Casting Beyond the Color Line

In this year’s fall production of “The Crucible,” a caucasian actress, Madeline Blomdahl (12), played Tituba, an African-American house slave. This inverse characterization is a product of color-blind casting.

Drama instructor Cambria Beilstein explains that this unique style of casting is “a method very often used in professional theater and in schools where there is a certain dynamic or ethnicity is not majorly prevalent.”

Color-blind casting allows the director to cast without being influenced by anything other than talent, allowing equal opportunity for actors.

While casting the fall production, Beilstein sought to assign her cast based upon talent alone, and not be influenced by the actors’ appearances.

“Because we are an educational institution and we get so many people,” says Beilstein, “we open up the opportunity to anybody who comes in and steps up to the role. It just so happened that when Madeline came in, she was the one who read the best and she had all the stakes, and that had nothing to do with color.”

Blomdahl expresses, “I do as much character research as I can, especially with this role, and through my studies I have grown a heavy heart for the character, Tituba. I plan to put as much feeling as I can into this role, in order to do justice for not only the character, Tituba, but to shed light upon the stories of any other African American slave.”

The drama department did not use makeup to make the audience visualize Blomdahl as the race expected for this role. Instead, Beilstein reveals that she intends to aid the audience’s understanding by “playing up the social status difference of a slave and an owner rather than the ethnic boundaries.” In “The Crucible,” a show about lies and deceit, the theme of race is not necessary for the sake of the plot.

Beilstein shares, “in color-blind casting you have to be very careful not to offend, especially with something like African-Americans and slavery, so how we’re choosing to approach it is through acting intention. [Madeline] won’t be in any sort of costume that would reflect a certain ethnicity––she will be herself.”

Previously, color-blind casting had been surrounded with a great deal of controversy but looking forward, it is preferred by directors across the globe; especially on the Broadway scene. Beilstein presumes that this is a result of the world opening up their minds and becoming easily ready to accept these sorts of things. By embracing this cutting-edge method, the drama sphere is able to experience a surplus of new talent that would not normally be featured with a prejudiced casting process.

It is no surprise that the Trapdoor Theater Company is innovative; however, by adopting an unbiased method of color-blind casting, they lead the district as the pioneers of this cutting-edge approach to characterization.