ABSTRACT
Casting as creative labor must pair the issue of bodies onstage and backstage with progressive creative vision. Kondo labels this power-sensitive process “the work of creativity”. Drawing on the author’s dramaturgy with Anna Deavere Smith on the world premiere of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, the article theorizes the politics of multiracial collaboration and cross-racial casting in Smith’s historically significant work. The prickly dilemmas of cross-racial representation—utopian and potentially problematic--are foregrounded in three productions of plays by David Henry Hwang. Yellow Face explicitly thematizes the exclusionary politics of yellow face performance, when whites play Asians. In production, however, Yellow Face featured white women who played across race and gender; white men did not. What difference does gender make? In Kung Fu, both progressive and problematic cross-racial representation occurred among people of color. Soft Power offered satisfying, subversive cross-racial performances, turning the geopolitical tables. China is now hegemonic; we see a “Chinese” musical featuring Asian American actors who don blond wigs to play white characters. Countering the psychic violence that erases minoritarian subjects, the work of Smith and Hwang engages acts of reparative creativity, offering ways to remake the theater world, our inner psychic worlds, and the social world.
