US theater production halts over casting actor of color

Estate of the late US playwright, Edward Albee, has put a halt to a performance based on one of the author’s plays due to using an actor of color among the cast.

The planned performance of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ in the US stopped after the  Edward Albee Estate denies rights to production over casting of a black actor playing the role of a character named Nick in the famous play.

Director Michael Streeter with a theater company in Oregon planned to put up the show but his Facebook post read, “The Edward Albee estate needs to join the 21st century,” adding, “There are valid arguments to not cast Nick as black. I believe the positives outweigh the negatives. The Albee Estate does not agree.”

According to a memo said to have been written by a representative of the estate, the decision to rescind the rights to do the show was due to the setting depicted by textual references of the play in the 1960s.

“It is important to note that Mr. Albee wrote Nick as a Caucasian character, whose blonde hair and blue eyes are remarked on frequently in the play,” the memo read, adding, “Mr Albee himself said on numerous occasions when approached with requests for non-traditional casting in productions of Virginia Woolf? that a mixed-race marriage between a Caucasian and an African American would not have gone unacknowledged in conversations in that time and place and under the circumstances in which the play is expressly set by textual references in the 1960s.”

Edward Albee was an American playwright known for works such as The Sandbox (1959) and 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' (1962).

AG/AG