Re. what John Whitworth said, both Olivier and Anthony Hopkins and hundreds of other actors of various races have played Othello. It's like when there was an Actors Equity flap years ago over Jonathan Pryce in Miss Saigon. Interestingly, Miss Saigon lost out in the Tonys to The Will Rogers Follies, which had an anachronistic multi-racial chorus line.
Frankly, I don't see why actors can't cross racial barriers. One of my Broadway favorites is the great Brian Stokes Mitchell, who excelled in both Ragtime and Kiss Me, Kate and was terrific in the concert version of South Pacific. The last Lucia I saw also had a multi-ethnic cast; it was horrible, but the problem was the bad acting and singing, not the racial profiling.
I think that we may be over the worst of this pc nonsense, which seems to have crested in the mid-90s. At least, one can only hope.
I have friends and relatives who are in deaf education. A strangely similar kind of thing surfaces in that area: Can the president of a university (Gallaudet) that exists for deaf students be a person who hears? Should deaf persons who try to lip-read be ostracized by those who use ASL?
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