"Blood Knot" Feud

American Players Theatre host a community discussion after dustup about casting. 

By Gwendolyn Rice, Isthmus | August 16, 2018

When Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot premiered in 1961 at the African Music and Drama Association in Johannesburg, it was met with a storm of controversy tied to race. The play is about two black half-brothers — one very dark and one light enough to pass for white (played initially by Fugard, who is white) — and their rage as oppressed people under apartheid. The production was immediately banned in South Africa, and interracial casts and audiences were also outlawed.

When the same play kicked off the American Players Theatre season this summer — almost six decades later — it was also met with a storm of controversy tied to race, specifically questioning the casting of longtime APT company member James DeVita as the light-skinned brother. In Mike Fischer’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel review of the production, he acknowledged the traditional casting of Caucasian actors in the role, but he chastised the company for following this precedent, writing, “No white actor can capture that existential dilemma as well as a black actor can.” He continued, “APT would never cast DeVita as a black man in an August Wilson play. It shouldn’t have cast him as a black man in this one.”

In the weeks that followed, the review was shared via social media across the country, with actors, critics, directors and audience members weighing in on the issue of “whitewashing” — giving a role written for a person of color to a white actor. The company’s actions were compared to other controversial casting decisions, including a St. Louis production of Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, which featured a white actress as Tuptim, an Asian character from The King and I. It was also likened to the 2015 incident at Kent State University where, as an experiment, a director double cast a white and a black man for the role of Martin Luther King Jr. in The Mountaintop.

In response to the review and scathing criticism on social media, Gavin Lawrence, who plays the dark-skinned brother in Blood Knot, issued a statement, which read, in part, “If what you come away with after having experienced Blood Knot is a problem with the casting, then I humbly submit that you’ve missed the point, or that you have some other agenda — either way I have to say that you’re clearly not ‘woke.’ And for those who jump on social media bandwagons based on headlines without doing your homework, please work on your critical thinking skills. When a situation of racial or cultural appropriation in the American theater truly calls for response and action, I’ll be right there with you. This production, however, is not one of them.”

Read the full article here.