Playwright Katori Hall Calls Out Director for Casting White Actor as Martin Luther King Jr.

As the saying goes – “wonders will never cease”. As the nation continues to battle racial discord and blatantly disarming bigotry, Kent State University in Ohio, is now being called to task for staging The Mountaintop an award-winning play from Katori Hall in a fashion that has left her perplexed and quite frankly outraged.

The play focuses on how the civil rights leader spends what is to be his last night alive as he finds himself aligned with a maid.

Sounds captivating enough but Hall never anticipated that her classified gem would be interpreted to accommodate a white actor playing the lead role.

Yep! It seems that the director Michael Oatman who erected the production of The Mountaintop for the university’s Department of Pan-African Studies African Community Theater felt that he was entitled to use his jurisdiction to propel his mission of the “All American” play that doesn’t rely on facts but rather the freedom of expression and unrestrained creativity.

When broached about his decision to cast a white actor in a role that is historically meant for black actor, Oatman replied, “I believe that the American theater is one of the last safe places we can experiment and explore”.

Hall for her part isn’t on board with this defection from her script and calls Oatman’s choice “a self-serving and disrespectful directing exercise”.

She acknowledges to TheRoot.com that even though she never went out of her way to announce that two of the main characters were to be portrayed by black actors – she assumed that the context would be clearly established based on common sense and intuition. “While it is true that I never designated in the play text that King and Camae be played by black actors, reading comprehension and good-ole scene analysis would lead any director to cast black or darker-complexioned actors”.

Oatman for his part is unapologetic about his approach and maintains his right to break the boundaries of performance art by instituting his version of events in a way that is unorthodox regardless of the consequences. “I wanted to see if a white actor, or light-skinned actor, had the same cultural buy-in and could portray Dr. King”. “Dr. King is not just a prominent African American, he’s a prominent American. Why can’t an American play another prominent American?”

But Hall isn’t sold on the idea of distorting her vision all in the name of artistic freedom is vocally denouncing this drastic revision to her offering “The casting of a white King is commuting yet another erasure of the black body”. “Sure, it might be in the world of pretend, but it is disrespectful nonetheless, especially to a community that has rare moments of witnessing itself, both creatively and literally, in the world”.

Hall doesn’t believe this avant garde approach translates when the subject happens to be a iconic figure that continues to be revered and finds Oatman’s blatant ignorance appalling but also recognizes it as proof of why black actors are left panting for work – in an industry that still refuses to fully utilize their worth.

“Black versions are a direct response to the persistent exclusion and lack of roles for black actors working in the dramatic arts, and only further highlight the historically racist programming practices of American theater”. “Nontraditional casting puts forth a pervasive misconception: that plays with roles for black protagonists are a) not good enough, b) won’t sell or, worse, c) don’t even exist”.

We have to side with Hall on this one. Having a white actor embody a role that conquers a man that led a movement that initiated the forced acceptance and respectability of the black America is ludicrous not to mention insultingly misleading. But then again that happens to be the crux of why racial insensitivity is a thriving disposition. White America has a hard time comprehending when and how they’ve crossed the line and until they can grasp the basics – the problem will persists.