Transparent Marathon - Realistic and/or Depressing

[Jill F]

I object to having people from Los Angeles being portrayed as selfish, shallow and sociopathic.  Most people I encounter every day here are... wait, nevermind. 

[stephaniec]

You lost me there.

sorry , my days as a Hippi , I'm having flashbacks

[stephaniec]

Stephanie, I agree with Bunnybee -- the blackface analogy isn't a good one. Her point about the mockery involved in blackface is well taken, because it shows one of the ways in it's very different from what Soloway was doing in Transparent -- blackface is fundamentally dishonest. Do you want to say that actors should never play parts which are outside what they have personally experienced? That's pretty limiting. Everyone belongs to multiple subgroups: people can be divorced, high school dropouts, disabled, gay, veterans, felons, poor, Muslims... the varieties of human experience are endless. Should the actor playing Maura also have been a retired Jewish professor with messed-up kids? All of that, as well as being trans, is central to the character's experience, but no one has suggested that an actor should have all that history in order to play the role.

The craft of acting is to be able to enter the experience of many different kinds of people, and to make their feelings and lived experiences real. It isn't necessary to have had those experiences in real life to do that; it takes empathy, intelligence, talent, and a lot of skill and training. It has very little to do with having lived whatever-it-is in real life.

as far as I know  Al Jolson wasn't mocking anyone that was his play as a singer and besides isn't it mocking the transgender community to say there is none among you who is good enough to fill this role.

[Tori]

A transgender woman would have to not have started transition to play the role as written. The character of Maura is not on HRT.

I would like to see more trans folk get cast in trans roles for sure, but this one makes sense to cast a cis man.

Trust me, I am an actor, transition really limits my opportunities. I wish there were more trans roles out there. That said, I am fine playing male, female, alien and even animal roles. In fact, I have done all these things and more. Being limited to trans roles would get old.

Black face is an odd analogy. Sure, some shows were terribly racist, but painting a face black to play a black character was just a theatrical convention.  It was common for white people to play black roles, like Shakespeare's Othello, by using makeup to change their race.

Times have changed.

Heck, in Shakespeare's time, he only used male actors to play all the roles even female. He had fun with this as did the audience. Imagine a guy playing a woman who spent a good portion of the play disguised as a man. That is much sillier than having a female play the role like we typically do it today.

Much Asian theatre to this day has men play all the roles.

We still have weird theatrical conventions. For example, night scenes have to be lit so people can see what is going on but they are usually lit in a blue hue to represent night time. Nobody thinks anything of it. In fact, a realistically lit night scene would distract the audience because it would be too dark.

You can't tell the Transparent story, with its flashbacks and whatnot, with a woman who is already transitioning or transitioned, without it being a distraction to much of the audience, although a good trans actor could surely pull it off. Would you be bothered by a trans woman having to play her younger male self? I could see that as bothering some in our community.

In fact, our community is very hard to please when it comes to trans stories being told on screen.

It is just acting. The best roles are the ones that make you stretch. Actors get paid because they can play people unlike themselves. I would not do it if I had to play myself every time I went on stage. I already do enough of that.

[translora]

Al Jolson wasn't mocking anyone

That is an incorrect statement. All "blackface" was mocking black people. That was largely its purpose.

Lora

[stephaniec]

That is an incorrect statement. All "blackface" was mocking black people. That was largely its purpose.

Lora

it was the norm of the times it was like that in entertainment for quite a long time , I really doubt you can say he was mocking people . It started long before he came along

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackface

[translora]

I think you are misunderstanding the cultural heritage of blackface. Regardless of what was "the norm" or "popular" in entertainment, this history of the form is unambiguous. It was a degradation to a portion of society that the dominant population wanted to keep down. It was caricature. It was belittlement. And, yes, it was popular. Those days are gone, and that is not the mechanism at work here. The analogy just doesn't fit.

From the article you linked:

Stereotypes embodied in the stock characters of blackface minstrels not only played a significant role in cementing and proliferating racist images, attitudes, and perceptions worldwide, but also in popularizing black culture. In some quarters, the caricatures that were the legacy of blackface persist to the present day and are a cause of ongoing controversy.

If I thought for a moment that casting a straight actor as a trans character were in any way trying to caricature or belittle or stereotype or keep down the trans community, I would be right there with you in anger about it. (Frankly, that's one of the reasons I have great discomfort with the whole "drag" subculture.) But that is simply not the case here, and the analogy to blackface is just not applicable.

Should we object to gay actors being cast as straight characters (Neil Patrick Harris in How I Met Your Mother)? Or straight actors being cast as gay characters (Eric McCormack in Will and Grace)? There are, no doubt, transgender actors (still closeted) playing straight roles out there. Further, there are old actors playing young roles and vice versa. There are dumb actors playing smart people, and smart actors playing dumb people. Heck, there are even billionaire heiress actors out there playing fictional Vice Presidents (Julia Louis-Dreyfus).

My point is that when it comes to casting, you pick the best actor for the role in question. And "best" largely means the actor with the greatest chance of creating a full character which meets the expectation of the writers and producers. To cast any lesser actor as Maura would have been a crime, and could never have been justified simply because she was actually trans in real life. Any lesser actor would not have served the art as well, and, as such, done a distinct disservice to the trans community.

I certainly hope that the day will come that a "transgender Meryl Streep" actor appears on the scene and can take us all to a new level. But that hasn't happened yet. And believe it or not, I think that Jeffrey Tambor's performance as Maura is actually a stepping stone in that direction.

Perhaps we will need to agree to disagree on this one...

Lora

[stephaniec]

 

[Tori]

It is certainly not acceptable any more.

On a side note, minstrel shows, now known to be horribly racist, and the way people offensively talked like dumbed down African Americans stems from slavery, when slaves would talk dumb to their masters in order to mock THEM. So, in a sense, the white people in black face didn't realize they were also mocking the owner class when they would do those shows.

Also, black performers wore black face too.

Stage makeup is weird and it was not always realistic.

It is amazing to think that some of these things did not seem offensive to so many for so long, and now that history can be reviewed, it seems terrible.

[BunnyBee]

It is amazing to think that some of these things did not seem offensive to so many for so long, and now that history can be reviewed, it seems terrible.

Lots of things like this.  If you want to know how to be on the right side of history, it's simple-history favors the empathetic.

[Tori]

Lately...

It also favors the victors, who write much of it.

[BunnyBee]

Wellllll... that's true too lol.

[Serena]

I understand that the script wants a trans woman that has not been on HRT, but what about season 2? (yes, there will be a season 2) And if there would be another season, let's say 3? Is Maura always going to be on stage 0 of her transition? How is that normal?

And yeah I understand it's better to use a known person for a role, but Laverne Cox wasn't known much before orange is the new black...

I really loved the show, but I really wished there would have been a trans woman instead. He is a good actor, but it's not the same.

I really don't know if someone understood the blackface reference, of course it's not the same thing. And if a black person paints their face white, that's not racist... And some people can get offended because playing a jewish character if you are christian is not the same thing as playing a trans woman, it's so much different. Like for sexuality, gender is something that you can see, if you are playing a trans woman at stage 0 and she is probably not passable, then you can clock her, while you can't tell someone is gay just by stereotyping... Just with a black person, it's their skin color, you can see that. You can see from my picture that I am not white, if someone white painted their face my skin color to play a biracial person I would be offended, and I would have rather if they found a trans woman instead, and to show her transition, not like a documentary but still something.  And you what I would been ok with anything else than someone holding male white and cis privilege. He doesn't go through discrimination.

And lots of black people were not hired for acting jobs because of discrimination before, I am not saying that this is what is happening now, but if we get into thinking that this is ok, then it will never change. No, it's not ok.

I think that trans women have a high unemployment rate already due to discrimination, and casting a white straight and cisgender men... Just can't be excused to me.

[stephaniec]

yes