Today’s non-conformists are as conforming as you can get. The Progressive Rebels seeking change want a form of totalitarian state control that mimics the oldest and longest form of rule. So could a #woke school putting on a supposedly non-conformist play be any different?
No heterosexual (cis-gendered) male students are allowed because the play’s the thing!
“This year’s play will be ‘Men On Boats,’” reads a document provided to Starbuck by a whistleblower. The story is about “a group of American explorers sent by the American government to ride down the Colorado River and claim land throughout the Grand Canyon in 1869.
“Though the explorers were all cisgender males, the play calls for the cast to be made up of actors who are not cisgender males, giving female-identifying, trans-identifying, genderfluid, and/or non-gender-conforming actors the opportunity to tell an amazing story.”
The school, by the way, is Saint Andrews. An Episcopalian private school that costs 60,000 a year to attend. Private and swanky. And if the play says the cast should be left-handed albino lesbians presenting as men, go for it. But here’s the rub, Shakespeare. The play’s not the thing.
If you want to be Netflix or even Disney, you have to non-conform. If a character in a book is white, make them brown; if male, make them female, straight, make them gay. Or, add non-male, gay people of color. That’s the new non-discrimination for discriminating non-discriminators.
Their adaptation of Shadow and Bone is good entertainment, but the male lead, Mal, is not a dark-eyed, dark-skinned young man in the book. And he’s not the only tweak (it is Netflix). There are no homosexual sidekicks in the book; (in fact) the entire side story about a bounty for Alina’s kidnapping is made up. None of that is in the book Shadow and Bone. But it all works on television, I love the characters and the acting, and I look forward to the next season.
My point is that if you want to be #woke performing a play with a “cast to be made up of actors who are not cisgender males, giving female-identifying, trans-identifying, genderfluid, and/or non-gender-conforming actors” seems passe to me.
If you want people talking about this high-school play, cast straight homeless black women.
And gay people in the theater, how conformist can you get.
Stop being so systemic in your discrimination disguised as non-discrimination and instead of pretending to break molds break some. Or not. We know it’s all virtue signaling but you could at least pretend. That is, after all, what actors do.
