THE TEMPEST
Let me get something off my chest first. I was a guest on a TV show the other day–one of those four-chairs-and-a-moderator setups they run at around sunrise on weekend mornings to fulfill FCC public-service requirements. The subject was the controversy over Miss Saigon, the British supermusical that transplants the Madame Butterfly story to wartime Vietnam. Briefly, Asian American actors were angry to learn that the show would be coming to Broadway with its London star, a white man named Jonathan Pryce, playing the important role of the Engineer–who’s supposed to be Eurasian. The board of Actors Equity chose to be angry, too, voting to bar Pryce from reprising his role in the United States.
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Two guests represented the anti-Mackintosh point of view, a third played Polonius, and I felt called upon to rebut the first two any way I could. This led me into trouble, because the conversation turned to the question of using makeup to change an actor’s ethnic appearance. One of the anti-Mackintosh guests, an Asian American, said that the idea of white actors using tape to get a “slanty-eyed” effect was deeply offensive to Asian Americans. I replied that I’d just come from the American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin, where I’d seen an Asian American actor named Randall Duk Kim use heavy makeup to give himself a Caucasian look for the role of Prospero in Shakespeare’s fantasy The Tempest. I said I didn’t think this compromised his performance.
And that specific bit about Randall Duk Kim’s performance not being compromised? Another abject lie. It would have been much more accurate to say his performance isn’t ultimately compromised by his makeup job: Kim’s acting here is so generous, so affable, so incredibly well-grounded that it finally seeps through the marionette’s-head mask of latex and grease in which he all but smothers himself.
Not that makeup is always a bad idea. It can be a marvelous thing when it’s used to goose rather than repress the imagination. Look at Stephen Hemming’s mutation into Caliban, the “mooncalf” whom Prospero enslaved after he nearly raped Prospero’s daughter: a cross between Edwin Booth and a fish, he nevertheless projects a strong internal life. Hemming allows Caliban his pain–and his glimpse of transcendence as well.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Zane Williams.
