Casting Against Type Does Not Always Equal Inclusivity
Christine McBurney
I often share an audition story from grad school with my acting students, about the time I was cast in the coveted role of Myhrrine in Lysistrata.
I had given a friend a ride to the auditions. She would end up getting the title role of Lysistrata and we all sort of knew that somehow. She was that brilliant. I had auditioned fully expecting to add my talent and extra pounds to the chorus. When we finished our auditions, we got in my car and I began to drive her home. A few minutes into the car ride, she realized she had left her scarf behind at the theater so we turned the car around and went back to retrieve it.
When we both walked in, the director grabbed me saying, “I accidentally let all of the women go. Would you read this scene with Erik?” It was the famous Kineseas and Myhrrine scene--Myhrinne, the woman who is just as sex-starved as her husband but is sent to greet him in order to get him so worked up that he will give in to the women’s demands of ending the war which will end their sex strike.
And so I read. With absolute abandon. And nothing to lose, because in my mind I thought there was no way I would ever be considered for this role-- I was merely reading so the director can look at my male partner. I was so free. Taking up space, flirting, teasing, dancing. And, I landed the role. My lesson to my students is to go into an audition prepared but with complete freedom and maybe even a little Buddhist detachment. The audition is the job and your job is to do a good job and then treat yourself and let it go, leave it up to the fickle theatre gods to determine your fate. The other lesson is to not tell yourself that you know what the director wants because a lot of times, even they don't know until they see it. The even bigger lesson for me was that someone thought I had sex appeal, even when I didn't myself.
And this is why the casting in the current Broadway production of The Rose Tattoo rubs me the wrong way, like my thighs on a hot summer day.
In addition to being a brilliant actor, Marissa Tomei is gorgeous. I Googled Marisa Tomei’s measurements. Yes, it’s a thing. The first hit came up: “She has a perfect body which measures breast 34, waist 25 and hip 35. She has a height of 5 feet and 4½ inches which is around 164 cm.” But, the character of Serafina is written as a larger woman.
Full disclosure, I have not seen the play yet, but from the publicity photos, I think it’s safe to say that Marissa Tomei, whom I adore as an actor, does not appear to wear a fat suit.
Inclusivity is all the rage in theatre today. As one of my students said in class just today, “don’t do the play if you don’t have the people.” He was referring to race and the theatre’s habit of sometimes casting a Caucasian actor in the role of a person of color (Jonathan Price in Ms. Saigon, the list goes on).
Larger bodies seem to be the last frontier in the push for greater inclusivity in casting. The topic is only beginning to surface in the theatre community. In January 2018, Maggie Rogers in her essay for American Theatre Magazine, “All Sizes Fit All: The Case for Normalizing Fatness Onstage” wrote, “We need to normalize fatness onstage and not heroicize people for casting a fat person as a sort of token. It’s time to take us beyond the Nurse in Romeo & Juliet, Tracy Turnblad in Hairspray, Helen in Fat Pig—i.e. shows where being fat is considered unattractive, or fatness is a plot point, or where loving a fat person is considered taboo.”
Just this past January, Abigail Mowbray in her essay, “The Fat Girl’s Diatribe Against the Theatre Community,” for this very publication added Bridget in Bring It On. Slowly this is happening. Bedlam’s Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet featured the dazzling Zusanna as Juliet that caused The Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout to write: “[Director Eric Tucker has] brought off a coup by casting Zuzanna Szadkowski in the double role of Shakespeare’s Juliet and Chekhov’s Yelena. In a traditional “Romeo and Juliet,” Ms. Szadkowski would likely have been cast to play Juliet’s nurse. No doubt she’d do it well, too, but what she does here is flat-out astonishing: Her Juliet and Yelena, both of them sardonic and sexually knowing to a breathtaking degree, add up to the most thrilling performance by an actor previously unknown to me since Nina Arianda made her professional debut in the 2010 premiere of David Ives’s “Venus in Fur.” Anyone who still questions the expressive potential of nontraditional casting should rush to see her.”
May we all take Mr. Tucker’s lead. But, when there is that rare role that is explicitly written for a larger type (and aren’t we taught that theatre isn’t fair or democratic, it’s about what reads, it’s about type?), why is there radio silence when a non-plump actor is cast as Serafina?
Everyone talks about Serafina’s body The Rose Tattoo. The word “plump” appears in no less than six times. In stage directions and in dialogue. The kinder more aesthetically pleasing term, “voluptuous” appears once. When Alvaro calls Serafina “plump,” and she calls herself a harsher version of that word: “fat.”
SERAFINA looks like a plump little Italian opera singer in the role of Madame Butterfly. Her black hair is done in a high pompadour that glitters like wet coal. A rose is held in place by glittering jet hairpins. Her voluptuous figure is sheathed in pale rose silk. On her feet are dainty slippers with glittering buckles and French heels. It is apparent from the way she sits, with such plump dignity, that she is wearing a tight girdle. She sits very erect, in an attitude of forced composure, her ankles daintily crossed and her plump little hands holding a yellow paper fan on which is painted a rose.
* * *
FLORA (acidly): Well, ex-cuse me! (She whispers maliciously to BESSIE.) It sure is a pleasant surprise to see you wearing a dress, Serafina, but the surprise would be twice as pleasant if it was more the right size. (To BESSIE, loudly) She used to have a sweet figure, a little plump but attractive, but setting there at that sewing machine for three years in a kimona and not stepping out of the house has naturally given her hips!
* * *
ALVARO: I am hoping to meet some sensible older lady. Maybe a lady a little bit older than me.--I don't care if she's a little too plump or not such a stylish dresser!
SERAFINA: Chocolates? Grazie! Grazie! But I'm too fat.
ALVARO: You are not fat, you are just pleasing and plump. (He reaches way over to pinch the creamy flesh of her upper arm.)
* * *
Even Serafina herself is prejudiced against fat people:
“They make the life without glory. Instead of the heart they got the deep-freeze in the house. The men, they don't feel no glory, not in the house with them women; they go to the bars, fight in them, get drunk, get fat, put horns on the women because the women don't give them the love which is glory.--I did, I give him the glory.”
* * *
While Williams couches the language about Serafina’s body in nice terms such as “plump,” Williams drops that consideration for the salesman and pokes fun at his larger body:
SERAFINA: Oh, Lady, Lady, Lady, give me a sign! (As if in mocking answer, a novelty salesman appears and approaches the porch. He is a "fat man in a seersucker suit and a straw hat with a yellow, red and purple band. His face is beet-red and great moons of sweat have soared through the armpits of his jacket. His shirt is lavender, and his tie, pale blue with great yellow polka dots, is a Butterfly bow.)
Critics seem to have amnesia when it comes to the fact that Serafina is written to have a larger body. However, props must be given to The Guardian’s Alexis Soloski who tried to warn us but just can’t quite say the words: “Past productions have starred actors with a heft of gravitas – Anna Magnani, Mercedes Ruehl, Maureen Stapleton – women who may have given the gags somewhere weightier to land. Tomei is a lighter, flightier presence – sensuous and delightful – and she plays even the darkest moments brightly, in on the joke.”
My grad school director of Lysistrata was supportive of my acting career and would often tell me that I would grow into the character roles I was then too young to play. Once he gave me a scene from The Rose Tattoo and said that someday I would play Serafina. I’ve aged into the role, but now I’m the wrong type.
Christine McBurney is a director and actor based in Cleveland and New York.