The Role of Art in a Divided Society

A still from Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ 1961 film of West Side Story

Sometime in the 1990s, I’ve forgotten exactly when, my sister’s high school theater program staged the classic musical West Side Story. Because of course they did, it’s standard theatrical repertoire. The only problem was, her school (she and I attended different high schools) was overwhelmingly White. The performance of urban tension between Hispanic and Irish communities, was played by farmers’ kids of mainly German and Czech heritage.

This meant, as you’d expect, brownface. Students playing the Puerto Rican Sharks gang dyed their hair, darkened their skin, and affected Latino accents. The White Jets, meanwhile, learned a stereotyped “New Yawk” accent and got ducktail haircuts. These students, who were entirely White and lived in Nebraska for most or all of their lives, immersed themselves in playing ethnically mixed East Coast characters, not always in the most sensitive ways.

Around twenty-five years later, my sister recalls that performance with a visible cringe. Troweling on makeup to play ethnically clichéd characters, which seemed broadly acceptable then, is patently unacceptable today. Nobody, except a few high-profile heel-draggers like Megyn Kelly, would pretend otherwise. But without the willingness to play characters who didn’t resemble themselves, I contend, these students would’ve deprived themselves, and their community, of something important.

West Side Story remains important theater, seventy-five years after its debut, because it addresses an important American cultural problem. The Jets and Sharks, defined by their race, attend the same high school and walk the same streets. But they never communicate, because they believe long-held bigoted myths about one another. When Tony and Maria dare fall in love, it transgresses one of America’s most cherished internal borders, the color line.

I’ve written before that teaching youth the humanities matters, because through art and literature, students see other people as fully dimensional human beings, with thoughts, feelings and dreams equal to their own. West Side Story reminds us that anybody, raised on such myths, could wind up believing them, and embracing the violence such division brings. Racism, this play reminds us, isn’t inevitable; it’s a choice we make, and keep making.

Arguably, that’s why White actors playing Brown characters is pretty specious, usually. If my sister’s high school had sufficient Hispanic actors to play the Sharks, they should’ve cast accordingly. No matter how sympathetically those student actors attempted to portray characters who were culturally or racially different from themselves, they’ll inevitably resort to stereotypes, sometimes hurtful ones, of people groups they’ve never actually met.

A still from Stephen Spielberg’s 2021 film of West Side Story

But simultaneously, if the school refused to perform this play, nobody would’ve had the opportunity to receive its message. Not the student actors, who needed to stretch beyond their limited small-town experience, nor the audience who, in Western Nebraska, seldom get to witness world-class art. Beyond the high school, getting to see top-tier theater means traveling to Omaha or Denver, and most people can’t spare that much money or time.

This elicits the question: is the message important enough to accept a less-than-optimum messengers? I don’t want to be mistaken for advocating brownface; the specific event I’m remembering belongs to its own time and place, and should remain there. But the event gave students and the community an opportunity to see people whose lives and experiences were wildly different from anything experienced locally. Even if those “people” were actors.

Questions like this will become more important in coming years. In 1957, when West Side Story debuted, Manhattan’s Upper West Side was predominantly working-class, racially mixed, and volatile. Within five years, the combined forces of gentrification and White Flight changed local demographics. By the 1980s, the Upper West Side was heavily populated with yuppies, while the ethnic communities celebrated onstage had been forced into dwindling enclaves.

The White small town where my sister attended high school has experienced something similar: there are now considerably more Hispanic residents, and even a few Black residents. Because the Hispanic residents are mostly agricultural workers, though, they seldom mix substantially with the community. Interactions with what locals call “Mexicans” happen in public places, like grocery stores; the actual community members seldom get to know one another beyond nodding hello.

Artistic expressions like West Side Story will matter more soon, as American society becomes more segregated, more hostile, more like the Sharks and Jets. Opportunities to see “the Other” as equally human to ourselves might make the difference between peace and violence. And sadly, not everybody will have access to racially representative casting choices. Cross-racial casting isn’t ideal, but it’s better than denying audiences the art they need to see.