Between Paper and Performance: Suspicion, Race, and Casting inThe Piano Teacher

Abstract

Produced immediately before and during the presidency of Barack Obama, Julia Cho’s The Piano Teacher (2007) reflects the evasions of a contemporary moment when claims that the United States had become “post-racial” were particularly pervasive. The play offers a model of how the intimate relationship between paper and performance in drama might capture the contradictions of post-racial discourse. In its theatrical staging, the play generally discourages considerations of how racial demarcations might impact the relationships among its characters; however, it explicitly rejects this position in the published “Author’s Notes.” This gap between paper and performance becomes a site for staging a confrontation among an insistence on colour-blindness, ongoing suspicion of racialized bodies, and the seemingly paranoid responses prompted by the convergence of these two forces.