Skip to main contentPortland Center Stage's new production of My Fair Lady brags of an African-American actress in the role of Eliza Doolittle in a style that seems to demand attention be paid to the company's liberality. I spoke with damali ayo, an artist who explores racism in her work, about whether this "black Eliza" is a step forward.
Steffen Silvis: PCS's campaign boasted that this wouldn't be a standard production. Other than reducing the pit to two pianos, which I thought worked, the primary PR focus seemed to be centered on the fact that Eliza is played by an African-American actress. Portland's hardly a mecca for minority actors, so on a basic political level one could applaud PCS's casting. However, there seemed to be a lot of minefields. The play is about "civilizing" a woman, teaching her to speak "properly" and to "pass" in class-focused society. Suddenly, the casting seemed, to me, questionable, unless these issues were addressed.
ayo: Well, the press release certainly caught my attention as it boasted the lead actress's race as if this was going to change the audience experience of the show—
"not your mother's My Fair Lady." No other actor's race was listed. Is this because we've grown accustomed to white faces on Portland's stages, or was this some way of promulgating Eliza's blackness as a gimmick? I saw nothing in the play to support this casting decision. The script and songs were indeed my mother's My Fair Lady that I grew up with. But in this version with our black Eliza, I found myself wincing at the frequent mentions of hangings, of "walloping" a "naughty" Eliza, and the purchase of Eliza for five pounds from her white father. However, no one on stage reacted to these phrases in the newly racialized context of this production. So I was left pondering, why the promotion of the black-Eliza device?
Silvis: Absolutely. From a feminist perspective, this play is also problematic, particularly the ending, which here lacks the ambiguity of Gabrial Pascal's film Pygmalion, or Eliza's slamming the door on Higgins in George Bernard Shaw's original play.
ayo: Yes. Any chance of satire and social commentary, as was Shaw's intention, is lost in the schmaltz of a love story reminiscent of the Stockholm Syndrome, where victims come to emulate their captors. In our new black-and-white version, we see modernized the slaveholder tradition of hand-picking a female slave from the field, planting her in the home, dressing her well and educating her. We well know what the payment for this is. Not the 18 shillings a lesson promised by Pickering but rather the complete body and the mind of the woman herself. In all, this is a story line I have grown terribly bored of both on and off the stage.
Newmark Theatre, 1111 SW Broadway, 274-6588.7 pm Tuesdays-Wednesdays, noon and 8 pm Thursdays, 8 pm Friday-Saturdays, 2 and 7 pm Sundays. Also 2 pm Saturdays, March 5 and 12. Closes March 12. $15-$55.
WWeek 2015