Real ‘Reverse Racism’ In The Theater

By Zenitha PrinceSpecial to the NNPA from Afro Newspapers BALTIMORE (NNPA) – Glenelg Country School senior Jay Frisby has been the best of friends with fellow senior Nick Lehan since the sixth grade. The two boys traversed the world of high school theater together, often acting as perfect counterfoils. So when their school’s production of Big River, a musical adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was nominated for 11 awards in the regional Cappies, the high school equivalent of the Tony Awards, and they were chosen to perform a selection from the musical on C-SPAN’s Close Up, they were extremely excited. But that excitement was snuffed out when the play’s copyright holders denied C-SPAN the right to air the performance because of the casting of Frisby, an African-American, as Huck and Lehan, a White American, as the runaway slave Jim. ”It was disappointing. It was like a tease,” said Frisby. ”We were just setting out to do a school play. We never imagined it would get like this.” Russell Frisby, Jay’s father and a Washington, D.C., attorney, said his son was ”very upset,” as was he. ”I am appalled by the position of R&H Theatricals. Everybody assumed that in this day and age nobody would deny them from showing the performance because Jay was an African-American, but R&H stuck to their guns,” Frisby said. ”It reminds me of the ‘Whites only’ clauses from days past.” But the decision of R&H Theatricals, the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, which owns licensing rights to the play, was not based on any racist policy, said spokesman Bert Fink. ”The assumption is that R&H is racist or against colorblind casting, which could not be further from the truth. We applaud colorblind casting in concept,” Fink said, referring to Disney’s 1997 remake of Cinderella, which featured R&B singer Brandy in the lead. ”But not when race is a big part of the story.” Carole Lehan, Glenelg’s performing arts director, who auditioned the actors for the play, said she was ”not intending to make a political statement,” but ”cast appropriate to the characters.” Nick, who played the role of Huck in ninth grade, had grown and his voice had changed over a four-year period, making him more appropriate for the Jim role, as was the case with Jay. But, Fink said, ”to cast a White actor as Jim is not a position that the authors of Big River could support, [because they believe] it does a disservice to the story.” Jay Frisby said that decision was too narrow-minded, however, and reduced the story of Huck and Jim to mere skin color. ”Trying to pigeonhole them into just White and Black takes away a whole other level of meaning from the story,” Frisby said. ”It’s more about their relationship, and that relationship transcends race.” Attorney Frisby said the racial overtones and byplays created by this play have been ”interesting” from the beginning. He referred to a March Baltimore Sun article on the play, in which someone changed the caption of the photo, ascribing the role of Huck to Lehan and Jim to his son, and a later article in which the author said Lehan was enrolling in Yale and Frisby in Catholic University, when it was actually the other way around. ”It was just one thing after another in terms of blatant racial stereotyping,” Frisby said. ”Someone at The Sun, most likely a copy editor, saw the picture and decided that Huck couldn’t possibly be played by a Black kid and Jim could not be played by a White kid.” Frisby continued, ”The audience and the critics who saw the play were just bowled over, but the way The Sun … and R&H Theatricals handled it demonstrates that institutional racism is alive and well in this country.”