Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Criticism preceded called-off opera plan
LITTLE ROCK — When professional opera company Opera in the Rock canceled its June online stream of its 2019 production of Giacomo Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” the company’s executive and artistic director and its board chairman apologized to patrons that “the sensitive themes in this work may be offensive for Asian-American communities.”
What they didn’t say was the cancellation followed a targeted two-day social media and email campaign from Asian-American groups accusing the opera company of “yellowface,” defined as the casting of non-Asian performers to play Asian characters. The messaging included what Opera in the Rock staff members have perceived as a physical threat.
The company staged two “Madama Butterfly” performances in May 2019 at Little Rock’s Arkansas Repertory Theatre. The opera company had planned to stream it June 12 and June 14 on YouTube and its website, oitr.org, as a way of maintaining its profile following the coronavirus-related cancellation of its spring production of Giuseppe’s Verdi’s La Traviata and to raise money for its Artist & Crew Relief Fund.
In the opera, set around 1900, an American naval officer named Pinkerton takes a house in a port of call, Nagasaki, Japan, that comes with a bride attached: Cio-Cio San, aka Butterfly, a teenage geisha. He sails away without knowing that he has fathered a child with Butterfly, who waits devotedly for three years for his return. She discovers that he by then has an American wife, to whom she must agree to give up the child. The opera ends with her committing ritual suicide.
Soprano Francesca Mondanaro, singing the role of Cio-Cio San, and Sarah Stankiewicz Dailey, who sang the role of Suzuki, her maid, are white. So are Daniel Foltz-Morrison, who sang the role of Pinkerton, and Theodor Carlson, who sang the role of Sharpless, the American consul in Nagasaki, both Caucasian characters. The cast included no Asians. Black performers made up approximately one-third of the supporting players and chorus.
Subsequent to canceling the stream, Opera in the Rock posted an apology on its website “to Asian-American communities and anyone else offended by this opera,” pledging “to stand with our Asian-American, Black and all communities of color. … It is unfortunate that some individuals chose to harass and threaten our staff and cast members online instead of opting to engage in a productive dialogue where real discussion, change and growth could take place.”
Board chairman Joshua Ang Price said he had run the statement by and gotten the approval of Marc A. Scorca, president/CEO of Opera America, an umbrella organization that includes 150 professional opera companies, which Scorca confirmed. However, the statement failed to mollify critics who objected to the plan to stream the production. One poster described the statement as “flaccid” and “anemic.”
Kate Sain, Opera in the Rock’s executive and artistic director, said the first negative response to the pending stream came in a late-night June 9 email from Simone Cottrell of Fayetteville, who identifies herself as a “multidisciplinary theatre-maker” and is the daughter of a Cambodian refugee.
Cottrell demanded that the stream be canceled because the production involved “actors … performing in yellow face,” and that even the choice of the opera, though one of the most popular in the repertoire, was problematic because “it perpetuates the stereotype of Asian women being subservient to men (particularly white men), plays on the exotic fetishism of Asian women and the fictionalized sexualization of a 15-year-old child. Not to mention, the main character dies by suicide in the end.”
The opera company shortly thereafter received numerous emails, first out of Northwest Arkansas and subsequently nationwide, also demanding the immediate cancellation of the stream. Social media posts also followed. Between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. June 10, “it went crazy,” Sain said, and the opera company called off its plans.
Sain estimates the loss to the opera and its partners, including an apartment complex that was to have held a watch party, at almost $37,000. The amount includes preparation costs for the stream.
The opera company also subsequently temporarily shut down its website and social media accounts for the protection of the staff, according to a statement from the company under the aegis of Little Rock lawyer Philip H. McMath.
Sain has kept a folder of screen shots of social media posts. One came from Kevin Duong, on his personal Facebook page. It read: “We are watching. If you continue to ignore and erase our concerns and experience … we WILL come for your throats.”
That’s the post Sain and McMath have said they construed as a threat.
Duong, a marketing and communication director for Minnesota theater company Theater Mu, also sent a less inflammatory email to Sain on June 11 condemning “yellowface” and urging her to cancel the stream.
The file also includes lengthy exchanges via social media platforms Facebook and LinkedIn between Debbie Chinn, executive director of the San Francisco-based Opera Parallele, and other activists, some of whom also had contacted Sain and the opera company through email.
Some of the posts suggested aiming protests at organizations that have funded Opera in the Rock, including Opera America, the Arkansas Arts Council and Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Sain pointed to a playbook titled “Yellowface: What to Do” that the Asian American Theatre Revue has posted on its website, aatrevue.com/Newsblog/yellowface-what-to-do.
Chinn, in particular, posted at one point that the company should have its “air hose” cut off. A spokesman for Opera Parallele did not return messages seeking comment by deadline Friday.
“Some of the emails were quite egregious,” McMath said.
McMath and Sain said the company has not taken any kind of legal action, but that the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Arkansas has looked into the issue.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Allison Bragg would neither confirm nor deny that her office was conducting an investigation. However, Price, chairman of the opera company board, said his understanding is there would not likely be any grounds for prosecution because of a lack of hard evidence. A civil suit remains a possibility.
Price, who is of Chinese-Filipino descent, said he was bewildered by what he considers an unwarranted attack on the opera company.
“I’m a practical and pragmatic guy,” he said. “I’m willing to discuss anything if you address me in a calm manner. This was ‘take this down, or else.’ It came out of left field.”
Price said he took particular care as the production was coming together to connect with local Asian-American organizations to get their stamps of approval and even some promotional help. Given that, he said, it’s harder to understand the vitriol the opera company has received on a wider level.
“It’s one thing if you set out purposefully to be hateful,” he said. “We didn’t do that.”
Duong declined to comment, deferring instead to Leslie Ishii, board president of the Consortium of Asian American Theatres and Artists, a national organization “for theater artists of Pan Asian, Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian, Indigenous and Middle Eastern North African descent.” She and KT Shorb, the board vice president, said they have been in touch with Opera in the Rock and with Scorca regarding the issue.
Ishii noted that “yellowface” has been a persistent issue for generations, and called the postings on private social media accounts as rather reflecting the degree of harm “yellowface” causes. She said she regrets that Opera in the Rock “misconstrued those as anything other than free speech” and that the opera company’s taking a defensive posture is a “common response” to being made conscious of racially biased attitudes of which they may not have been previously aware.
Shorb added that the current shakeup in social norms in the wake of protests regarding race makes this “a great time to have a conversation” about “ending various forms of racism.” And she and Ishii are urging additional dialogue and have offered the opera company additional resources to assist in awareness and resolution.
Scorca said to a limited degree he has been playing mediator between Opera in the Rock and Opera Parallele, both Opera America members. He added that he had spoken to Price and other Opera in the Rock board members while also monitoring the comments of Chinn, whom he called the “most vocal” complainant.
Scorca said his organization has no policing powers when it comes to disputes between members.
The issue of “yellowface” — as opposed to “blackface,” where white actors wear dark makeup to play Black characters — has been raging through the theatrical and opera worlds in the past couple of years.
Particularly in the cross hairs have been productions of “Butterfly” and Puccini’s other Asian-centered opera, “Turandot,” set in “ancient Peking,” as well as Gilbert & Sullivan’s “The Mikado,” a spoof of Victorian British society and politicians whimsically set in Japan. Criticism has been leveled at casting non-Asians and for such works’ unflattering — considered by many to be racist — depictions of Asian characters.
Different companies have taken different measures in approaching this issue, as well as the one of “cultural appropriation,” in which the creators of a work deal with a culture that is not their own. The Seattle Opera, for example, received praise for its preparation for a 2017 production of “Butterfly” that involved seminars and a large-scale exhibit in its lobbies providing a perspective on the history of Americans of Japanese, Asian and Pacific Islander descent in opera and “a broader entertainment landscape.”
Sain said Opera in the Rock unwittingly fell into the gap between what Broadway producers are now calling “color-conscious casting,” in which they must consider race, sexual orientation and other character background elements before choosing actors to play them, and “color-blind casting,” which had previously been considered a gold standard of casting the “right” actor for the part regardless of background.
She said she is more likely now to avoid putting on works that would spur the kind of controversy this one did, “or at least to consider their context before presenting them.”