Nov 17, 2015 3 min read

“Jesus of India” is not a play that tumbles off the lips as readily as “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” or “The Crucible,” and its playwright, Lloyd Suh, is in no imminent danger of having the same level of name recognition as Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller.

You would think he would welcome any kind of exposure his work would receive.

Woah. Better hold up there a minute.

Last week, students at Clarion University, located two hours north of Washington, were in the final stages of preparing for a production of “Jesus of India” when it was abruptly called off at Suh’s insistence. His reasoning? Three of the five roles in “Jesus of India” are Indian, and he wanted actors of Asian descent in those parts. However, the Clarion production had two white students and one mixed-race student playing the parts, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Suh insisted that students of Asian descent be found and cast in the play, and unless that happened, the right of Clarion to stage the play would be withdrawn.

Officials pointed out that finding thespians of Asian descent to fill the parts would be rather a, um, challenge, considering that Clarion University is not located in the diverse orbit of Philadelphia and the eastern part of the commonwealth, but the overwhelmingly white center of the state.

In fact, students of Asian or Pacific Island descent make up only 0.7 percent of the roughly 5,000 students at Clarion University, and it stands to reason that those students might well have interests in areas other than the theater department.

In a letter – well, more like a tirade – to Clarion theater professor Marilouse Michel, Suh said the casting of white actors in the parts “hurts me to my core.

I couldn’t stop crying when I saw the photos (of the cast) and realized what was happening” and that “Your citing of ‘color blind casting’ as an excuse for selecting white actors to portray nonwhite characters is a gross misunderstanding of the practice, and denies the savage inequities that exist in the field at large for nonwhite performers, both in professional and educational settings.”

Suh might want to curtail his weeping and consider the following: The world of the theater – and, more recently, film – is packed with actors who portrayed characters of different races or nationalities, and did so with sympathy and credibility. Laurence Olivier was acclaimed for playing the title role in Shakespeare’s “Othello” on the British stage in 1964, and received an Oscar nomination the following year for his work in a movie adaptation. Natalie Wood played the Puerto Rican Maria in the movie version of “West Side Story” and Alec Guinness was a compelling Prince Faisal in “Lawrence of Arabia.”

As Olivier himself once said, “Dear boy, it’s called acting.”

Suh would do well to remember that. Through his cascade of tears, he might also want to consider the students who put in hours of toil on the production, all for naught.

Unfortunately, they’ve received an important lesson – on how hours of dedication and labor can sometimes be undone by an arbitrary tantrum from a prima donna.