Well (to echo my observation about Marian Anderson as Ulrica, or as anyone else): stepping into another person’s lived experience, and often in cultures that are not “theirs,” is exactly what performers are supposed to do, and the elimination of approximations is their fondest hope, if they are artists. Wilson, Phillips, and I all seem to agree that race is a major source of approximation, though far from the only one (“But how can I play someone I have nothing in common with?” is one of the most often-heard acting-class wails, and race is seldom involved). Presumably, Phillips would have no tolerance for the “We See You” demands, and would consider all instances of cross-race casting to be acts of cultural appropriation. By that standard, Porgy and Bess should not even exist, since from book to play to opera, it is the creation of white artists portraying black life. I don’t agree. I think writers and composers must be free to write and compose about anything and everyone. And I feel we must try to make cross-racial casting work, in full awareness of its implicit double standard and the extra difficulty involved in overcoming approximations, a/k/a achieving verisimilitude.

Blackface! Minstrelsy!—these terms are the ones always slung about to discredit the use of cross-racial makeup. The word “blackface” should be retired, except as it applies specifically to the intentionally stereotyped, caricatured kind used in minstrel, vaudeville, and revue-type shows of the later 19th- and 20th-centuries, where it was demeaning in effect, if not always in intention. To use it with regard to any artistically meant effort at verisimilitude is slander. And to include Laurence Olivier’s movie makeup as Othello among the “acts of minstrelsy” (as Phillips does) is calumny, too. He was attempting to embody his role, which he had surely earned the right to play, and to present himself for camera inspection in the process. But while in opera we are sometimes dealing with the cross-racial problems of white singers (Aïda and her Dad, Amonasro; Cio-Cio-San, et al.), what we’re more often considering isn’t “blackface,” anyway. It’s whiteface—the assumption of roles written for white artists by artists of color. Or would be, if they bothered to try it.

One thing we can all gripe about is the tokenism of operatic makeup. Anna Netrebko got all kinds of grief for breaking house rules by slathering on some color for her Aïda, but the real offense was that that’s all she did. At the last Met Aïda I saw, both Ethiopians were paleface, the King of Egypt African-American, the chorus mixed-race, and the dances so neutralized as to expunge racial distinctions. That’s a betrayal of the work, to which those distinctions are important. Not as important as great singingacting, but there was none of that, so the absence of the verisimilitudes was more keenly felt. As for Othello/Otello himself, he’s not sub-Saharan African. He’s a Moor. The untransformed African-American face is as far off as the unapologetic white one.

The only way to overcome tokenism and/or stereotyping of appearance (apart from deciding to not care about it, which is the current aesthetic) is through verisimilitude. That requires a high level of skill, extra time and expense, and true care over what may seem to be a subsidiary aspect of the performer’s art, like the study of details of period and class in costuming. That is why these elements make such a great effect when they are actually attended to—they are parts of an effort to transform oneself. Kevin Kline as Falstaff and Mark Rylance in almost anything (La Bête, Jerusalem, Twelfth Night—the last not cross-racial, but cross-gender) are examples from our spoken theatre. But the great master/exemplar of the transformative in makeup and costume was an opera singer, Fedor Chaliapin. A gifted painter and sculptor who in his youth immersed himself in the artistic movements of his time and place, he spent hours before each performance becoming, with one line or shadow, one layer of prosthetic at a time, the character he envisioned. The results, hardly recognizable from one character to another, are there to see in dozens of stunning black-and-white photos—the personalities jump out at us across the decades. The group scene and individual character photos of the Moscow Art Theatre from productions of the 1910s and ’20s, show the same care in representation.