August Wilson And Colorblind Casting

“Wilson cared passionately about black theater as a distinct medium, and in the late 1990s he famously wrangled with Robert Brustein, then artistic director of American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., who claimed that theater should be ‘a unifying, not a segregating, medium.’ In 1997 the two men held a public debate in New York, and Wilson continued to argue that ‘colorblind’ casting — casting without regard to race — is ‘an aberrant idea’ and that blacks should not allow others to dictate their culture.”