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playwrites

Fringe Fusion:

Manchester, England

*Black Actors Development Theatre*

By Jeff Johnson..The Global Guy..page2

On the business end, BADT runs like a one-man show, as Burke, with administrative assistance from his partner Celia Donnelly, conceives each project, seeks funding for it, and selectively develops it. The productions, however, focus on collaboration, including open casting, workshops, improvisation and collective creative input. And though the philosophy is to showcase black talent, Burke does not hesitate to incorporate white writers and directors into his productions.

For example, he chose the white writer Michael Harvey to create the text for "Black Love" not only because Harvey is well-known for his "gay issue" plays ("Skin," Andy in Dire Straits," "Oral Sex") but also for the quality of his writing. Burke insists that "gay themes apply equally to whites and blacks" and that a writer like Harvey, sensitized to institutional prejudice, well understands the essence of what it means to be an "outsider." In this sense, the theme of the play, while foregrounding the plight of black gays, transcends race and concerns life beyond any particular sociological issue. Given the subject, and his approach to it, Harvey's "whiteness" becomes transparent, allowing him to graft the negative attitudes straights have towards gays with the negative attitudes whites have towards blacks into a convincing dramatic hybrid. Harvey also shares Burke's desire to draw on and connect with a minority audience: as Burke wants to give black audiences themes they identify with, Harvey strives to provide the gay community the same experience. With "Black Love" they hope to inspire an even more desperate but no less vibrant disenfranchised subculture.

The case is a bit different with Helen Parry, a white director with whom Burke has worked on numerous projects, including "A Raisin in the Sun," "Fences," and the forthcoming "Black Love." Neither black nor gay, Parry at first glance seems an odd choice. But Burke's relationship with Parry has evolved over years of collaboration, beginning when he was a finishing drama student and first starting to work in the Manchester fringe. Parry, long a fixture in the Mancunian theatre scene, intensified Burke's training, both as mentor and teacher. Parry, whose experience with "color-blind casting," and casting "against race" is extensive, says she especially enjoys the role reversal, when the student becomes the professional and how she, as a former tutor, is now employed by her student in a professional production. In addition to his personal trust in Parry, Burke appreciates the more practical aspects of using a white director to stage essentially black plays. Working with what he calls, with qualification, an "outsider" can often, according to Burke, enhance the performance, filtered, as it were, through a distant, even "neutral" perspective, offering the director a more abstract vision in order to transform the raw material into art and allowing her to shape the material without any subjective "interference."

Ideally, Burke insists, he would prefer to produce plays that support color-blind casting. But in contemporary British society, being black still evokes implicit and explicit cultural assumptions from most mainstream theatre audiences that inherently change the dynamics of any staged theatrical construct. He points out that, whereas Shakespeare's plays lend themselves to mixed casting, most modern or contemporary classics do not. To cast, for instance a black girlfriend for one of the boys in Arthur Miller's "All My Sons" would be as disruptive and, to Burke, as ludicrous as casting Roger Moore to play John Shaft ("can you dig it?"). But the necessity of restrictive casting illustrates the core point Burke makes repeatedly: the lack of quality roles available for black actors. Ironically, those black writers scripting "mainstream" plays about blacks for black audiences are often as exclusive - and sometimes more militant - than playwrights addressing white values for white audiences. For instance, when Burke applied for the rights to produce "Fences," Wilson, through an agent, expressed reservations about Burke's using Parry because she was white, and Burke found himself in the awkward position of having to write a justification for why he wanted her to direct.

A good example of this color-blind casting occurred early in Burke's career when Parry cast him and another black actor to work with a white female in a production of a play I wrote, "Western Omelet" (Green Room, 1991). The play deals with the relationship between two men waiting for a delivery of unspecified contraband who are visited by a woman who seduces the younger man in an act of revenge against the older, her former lover. The play did not identify the race of any of the characters, nor did it signal with internal codification any ethnic allegiances. Stripped of social, racial or ethnic delineation, the play assumed a neutral field that Parry intensified by casting the two black males with the white female. The extra-textual tension - created by Parry's casting - on one level ignored the characters' social and historical realities, but on another cleverly exploited the expectations of the audience, decontextualizing their intuitive responses and thereby initiated a covert attempt, in a sense, to "correct" their understanding of the play.

Burke's ambition is tempered by his pragmatism. For instance, in competing for funds, he understands that as the State continues to shave funding for the arts, even in a city as progressive as Manchester, private sponsors are becoming the primary sources of backing funds for new productions. But this in no way diminishes his enthusiasm for his agenda. Balancing aesthetics with a keen business sense, he chooses his projects carefully, keeping his focus on providing a sounding board for the not-so-silent but often unheard voices of Manchester. Burke's complaint that the concentration of power in fewer and larger theatre companies that inevitably cater to a tame, predominantly white middle-class, is legitimate. Commercial co-opting of the theatre, as it marginalizes a large constituency of the population, also threatens to monopolize community values, determining and defining social roles and hierarchies. Yet, if sometimes he speaks rhetoric of crisis, Burke acts on the impulse of hope, determined to discover - indeed, to recover - and develop new talent, empowering the under- represented, the alienated, the exiled, those truly living on the fringe. END

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