When, from an artistic point of view, might those same considerations give way? I think back to a Broadway production of Of Mice and Men that starred James Earl Jones as Lenny. (Again, you must know something of the work and the character.) Jones was certainly one of the best American actors of those years, and with regard to physical type perfectly suited to the part, save only for his ethnicity. For that production, the estate of John Steinbeck (like Miller, a writer of the Left) had given permission for the casting of Jones. Again, though, we have a classic of American realism, and in such a work to propose that two closely bonded men—one white, the other black—might have roamed the camps and ranches of the Salinas Valley in search of work in the 1930s without arousing the slightest comment is absurd. It puts an impossibility at the heart of the play, not to mention giving us the tableau of a large, “slow,” black man killing a white woman in a sexually charged scene (straight off a lurid paperback cover) and necessitating the elimination of the minor role of the stable buck, Crook, who usually stands out as the sole black character, in the position reserved for blacks in that society—a morsel of bitter social truth, written in by Steinbeck, and certainly not casually.

Jones as Lenny almost mirrors Tibbett as Porgy. Only “almost,” since Porgy is an opera, and fine an actor as Jones is, there’s no acting equivalent for Tibbett’s singing of the title role. But the wager is the same—that for a sufficient number of customers, Jones’ talent and charisma will move the elephant of verisimilitude out of the room. Many people profess to not care about verisimilitude. I care about it deeply, because from quite early on in my experience of theatre both spoken and sung, I have noticed that when a “truth-to-lifeness” seems to me to be present, I am more absorbed, more emotionally engaged, than when it isn’t. When an important element of verisimilitude is contradicted, I am set back a step from my deepest involvement. I am required to overlook something, and to provide an intellectual justification for the missing element. Though I wasn’t thinking in terms of race when I coined the term in Opera as Opera, a “brain barrier” has been set in place, over which I must leap to continue an engagement that is now more abstract in nature. I can do it, but a price has been paid. And in theatre both spoken and sung, the arc of history is on my side; it has bent toward verisimilitude for hundreds of years, and continues to do so in our secondary onscreen oralities.^(I)