lived) afterlife. It was made into a TV movie in 1973 (dir. Burt Brinckerhoff) and a series in 1983. The series was cancelled after only a few episodes.
51 ‘The New Shows’, 73.
52 Frey, ‘Hector Elizondo: Role Player’.
53 Michaelson, ‘Hector Elizondo: Getting to the Heart of Matters’.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Of all of the productions and adaptations mentioned in this essay, there are only three Lear / Lear figures under the age of sixty: Terence Howard as Lucious Lyon in Empire from ages 46–51, James Earl Jones as King Lear at the NYSF at age 42, and F. Murray Abraham at The Public at age 56.
58 Jonathan Pryce played the role at age 65 and threw out his back doing so. Barnett, ‘Out of Their Minds: The Actors’ Guide to Playing King Lear’. John Gielgud famously said, ‘Make sure you have a light Cordelia.’ Keach, ‘From the Actor’s Notebook: Thoughts on Playing Shakespeare’.
59 Nestruck, ‘Paul Gross To Play King Lear at Stratford Festival’.
60 Lukowski, ‘Kenneth Branagh Will Play King Lear In the West End for 50 Performances Only This Autumn’.
61 Falls later removed the tweet and wrote, ‘after seeing a rather pretentious announcement that a very fit tan chiseled kenneth branagh would be directing and starting in lear i thought it would be amusing to announce that i too – not fit tan OR chiseled – would also be directing and starring in lear. I was joking’. Falls, Twitter.
62 There are some exceptions amongst white British and Irish actors. Laurence Olivier (1946) was thirty-nine, Paul Scofield (1962) and Michael Gambon (1982) were forty when they played Lear, Michael Redgrave (1953) was forty-five, and John Gielgud (1950) was forty-six. In the twenty-first century, the age of actors has increased. Greg Hicks (2010) was fifty-seven, Corin Redgrave (2004) was sixty-five, and Ian McKellen (2007) and Antony Sher (2016) were sixty-eight.
63 Data is based on year of birth; I did not determine age based on actual birthdate at time of nomination or awards ceremony. Of the 896 nominations (not nominees) for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, 302 were for actors over age 60 (34%). For white and Black actors, this percentage is 34% (287 of 836 nominations) and 31% (15 of 49 nominations), respectively. Only 11 times have Latinx and Latin American actors been nominated for an acting Oscar, and not one over age 60 has been nominated.
64 Hewlett, Executive Presence, 5.
65 Della Gatta, Latinx Shakespeares, especially 10–15.