Where Should Actors Draw the Line?

Let’s start with a position everyone should agree on now: it’s wrong for White actors to play Black, Hispanic, or otherwise non-White characters. Full-time professional offense-takers like Megyn Kelly might feign nostalgia for a prior time when Blackface was okay, but given what we’ve learned recently, surely anybody should understand that’s bad, unless they’re paid to not understand. Troweling on makeup to become a racial caricature is wrong and harmful.

However, as a trained actor with some stage experience, I retain important questions. As actors, we’re trained to become somebody we’re not: a different age, social class, nationality. Good people with big hearts practice to become violent, hateful, small people onstage. Likewise, people with embittered, destructive souls sometimes pass for amiable, fatherly figures for years, as Bill Cosby and Kevin Spacey taught us. Actors exist to step outside ourselves.

Where do we draw the line? How far can actors stray from themselves, from their assigned social roles and identity, before we become something offensive? This question strikes me after reading actor Fisher Stevens’ stated apology for playing Ben Jabituya in the 1986 comedy movie Short Circuit. Stevens, who is White Jewish, applied heavy makeup and adopted a pronounced accent to play Jabituya, a computer scientist from India.

The situation makes me uncomfortable because, though I’m nowhere near Stevens’ standing, I’ve also adopted fake accents to play roles. I’ve never done Blackface, a small mercy, since like Megyn Kelly, I grew up in the waning days when people still did that occasionally. I have, however, gotten cast across some questionable social lines. To further this debate, I must ask: do we consider Jewish people White?

I once got cast as an aged Jewish neighbor, whose looping grammar convinced me the character’s first language was Yiddish. So I took the initiative to teach myself a New York Yiddish accent, spent some time reading the Talmud and Sefir Yetzirah, and learned enough rudimentary Yiddish to incorporate it into my dialog. I never would’ve passed in a shul in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but for a community theatre audience in Nebraska, I was Jewish.

Except, of course, I wasn’t. I, a White man of no fixed ethnic heritage, adopted the identity of an ethnic group that’s been historically ostracized, downtrodden, and subject to multiple attempts at genocide. I offered the character all the respect I could provide, learning his heritage, his religion, his language, and inhabiting the identity to the utmost extent possible. But I’m still a White guy trying to pass as Yiddish.

Memoirist Emily Raboteau, who is mixed-race, writes about a school experience. During a discussion of race, a Jewish friend turned to her and declared: “I’m not White.” Decades later, her friend made aliyah to Israel. Visiting her friend, Raboteau found her living proudly in a house expropriated from a Palestinian family. Her Jewish friend wasn’t White in America, Raboteau realized, but in Israel, she certainly was.

Therefore, I suggest that whether I transgressed racial boundaries by playing Jewish, is an unresolved question. Whether Jewish people are White is conditional. And because Jewish people are historically disadvantaged in America, where this play was set, one could make a persuasive case that I performed the equivalent of Blackface. Does it matter that, like Fisher Stevens, I played the role with utmost respect, and strove to avoid playing stereotypes?

I can’t answer that, because I’ve also played White people who were very different from myself. I played a poor White Southerner in To Kill a Mockingbird, a play I found riddled with problems. The entire play seemed designed to excuse its central White characters from responsibility for the violence enacted against Black Southerners. The character I played, however small, was an excessively broad stereotype of Southern Whiteness.

My role in Mockingbird was, I’d contend, more harmful to the categories of people it depicted, than my Yiddish character. My Yiddish character was respectful, honest, and most important, an individual. My White Southerner was a crass stereotype, in an ensemble of crass stereotypes, and equally important, was inaccurate. In portraying that character, I held an entire category of people up for ridicule and derision, irrespective of facts.

Don’t misunderstand me: this isn’t advocating Blackface or its equivalents. But beyond the clear boundary of “don’t change your skin color for a part,” it becomes much murkier. Portraying a character of another ethnicity, heritage, social class, or experience, could become explosive. And unfortunately, as with any experience reaching across social boundaries, the harm is often only visible in retrospect.