Shakespeare In Black and White
From Richard Paul
| 00:07:01
Producers: Richard Paul
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Broadcast History
Originally aired on PRI's Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen
Transcript
LEAD: The issues raised on ?Black.White? have the resonance they do for a lot of reasons. One is our country?s unusual history in the theater. For 75 years, whites played blacks on stage ? from Edwin Booth?s Othello in 1849 to Al Jolson in ?The Jazz Singer.? It was a common practice. No one said anything. Then the world changed and for the past 35 years, African-Americans have taken on traditionally white roles on stage. Now a backlash has started over that. Producer Richard Paul is working on documentary with the Folger Shakespeare Library that will look at Shakespeare in American Life. We have an excerpt from that program now that looks at the issue of whites playing blacks and blacks playing whites in Shakespeare.
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First thing you need to understand for context is this: In the mid-1800s, if you were a seamstress or a longshoreman, Shakespeare?s...
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Additional Information
- Produced: Apr 01, 2006
- Added to PRX: Apr 10, 2006
- This piece is in English
Michael Johnson
Posted on April 18, 2006 at 09:12 PM | Permalink
Review of Shakespeare In Black and White
Richard Paul's story of African Americans and Shakespeare is interesting enough to hold the listener through it's quickly paced seven minutes. There's a great variety of voices from varying points of view, perhaps a tad too many, yet the overall effect is somewhat compelling, exploring the conflicting history of "classic" theatre and perceptions of race, both subjective and objective.
Not really a black history piece, but one that might well accompany a program on literature or the performing arts.