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JOHN FLEMINGThe lone black actor in a St. Petersburg production plays the villain, raising some eyebrows. Negative stereotyping? Just a good actor in a good role, says the director.
ST. PETERSBURG - Bob Devin Jones has fielded the same question more than a few times about his role in Much Ado About Nothing, now playing in American Stage's Shakespeare in the Park.
"A friend asked me last night," Jones said at lunch recently. "He asked me, "So what I want to know is what does it feel like being the only African-American and also playing the villain?' "
To some people, Jones has deflected the question with one of his own, joking, "What? I can't play the bad guy? African-Americans can't play the bad guy?"
But the actor also knows that his portrayal of Don John in an otherwise white cast of 19 is bound to raise a question about negative racial stereotyping. Don John, the bastard brother of the prince, Don Pedro, and self-described as "a plain-dealing villain," is the comedy's only completely malevolent figure, scheming and spreading disinformation to upset the marriage of Hero and Claudio.
Even Don John's henchmen, Borachio and Conrade, experience a measure of redemption, but he is unrepentant to the end.
Todd Olson, the artistic director of American Stage, who directed Much Ado, was aware of the implications of casting Jones as Don John. "I thought about it a long time, and I resisted it," Olson said. "In the end, I sort of tossed it aside. It's his performance that is paramount."
Jones wanted to play Don John and was overjoyed, he said, when the theater called to say he had the role. Remarkably, it is the first villain that the 49-year-old actor has played in a career that in more than 25 years has included some notable Shakespearean credits.
"I always get cast as the "young Negro for Kennedy,' " he said of the upstanding characters he often portrays. "So that's why I was intrigued with playing Don John.
"The one way you build your skill as an actor, particularly in Shakespeare, is getting the big stuff. You need the words. It changes your DNA when you play a lead."
Jones and Olson talked during several meetings about what he might play in Much Ado.
"In the early casting worksheets for the show, Bob was in the Leonato pile, the Antonio pile, the Don Pedro pile," the director said. "One of my favorite questions for actors is, "Cast yourself.' Then I get a sense of how they would relish a certain role and just what personal connection they have to the role. And the way Bob spoke of being able to play this guy and play a villain swayed me. If an actor can make the case and convince me to do it, then I usually think there's a good performance in there somewhere."
Don John is not as fully developed as Shakespeare's later, masterful version of a similar character, Iago, the schemer in Othello, but it is a rich role. Jones, with fine voice and dramatic presence, gives a strong performance, one of the best in the production, which continues through Sunday.
"Bob is one of those actors that when he's onstage he sort of has a secret," Olson said. "You have to stare at him. You have to wonder what's going on inside. I like that intensity in Don John."
Jones thinks questions he has gotten about being the only black actor in the cast and playing Don John are perhaps more telling about the general state of theater casting than they might seem.
"In a way, even the most informed people, by saying, "Why are you playing the villain?' tacitly are referencing that it would be an automatic choice that the African-American would play the villain," he said. "If you scattered us throughout any particular play, it wouldn't come up."
Last year's American Stage production of Romeo and Juliet had four actors of color in the cast, including Jones as the prince of Verona. If Much Ado had a more diverse cast, an African-American playing the villain wouldn't have been conspicuous.
"I would have cast another black actor in the cast of 19 had there been a local actor of color who auditioned," Olson said. "There was not. In the end, I went in the direction of talent and strong audition."
Jones, a St. Petersburg resident, co-wrote and directed a large musical with a virtually all-black cast, Manhattan Casino, in 2003. He sees the cultivation of a local pool of African-American actors as a key issue.
"We have to somehow farm-raise a few more so that I'm not the designated Negro," he said. "So that sometimes there are two, three other people up for a part and I don't get it because it goes to somebody else."
Diversity in the theater has often centered on nontraditional or colorblind casting - putting blacks in traditionally white roles - and that has been a sort of theme running through Jones' stage career. In Shakespeare, the only specifically black principal characters are Othello, a role Jones has played, and Aaron in Titus Andronicus.
He was Tom in an all-black production of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. ("We had to cut some of the lines of Amanda because she talked about the darkies," he pointed out.) At American Stage in 1997, he directed an all-black production of Strindberg's Miss Julie, set in the Harlem Renaissance.
Last year, Olson asked Jones to audition as Jim Tyrone, the broken-down Broadway idol in A Moon for the Misbegotten by Eugene O'Neill.
"He was a close call for A Moon for the Misbegotten, but I ended up going another way in that casting," said the director, who hired Ned Averill-Snell, a white actor. "Bob is an actor I want to use not because he's an actor of color but because he's a good actor."
Jones appreciated Olson considering him for the O'Neill play. "The fact that he was entertaining the idea was, to me, a broadening of the aperture," he said.
Jones, who does as much directing as acting nowadays, wants a chance to play such classic characters as Jim Tyrone.
"If I was to continue acting full time, those are the kinds of parts I would need to play, those great American roles," he said. "I'd love to play some Eugene O'Neill. But in the absence of Eugene O'Neill, thank God, August Wilson came along. That's thick stuff."
Wilson, the leading African-American playwright, has been a godsend to black actors and directors. "Wilson had this policy that only African-American directors could do his plays, and because of that I got a couple of jobs I might not otherwise have gotten," said Jones, who has directed Fences and The Piano Lesson. American Stage has never done a Wilson play.
In 1996, Wilson ignited a fierce debate with a speech he gave taking American theaters to task for not supporting black artists and not reaching out to black audiences. It led to a high-profile, often angry series of exchanges between the playwright and Robert Brustein, artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard University and a distinguished critic, over issues such as nontraditional casting. But the debate died away.
"The issue of nontraditional casting goes in and out of fashion," Olson said. "Sometimes it's a very heated subject, and then we go a long time without thinking about it. I think the real truth is that actors of color who are good can work all the time if they want. You'd be hard-pressed to see much Shakespeare in this country that doesn't have nontraditional casting to some degree."
Jones thinks nontraditional casting and other ways to foster diversity need to be on the agenda.
"It's unfortunate that it's not a hot topic, because the issues that brought it into play are still here," he said. "It's not even in the Equity newsletter. People get tired of talking about race. People don't like to talk about it."