Writer Slams Director Who Wants To Use A White Guy As Martin Luther King In New Movie

A furious playwright has hit out at a director’s ‘tone deaf and disrespectful’ decision to cast a white actor as Martin Luther King in her play.

Memphis playwright Katori Hall posted a withering statement online after learning that Ohio’s Kent State University had ‘broken a world record’ by using a white actor to play the lead in a production of her Olivier award-winning play, The Mountaintop.

On the African American cultural website The Root, Hall wrote: ‘Imagine my surprise when, on Oct. 4, 2015, at midnight in London, I received an email from a colleague sending me a link to Kent State University’s amateur production of the play.

‘The actor playing King stood there, hands outstretched, his skin far from chocolate but a creamy buff.

‘At first glance I was like, “Unh-uh, maybe he light-skinned. Don’t punish the brother for being able to pass.” But further Googling told me otherwise.’

The Mountaintop imagines Martin Luther King’s last night in room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, Memphis, before he was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

The play’s director Michael Oatman, who is black, said in an interview on the university’s website, that he wanted to ‘explore the issue of racial ownership and authenticity’ and for the play to explore King’s wish that ‘we all be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin’

He added: ‘I wanted to see how the words rang differently or indeed the same, coming from two different actors, with two different racial backgrounds.’

In three of the six performances King was portrayed by a black actor; in the other three a white actor performed the role.

The white actor was Robert Branch, a middle-aged actor with considerable stage experience and who lists himself on LinkedIn as currently performing for the Cleveland Radio Players and being involved in the Inaugural Cleveland Playwrights Festival.

Director Robert Oatman said he cast Branch because ‘he is one of the best actors I’ve ever seen. I was not going to make the racial switch unless I had an actor who could pull it off.’

The play ran for four months and closed on October 4 and Hall, was only alerted after the fact when somebody tweeted to her about it.

Her statement later added that director Oatman’s move was ‘ yet another erasure of the black body’.

She continued: ‘Sure, it might be in the world of pretend, but it is disrespectful nonetheless, especially to a community that has rare moments of witnessing itself, both creatively and literally, in the world.’

In the wake of the Kent State production,Ms Hall has insisted on the following clause being added to her licensing agreement: ‘Both characters are intended to be played by actors who are African-American or Black. Any other casting choice requires the prior approval of the author’.

Source: DailyMail