Let's Put on a (Minstrel) Show: The 'Scottsboro' Dispute

Last week, a small group of people gathered outside of Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre to protest a minstrel show. The demonstrators—about 30-strong, according to The New York Times—were organized by the Freedom Party, a self-described black and Latino political organization. The show was “The Scottsboro Boys,” a musical by David Thompson, John Kander, and the late Fred Ebb, based on the true story of nine African-American men falsely convicted in 1931 of raping two white women in Alabama. “Scottsboro” employs the form of a minstrel show, which it further destabilizes by having the black actors playing the two end men enact white characters and a white actor as the Interlocutor, who in the show declares himself “the master of these folks.”

The show’s director, Susan Stroman, speculated to the Times that most of those assembled had likely not been inside to see what they were protesting. Many of those who have seen it understood the minstrelsy to be a device employed, as Entertainment Weekly critic Thom Geier wrote, “to underscore both the horror of the Scottsboro case as well as the ways in which popular culture has reinforced racial stereotyping.”

The Times spoke to the actors at the center of the controversy, who expressed support for the show’s creators and format. But the Times also reports that “Scottsboro” was booed during its Off-Broadway run and that audience members have walked out on several occasions since the move to Broadway. Linda Armstrong, a writer for the black-owned newspaper Amsterdam News, wrote that she was offended by the play, in which “off-color songs were being sung and offensive lines said as actors acted like buffoons.”

White actors, of course, get paid to sing off-color songs and act like buffoons all the time. Black actors, not as much. “Scottsboro” is one of only three shows currently on Broadway that boast a majority African-American cast, the other two being “Fela!” and “The Lion King.” For the actors involved, it represents a rare opportunity, though not so rare as on network television, where no majority-black-cast shows can be found. And it’s getting even harder to find black actors on network TV at all. Last week NBC canceled its J.J. Abrams–produced spy drama “Undercovers,” which starred Boris Kodjoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (the latter of whom appeared on Broadway last year opposite Jude Law as Ophelia in “Hamlet.”) The network had touted the show following a summer in which it came under fire for a perceived lack of diversity in front of and behind the camera.

The almost entirely black cast of “Scottsboro” does not, in any way, insulate the show from charges of racism. But the fact that it has sparked a controversy—and the conversation that inevitably comes with controversy—shows what the networks’ offerings are losing as they continue to grow whiter, less daring, and more banal: relevance.