#columbiauniversity — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #columbiauniversity, aggregated by home.social.
-
Where is Skibs the Kid now? ‘Hong Kong Kids’ rapper on viral hit, school and ‘Asian vibe’
The last time I sat down with Lucas “Skibs the Kid” Scibetta, in the summer of 2013, he…
#NewsBeep #News #Music #AU #Australia #ColumbiaUniversity #EastMeetsWest #Entertainment #G.O.D. #HongKong #HongKongGod #HongKongInternationalSchool #HongKongKids #Lucas“SkibstheKid”Scibetta #LucasScibetta #NewYork #PharrellWilliams #Skibs #SkibstheKid
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/667522/ -
Where is Skibs the Kid now? ‘Hong Kong Kids’ rapper on viral hit, school and ‘Asian vibe’
The last time I sat down with Lucas “Skibs the Kid” Scibetta, in the summer of 2013, he…
#NewsBeep #News #Music #AU #Australia #ColumbiaUniversity #EastMeetsWest #Entertainment #G.O.D. #HongKong #HongKongGod #HongKongInternationalSchool #HongKongKids #Lucas“SkibstheKid”Scibetta #LucasScibetta #NewYork #PharrellWilliams #Skibs #SkibstheKid
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/667522/ -
https://www.europesays.com/ie/481961/ Where is Skibs the Kid now? ‘Hong Kong Kids’ rapper on viral hit, school and ‘Asian vibe’ #ColumbiaUniversity #EastMeetsWest #Éire #Entertainment #GOD #HongKong #HongKongGod #HongKongInternationalSchool #HongKongKids #IE #Ireland #Lucas“SkibsTheKid”Scibetta #LucasScibetta #Music #NewYork #PharrellWilliams #Skibs #SkibsTheKid
-
First Real-Time Brain-Controlled Hearing Device
Summary: Researchers provided the first direct evidence that brain-controlled technology can help listeners isolate a single voice in…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Science #auditoryneuroscience #Brain-ControlledHearing #cocktailpartyeffect #ColumbiaUniversity #euralExtension #Hearing #HearingAugmentation #Neuroscience #neurotech #speechperception
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/638047/ -
First Real-Time Brain-Controlled Hearing Device
Summary: Researchers provided the first direct evidence that brain-controlled technology can help listeners isolate a single voice in…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Science #auditoryneuroscience #Brain-ControlledHearing #cocktailpartyeffect #ColumbiaUniversity #euralExtension #Hearing #HearingAugmentation #Neuroscience #neurotech #speechperception
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/638047/ -
The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·Mahmoud Khalil Hurtles Toward Potential Deportation as U.S. Speeds Case
-
The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·Mahmoud Khalil Hurtles Toward Potential Deportation as U.S. Speeds Case
-
https://www.europesays.com/people/49195/ Bezos Earth Fund announces $34m grants for sustainable textiles #BezosEarthFund #CaliforniaInstituteOfTechnology #ClemsonUniversity #ClothingProduction #ColumbiaUniversity #CottonSeed #CottonVarieties #EnvironmentalImpact #FashionInstituteOfTechnology #JeffBezos #StanfordUniversity
-
OK, so, #Kroll just sent out breach notice + identity monitoring offer letters on behalf of #ColumbiaUniversity.
We received two. They were addressed to first initial + last name. The salutation of the letter, also, says "Dear <initial>:" rather than giving a name.
The two letters' initials match my wife's and my first names. They _also_ match the first names of two of our kids who may have applied to Columbia.
So, who the fuck are the letters for? 🤔🤷🤡
#infosec -
Happy #ColumbiaUniversity #BreachNotification Day to those who celebrate!
(And it only took them ten months. Wow, so fast!)
#infosec #privacy #breach -
Leqaa Kordia was freed on March 16 after spending more than a year in an ICE jail in Texas; arrested in 2025 in the Trump regime’s campaign to target any who advocate for #Palestine rights.
Born in the occupied #WestBank now lives in #NewJersey. She was arrested in 2024 during the #Gaza #solidarity protests at #ColumbiaUniversity.Part 1
https://www.democracynow.org/2026/4/3/leqaa_kordia_palestinian_activistPart 2
https://www.democracynow.org/2026/4/3/freed_from_ice_jail_leqaa_kordia -
2/2
Connecting the dots:
https://substack.com/@kaitjustice/note/c-236845913 #Epstein #EpsteinFiles #CoverUp #BillBarr #ColumbiaUniversity #DonaldBarr #Trump #Harveyweinstein #BillGates #DaltonSchool #PeterThiel #JDVance #DavidSacks #MichaelKratsios #JacobHelberg #Palantir #DeutscheBank #Kushner #EhudBarak
-
💥 Must read: 👇 ❗
Is the Barr Family Blocking The Epstein Investigation Because It Would Expose What's Being Built Right Now?
Three threads, fifty years, a 1973 Sci-Fi novel and the architecture of a sovereign class that answers to no one.
https://kaitjustice.substack.com/p/epstein-donald-bill-barr #Epstein #EpsteinFiles #CoverUp #BillBarr #ColumbiaUniversity #DonaldBarr #Trump #Harveyweinstein #BillGates #DaltonSchool #PeterThiel #JDVance #DavidSacks #MichaelKratsios #JacobHelberg #Palantir #DeutscheBank #Kushner #EhudBarak
-
The Borrowed Saint: The Book That Watched Me Back
I have been thinking about mirrors for forty-eight years. The thinking started in a dressing room at a community playhouse in Lincoln, Nebraska, where a row of mirrors lined the wall above a counter cluttered with spirit gum and cold cream and the residue of faces that had been built and removed hundreds of times. I was thirteen years old and I was watching an actor apply a prosthetic nose, and the thing that struck me was the moment when his own face disappeared under the new architecture. His eyes changed. The man in the mirror stopped being the person I had been talking to thirty seconds earlier and became someone whose bone structure carried a different social signal, a different set of expectations, a different gravitational field. Same eyes. Different face. Different world.
That image has been sitting in my head for nearly five decades, paying rent in the form of a question I could not discharge: what is the relationship between the face and the person behind it? Is the face a window or a wall? If it is a window, what passes through it, and in which direction? If it is a wall, who built it, and what is it defending?
The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins is now available from David Boles Books Writing and Publishing as a Kindle ebook and a trade paperback. It is the answer to that question, and the answer is worse than I expected.
The Mechanism
Asa Greer is five years old when he stands in a bathroom in Decker, Ohio and watches his reflection change. His cheekbones soften. His jaw loses its angles. For three seconds, he is wearing the face of the boy next door on his own skull. Then the face collapses, his features rush back, and the bathroom is loud again.
Asa can copy any face he sees. He can build composites from dozens of sources. He can walk through a room wearing the face that room requires, and the room will respond to the face without checking whether anything exists behind it. Each transformation extracts a sensory capacity he will never recover. Over fifty years, the ledger of things he can no longer smell, taste, feel, or hear grows longer than the ledger of things he retains.
I wanted the horror to be specific. Each loss is granular and irreplaceable: the smell of his own skin, the texture of his winter coat, the taste of tap water, his heartbeat’s internal sensation, the tonal distinctions that give melody its emotional contour. These are the small, unremarkable anchors that tether a person to the life they are living as opposed to any other life, and Asa severs them one by one and replaces them with borrowed faces that connect him to other people’s responses and sever him from his own existence.
The mechanism is supernatural. The cost is not.
The Kindness Problem
At twenty-eight, Asa discovers that performed goodness is the most powerful face he can build. Competence generates compliance. Charisma generates admiration. Authority generates obedience. Goodness generates worship. A room that witnesses an act of apparent compassion will defend the person who performed it against any attack, because the attack threatens the room’s belief that compassion exists.
Asa builds a kindness persona. He deploys it across a career that ascends from political consulting to the corridors of institutional power. The warmth that other people’s trust generates in his body is narcotic. His body is allergic to it. Every deployment produces an inflammatory response that begins at the jaw hinge and spreads through the muscles the performance recruits. The threshold contracts with each use. By his fifties, the margin between the face the world needs and the face his body can sustain is measured in minutes.
Writing this section of the book required me to think carefully about something I have observed across thirty years in theatre, publishing, and public life: the distance between a person’s performed concern and their actual capacity for being affected by another human being. Asa is an extreme case. The condition is not extreme. Every public figure, every institutional spokesperson, every person who has stood at a podium and projected the appearance of caring about something they were hired to manage rather than moved to address, operates on the same spectrum. Asa sits at the far end. The spectrum itself is ordinary.
Harlan Moeck and the Ditch
Every book needs a counter-argument, and this book’s counter-argument is a boy named Harlan Moeck who sits in the front row of Asa’s second-grade classroom and performs no performance at all. Harlan is kind because Harlan is kind, the way a heart beats because a heart beats. Asa can see it. He can catalog it. He cannot replicate it. He tries. The result is a window painted on a wall. Every measurement is precise. Light does not pass through.
Harlan appears three times across fifty years. Each appearance finds him doing invisible work: maintaining water systems, testing samples, keeping the infrastructure alive that the public consumes without awareness of the labor that produced it. The dedication reads: For the good men who dig the ditches. The water flows. No one applauds.
I have known Harlan Moecks. Every writer has. They are the people who do the work that makes the visible work possible, whose names appear in no coverage, whose labor sustains the systems that the public credits to the faces standing in front of cameras. I wrote Harlan because the book needed someone whose goodness was structural rather than performed, and because the horror of Asa’s condition is legible only when measured against a person for whom goodness is a condition of being alive rather than an overlay applied to a composite.
Cordelia’s Secret
Asa’s mother, Cordelia Greer, runs the household with efficiency and without affection. Touching her son only when logistics require it. Pushing his hair from his forehead with the heel of her hand. Washing a glass that is already clean, alone, in the dark, in the middle of the night, while the rest of the house sleeps.
The book’s final section, On the Lability, includes a clinical appendix: case notes of uncertain provenance describing Asa’s condition in medical language. Filed separately, an addendum describes a woman who presented at a clinic in 1987 asking whether the condition could be passed to a child. She said her father had possessed the ability to move his face and that it had eaten him from inside. She had spent her life holding still so it would not start.
That woman is Cordelia. The reader connects the dates and the details without being told. Every scene of emotional distance, every closed face, every hand that withdrew, is retroactively reframed. Cordelia was containing the same condition that consumed her son. The holding still was an act of will maintained across an entire lifetime. The coldness was a firewall.
I am proudest of this element of the book. The revelation arrives in a clinical register that has no capacity for grief, which is exactly why the grief hits as hard as it does. The driest language in the book carries the heaviest weight. If the mechanism works, the reader finishes the appendix and then sits for a moment and thinks about Cordelia washing the glass.
The Mirror on the Back Cover
One design detail I want to mention. On the paperback’s back cover, the title of the book appears reversed, as a mirror image. Letters flipped. Name reading backward. Below the reversed title, two amber eyes stare out, the same eyes that appear in the dissolving face on the front cover. Asa Greer is five years old in the first scene, standing in a bathroom, looking at a mirror. Turn the book over, and the mirror looks back.
The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins is available now from David Boles Books Writing and Publishing at BolesBooks.com. Kindle eBook and paperback.
David Boles is a writer, dramatist, editor, and publisher. A member of the Dramatists Guild since 1984 and a graduate of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University, he has published novels, nonfiction, and dramatic works through David Boles Books Writing and Publishing since 1975. He lives in New York City.
#audiobook #charisma #columbiaUniversity #face #fiction #hiding #horror #kindness #literature #lying #mechanism #novel #psychiatry #shapeshifter #success #tech -
The Borrowed Saint: The Book That Watched Me Back
I have been thinking about mirrors for forty-eight years. The thinking started in a dressing room at a community playhouse in Lincoln, Nebraska, where a row of mirrors lined the wall above a counter cluttered with spirit gum and cold cream and the residue of faces that had been built and removed hundreds of times. I was thirteen years old and I was watching an actor apply a prosthetic nose, and the thing that struck me was the moment when his own face disappeared under the new architecture. His eyes changed. The man in the mirror stopped being the person I had been talking to thirty seconds earlier and became someone whose bone structure carried a different social signal, a different set of expectations, a different gravitational field. Same eyes. Different face. Different world.
That image has been sitting in my head for nearly five decades, paying rent in the form of a question I could not discharge: what is the relationship between the face and the person behind it? Is the face a window or a wall? If it is a window, what passes through it, and in which direction? If it is a wall, who built it, and what is it defending?
The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins is now available from David Boles Books Writing and Publishing as a Kindle ebook and a trade paperback. It is the answer to that question, and the answer is worse than I expected.
The Mechanism
Asa Greer is five years old when he stands in a bathroom in Decker, Ohio and watches his reflection change. His cheekbones soften. His jaw loses its angles. For three seconds, he is wearing the face of the boy next door on his own skull. Then the face collapses, his features rush back, and the bathroom is loud again.
Asa can copy any face he sees. He can build composites from dozens of sources. He can walk through a room wearing the face that room requires, and the room will respond to the face without checking whether anything exists behind it. Each transformation extracts a sensory capacity he will never recover. Over fifty years, the ledger of things he can no longer smell, taste, feel, or hear grows longer than the ledger of things he retains.
I wanted the horror to be specific. Each loss is granular and irreplaceable: the smell of his own skin, the texture of his winter coat, the taste of tap water, his heartbeat’s internal sensation, the tonal distinctions that give melody its emotional contour. These are the small, unremarkable anchors that tether a person to the life they are living as opposed to any other life, and Asa severs them one by one and replaces them with borrowed faces that connect him to other people’s responses and sever him from his own existence.
The mechanism is supernatural. The cost is not.
The Kindness Problem
At twenty-eight, Asa discovers that performed goodness is the most powerful face he can build. Competence generates compliance. Charisma generates admiration. Authority generates obedience. Goodness generates worship. A room that witnesses an act of apparent compassion will defend the person who performed it against any attack, because the attack threatens the room’s belief that compassion exists.
Asa builds a kindness persona. He deploys it across a career that ascends from political consulting to the corridors of institutional power. The warmth that other people’s trust generates in his body is narcotic. His body is allergic to it. Every deployment produces an inflammatory response that begins at the jaw hinge and spreads through the muscles the performance recruits. The threshold contracts with each use. By his fifties, the margin between the face the world needs and the face his body can sustain is measured in minutes.
Writing this section of the book required me to think carefully about something I have observed across thirty years in theatre, publishing, and public life: the distance between a person’s performed concern and their actual capacity for being affected by another human being. Asa is an extreme case. The condition is not extreme. Every public figure, every institutional spokesperson, every person who has stood at a podium and projected the appearance of caring about something they were hired to manage rather than moved to address, operates on the same spectrum. Asa sits at the far end. The spectrum itself is ordinary.
Harlan Moeck and the Ditch
Every book needs a counter-argument, and this book’s counter-argument is a boy named Harlan Moeck who sits in the front row of Asa’s second-grade classroom and performs no performance at all. Harlan is kind because Harlan is kind, the way a heart beats because a heart beats. Asa can see it. He can catalog it. He cannot replicate it. He tries. The result is a window painted on a wall. Every measurement is precise. Light does not pass through.
Harlan appears three times across fifty years. Each appearance finds him doing invisible work: maintaining water systems, testing samples, keeping the infrastructure alive that the public consumes without awareness of the labor that produced it. The dedication reads: For the good men who dig the ditches. The water flows. No one applauds.
I have known Harlan Moecks. Every writer has. They are the people who do the work that makes the visible work possible, whose names appear in no coverage, whose labor sustains the systems that the public credits to the faces standing in front of cameras. I wrote Harlan because the book needed someone whose goodness was structural rather than performed, and because the horror of Asa’s condition is legible only when measured against a person for whom goodness is a condition of being alive rather than an overlay applied to a composite.
Cordelia’s Secret
Asa’s mother, Cordelia Greer, runs the household with efficiency and without affection. Touching her son only when logistics require it. Pushing his hair from his forehead with the heel of her hand. Washing a glass that is already clean, alone, in the dark, in the middle of the night, while the rest of the house sleeps.
The book’s final section, On the Lability, includes a clinical appendix: case notes of uncertain provenance describing Asa’s condition in medical language. Filed separately, an addendum describes a woman who presented at a clinic in 1987 asking whether the condition could be passed to a child. She said her father had possessed the ability to move his face and that it had eaten him from inside. She had spent her life holding still so it would not start.
That woman is Cordelia. The reader connects the dates and the details without being told. Every scene of emotional distance, every closed face, every hand that withdrew, is retroactively reframed. Cordelia was containing the same condition that consumed her son. The holding still was an act of will maintained across an entire lifetime. The coldness was a firewall.
I am proudest of this element of the book. The revelation arrives in a clinical register that has no capacity for grief, which is exactly why the grief hits as hard as it does. The driest language in the book carries the heaviest weight. If the mechanism works, the reader finishes the appendix and then sits for a moment and thinks about Cordelia washing the glass.
The Mirror on the Back Cover
One design detail I want to mention. On the paperback’s back cover, the title of the book appears reversed, as a mirror image. Letters flipped. Name reading backward. Below the reversed title, two amber eyes stare out, the same eyes that appear in the dissolving face on the front cover. Asa Greer is five years old in the first scene, standing in a bathroom, looking at a mirror. Turn the book over, and the mirror looks back.
The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins is available now from David Boles Books Writing and Publishing at BolesBooks.com. Kindle eBook and paperback.
David Boles is a writer, dramatist, editor, and publisher. A member of the Dramatists Guild since 1984 and a graduate of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University, he has published novels, nonfiction, and dramatic works through David Boles Books Writing and Publishing since 1975. He lives in New York City.
#audiobook #charisma #columbiaUniversity #face #fiction #hiding #horror #kindness #literature #lying #mechanism #novel #psychiatry #shapeshifter #success #tech -
Why ICE Is Allowed to Impersonate Law Enforcement
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.wired.com/story/why-ice-is-allowed-to-impersonate-law-enforcement/
-
Financial Decline Accelerates Brain Aging
Summary: A new study reveals a direct link between poor financial well-being and accelerated cognitive decline in middle-aged…
#NewsBeep #News #Health #Aging #AU #Australia #Brain #cognitivedecline #ColumbiaUniversity #Dementia #FinancialWell-being #memoryloss #Neurology #Neuroscience
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/555288/ -
Financial Decline Accelerates Brain Aging
Summary: A new study reveals a direct link between poor financial well-being and accelerated cognitive decline in middle-aged…
#NewsBeep #News #Health #Aging #AU #Australia #Brain #cognitivedecline #ColumbiaUniversity #Dementia #FinancialWell-being #memoryloss #Neurology #Neuroscience
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/555288/ -
Financial Decline Accelerates Brain Aging
Summary: A new study reveals a direct link between poor financial well-being and accelerated cognitive decline in middle-aged…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Health #aging #Brain #cognitivedecline #ColumbiaUniversity #dementia #FinancialWell-being #memoryloss #Neurology #Neuroscience
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/536385/ -
Financial Decline Accelerates Brain Aging
Summary: A new study reveals a direct link between poor financial well-being and accelerated cognitive decline in middle-aged…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Health #aging #Brain #cognitivedecline #ColumbiaUniversity #dementia #FinancialWell-being #memoryloss #Neurology #Neuroscience
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/536385/ -
@jonesmurphy The lawyer for #LeqaaKordia is probably sizing-up the endowment at #ColumbiaUniversity for her imminent lawsuit.
It’s pretty BIG! 💰💰💰
-
Leqaa Kordia, a pro-Palestinian activist, released after a year in ICE custody https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/16/leqaa-kordia-released-ice-custody #UsNews #IceUsImmigrationAndCustomsEnforcement #WestBank #Gaza #Palestine #ColumbiaUniversity #UsCampusProtests #Texas
-
The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·
Culture of Silence at Columbia Shielded Sexual Assault by Physician, Report Finds
-
The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·
Culture of Silence at Columbia Shielded Sexual Assault by Physician, Report Finds
-
‘We all want to know what he was doing in the bedroom’: Kerouac’s unseen archive goes on show in New York https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/mar/09/jack-kerouac-archive-photos-sexuality-grolier-club-exhibition-new-york-beat-generation #JackKerouac #Books #Photography #Art #ArtAndDesignBooks #ArtAndDesign #Culture #AllenGinsberg #WilliamBurroughs #FyodorDostoevsky #ColumbiaUniversity
-
‘We all want to know what he was doing in the bedroom’: Kerouac’s unseen archive goes on show in New York https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/mar/09/jack-kerouac-archive-photos-sexuality-grolier-club-exhibition-new-york-beat-generation #JackKerouac #Books #Photography #Art #ArtAndDesignBooks #ArtAndDesign #Culture #AllenGinsberg #WilliamBurroughs #FyodorDostoevsky #ColumbiaUniversity
-
‘We all want to know what he was doing in the bedroom’: Kerouac’s unseen archive goes on show in New York https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/mar/09/jack-kerouac-archive-photos-sexuality-grolier-club-exhibition-new-york-beat-generation #JackKerouac #Books #Photography #Art #ArtAndDesignBooks #ArtAndDesign #Culture #AllenGinsberg #WilliamBurroughs #FyodorDostoevsky #ColumbiaUniversity
-
‘We all want to know what he was doing in the bedroom’: Kerouac’s unseen archive goes on show in New York https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/mar/09/jack-kerouac-archive-photos-sexuality-grolier-club-exhibition-new-york-beat-generation #JackKerouac #Books #Photography #Art #ArtAndDesignBooks #ArtAndDesign #Culture #AllenGinsberg #WilliamBurroughs #FyodorDostoevsky #ColumbiaUniversity
-
The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·
A Year After His Arrest, Mahmoud Khalil Lives in Limbo and in Fear
-
The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·
A Year After His Arrest, Mahmoud Khalil Lives in Limbo and in Fear
-
NYPD releases bodycam footage of response to Columbia student's ICE arrest
-
Miscast: The Playwright Decides, and No One Else Gets a Vote
There is a moment in the life of every playwright when someone walks into a rehearsal room and announces that the character you wrote is not, in fact, the character you wrote. The director has a vision. The institution has a policy. The casting committee has decided that your Irish Catholic mother from the Southside of Chicago would be better served by an actress who has no connection to the world you built because connection, in the current theatrical climate, is less important than representation, and representation is whatever the people who control the stage say it is. You sit there. You watch your play become someone else’s argument. And you have two choices: you can let it happen, or you can pull the production.
I pulled the production.
That story appears in Chapter 11 of Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage?, my new book, now available in eBook, paperback, and PDF from David Boles Books. The anecdote is from Columbia University, where I was earning my MFA, and where a director proposed splitting a single character in my play into bipolar twins under the banner of non-traditional casting. I said no. I cancelled the production. I lost the showcase. I kept the play. That was more than thirty years ago, and I have spent the time since thinking about what that moment meant, not just for me but for every playwright who has watched the American theatre transform casting from an artistic decision made by the author into an institutional mandate imposed over the author’s objection.
Miscast is the book that thinking produced.
The argument is simple. The playwright creates the characters. The playwright determines what the characters are. No institution has the right to override that determination. When Lin-Manuel Miranda casts actors of color as the Founding Fathers in Hamilton, that is authorial choice, and it is art. When an institution imposes non-traditional casting on a playwright’s work without the playwright’s knowledge or against the playwright’s wishes, that is something else entirely. It is expropriation. It is the seizure of creative authority from the person who did the creating. And it is now standard practice in the American theatre, codified in equity agreements, hiring mandates, and the Dramatists Guild’s own 2021 Inclusion Rider, the first contract addendum in theatre history that asks playwrights to redirect their copyright authority toward institutional demographic objectives.
That is a sentence worth reading twice.
The book traces the full arc. It begins with the all-male stages of fifth-century Athens, where Medea and Clytemnestra were performed by masked men in a civic festival that excluded women not because they lacked talent but because the stage was a function of democratic citizenship and women were not citizens. It moves through the Restoration revolution of 1660, when Charles II returned from French exile and issued a royal warrant requiring female roles to be performed by women, ending two thousand years of all-male convention in England overnight. It examines the blackface minstrelsy of the nineteenth century, which I argue is not the opposite of non-traditional casting but its structural cousin: both treat the actor’s body as raw material on which someone else’s vision is painted, the one through burnt cork, the other through institutional policy, with the same underlying assumption that the controlling authority, not the playwright, decides what the body on stage means.
That claim will make people uncomfortable. It is meant to. The surface justifications of blackface and non-traditional casting are opposite, one rooted in white supremacy, the other in racial justice, but the structural relationship between the performer’s body and the institution that governs the stage is identical. The body is canvas. The institution holds the brush. The playwright, in both systems, is irrelevant.
The book then turns to case studies that give the argument flesh. Samuel Beckett’s refusal to allow the American Repertory Theatre to cast women in Endgame in 1984, which established that a playwright’s stage directions are not suggestions but legally enforceable elements of the work. August Wilson’s 1996 address at the Theatre Communications Group conference, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” which declared that Black plays require Black directors and Black actors, and which remains the most important speech about race and the American stage delivered in the last half century. The casting of Hamilton and the 2022 revival of 1776, where color-conscious casting was deployed to reimagine the founding mythology of white America through non-white bodies, with radically different results. The removal of a white ASL interpreter from a performance of The Lion King because the actors on stage were Black, which raises a question the theatre has not answered: is an interpreter a performer or a conduit? Ali Stroker’s Tony-winning performance in Oklahoma!, which asks whether a wheelchair in a scene that depends on physical running is an artistic disruption or an artistic contribution, and who gets to decide. Eugene O’Neill’s Irish families, in which the ethnicity is not decoration but architecture, load-bearing walls that collapse if you remove them.
Each of these cases is examined at length, with sources documented and arguments presented with as much candor as I can bring to the page. I have tried to be fair. I have also tried to be honest. Where those two imperatives conflict, I chose honesty. That choice runs through the entire book, and it is the choice I have made in every professional decision since I founded The United Stage on the principle that the playwright has the right to direct the first public performance of the playwright’s own play.
I have been a dues-paying member of the Dramatists Guild of America since July 2, 1984, member number 45010, enrolled on the advice of a freshman playwriting teacher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who read the first one-act play I ever wrote and told me to join immediately. I did not understand at eighteen what that membership meant. I understand it now. The Guild was built to protect the playwright. Its Bill of Rights, maintained since the first Minimum Basic Agreement of 1926, affirms the playwright’s right to approve casting, the creative team, and production elements, to be present at rehearsals, to own the copyright, and to protect the integrity of the text. This book criticizes the Guild’s Inclusion Rider, and I want to be clear that the criticism is offered from within the Guild, by a member who has been paying dues without interruption for more than forty years, who believes in the Guild’s foundational mission, and who writes this book in its defense.
The book also benefits from the expertise of Janna Sweenie, my collaborator on American Sign Language educational materials, who contributed her knowledge of Deaf culture, interpreter ethics, and the NAD-RID Code of Professional Conduct to the chapter on the Lion King interpreter incident. The precision in that analysis is hers. The errors in the book are mine.
Miscast is not a book about inclusion. It is a book about authorship. The distinction matters more than any other distinction in the American theatre today, because every institution that promotes non-traditional casting claims to be expanding inclusion, and some of them are, but the mechanism by which they do it requires seizing creative authority from the person who created the work. That seizure is the subject of this book. That seizure is what I spent thirty years watching. That seizure is what I said no to in a rehearsal room at Columbia, and what I am saying no to now, in print, at full length, with documentation.
The playwright decides. That is the ground on which this book stands.
Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage? is available now from David Boles Books in Kindle eBook ($9.99), paperback ($16.99), and free PDF download. David Boles is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and has been writing for the stage, for television, and for publication for more than four decades.
#artOwnership #augustWilson #bolesBooks #casting #columbiaUniversity #cuny #davidBoles #dramatistsGuild #nonTraditional #playwright #production #samuelBeckett #television #theatre -
Miscast: The Playwright Decides, and No One Else Gets a Vote
There is a moment in the life of every playwright when someone walks into a rehearsal room and announces that the character you wrote is not, in fact, the character you wrote. The director has a vision. The institution has a policy. The casting committee has decided that your Irish Catholic mother from the Southside of Chicago would be better served by an actress who has no connection to the world you built because connection, in the current theatrical climate, is less important than representation, and representation is whatever the people who control the stage say it is. You sit there. You watch your play become someone else’s argument. And you have two choices: you can let it happen, or you can pull the production.
I pulled the production.
That story appears in Chapter 11 of Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage?, my new book, now available in eBook, paperback, and PDF from David Boles Books. The anecdote is from Columbia University, where I was earning my MFA, and where a director proposed splitting a single character in my play into bipolar twins under the banner of non-traditional casting. I said no. I cancelled the production. I lost the showcase. I kept the play. That was more than thirty years ago, and I have spent the time since thinking about what that moment meant, not just for me but for every playwright who has watched the American theatre transform casting from an artistic decision made by the author into an institutional mandate imposed over the author’s objection.
Miscast is the book that thinking produced.
The argument is simple. The playwright creates the characters. The playwright determines what the characters are. No institution has the right to override that determination. When Lin-Manuel Miranda casts actors of color as the Founding Fathers in Hamilton, that is authorial choice, and it is art. When an institution imposes non-traditional casting on a playwright’s work without the playwright’s knowledge or against the playwright’s wishes, that is something else entirely. It is expropriation. It is the seizure of creative authority from the person who did the creating. And it is now standard practice in the American theatre, codified in equity agreements, hiring mandates, and the Dramatists Guild’s own 2021 Inclusion Rider, the first contract addendum in theatre history that asks playwrights to redirect their copyright authority toward institutional demographic objectives.
That is a sentence worth reading twice.
The book traces the full arc. It begins with the all-male stages of fifth-century Athens, where Medea and Clytemnestra were performed by masked men in a civic festival that excluded women not because they lacked talent but because the stage was a function of democratic citizenship and women were not citizens. It moves through the Restoration revolution of 1660, when Charles II returned from French exile and issued a royal warrant requiring female roles to be performed by women, ending two thousand years of all-male convention in England overnight. It examines the blackface minstrelsy of the nineteenth century, which I argue is not the opposite of non-traditional casting but its structural cousin: both treat the actor’s body as raw material on which someone else’s vision is painted, the one through burnt cork, the other through institutional policy, with the same underlying assumption that the controlling authority, not the playwright, decides what the body on stage means.
That claim will make people uncomfortable. It is meant to. The surface justifications of blackface and non-traditional casting are opposite, one rooted in white supremacy, the other in racial justice, but the structural relationship between the performer’s body and the institution that governs the stage is identical. The body is canvas. The institution holds the brush. The playwright, in both systems, is irrelevant.
The book then turns to case studies that give the argument flesh. Samuel Beckett’s refusal to allow the American Repertory Theatre to cast women in Endgame in 1984, which established that a playwright’s stage directions are not suggestions but legally enforceable elements of the work. August Wilson’s 1996 address at the Theatre Communications Group conference, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” which declared that Black plays require Black directors and Black actors, and which remains the most important speech about race and the American stage delivered in the last half century. The casting of Hamilton and the 2022 revival of 1776, where color-conscious casting was deployed to reimagine the founding mythology of white America through non-white bodies, with radically different results. The removal of a white ASL interpreter from a performance of The Lion King because the actors on stage were Black, which raises a question the theatre has not answered: is an interpreter a performer or a conduit? Ali Stroker’s Tony-winning performance in Oklahoma!, which asks whether a wheelchair in a scene that depends on physical running is an artistic disruption or an artistic contribution, and who gets to decide. Eugene O’Neill’s Irish families, in which the ethnicity is not decoration but architecture, load-bearing walls that collapse if you remove them.
Each of these cases is examined at length, with sources documented and arguments presented with as much candor as I can bring to the page. I have tried to be fair. I have also tried to be honest. Where those two imperatives conflict, I chose honesty. That choice runs through the entire book, and it is the choice I have made in every professional decision since I founded The United Stage on the principle that the playwright has the right to direct the first public performance of the playwright’s own play.
I have been a dues-paying member of the Dramatists Guild of America since July 2, 1984, member number 45010, enrolled on the advice of a freshman playwriting teacher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who read the first one-act play I ever wrote and told me to join immediately. I did not understand at eighteen what that membership meant. I understand it now. The Guild was built to protect the playwright. Its Bill of Rights, maintained since the first Minimum Basic Agreement of 1926, affirms the playwright’s right to approve casting, the creative team, and production elements, to be present at rehearsals, to own the copyright, and to protect the integrity of the text. This book criticizes the Guild’s Inclusion Rider, and I want to be clear that the criticism is offered from within the Guild, by a member who has been paying dues without interruption for more than forty years, who believes in the Guild’s foundational mission, and who writes this book in its defense.
The book also benefits from the expertise of Janna Sweenie, my collaborator on American Sign Language educational materials, who contributed her knowledge of Deaf culture, interpreter ethics, and the NAD-RID Code of Professional Conduct to the chapter on the Lion King interpreter incident. The precision in that analysis is hers. The errors in the book are mine.
Miscast is not a book about inclusion. It is a book about authorship. The distinction matters more than any other distinction in the American theatre today, because every institution that promotes non-traditional casting claims to be expanding inclusion, and some of them are, but the mechanism by which they do it requires seizing creative authority from the person who created the work. That seizure is the subject of this book. That seizure is what I spent thirty years watching. That seizure is what I said no to in a rehearsal room at Columbia, and what I am saying no to now, in print, at full length, with documentation.
The playwright decides. That is the ground on which this book stands.
Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage? is available now from David Boles Books in Kindle eBook ($9.99), paperback ($16.99), and free PDF download. David Boles is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and has been writing for the stage, for television, and for publication for more than four decades.
#artOwnership #augustWilson #bolesBooks #casting #columbiaUniversity #cuny #davidBoles #dramatistsGuild #nonTraditional #playwright #production #samuelBeckett #television #theatre -
Miscast: The Playwright Decides, and No One Else Gets a Vote
There is a moment in the life of every playwright when someone walks into a rehearsal room and announces that the character you wrote is not, in fact, the character you wrote. The director has a vision. The institution has a policy. The casting committee has decided that your Irish Catholic mother from the Southside of Chicago would be better served by an actress who has no connection to the world you built because connection, in the current theatrical climate, is less important than representation, and representation is whatever the people who control the stage say it is. You sit there. You watch your play become someone else’s argument. And you have two choices: you can let it happen, or you can pull the production.
I pulled the production.
That story appears in Chapter 11 of Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage?, my new book, now available in eBook, paperback, and PDF from David Boles Books. The anecdote is from Columbia University, where I was earning my MFA, and where a director proposed splitting a single character in my play into bipolar twins under the banner of non-traditional casting. I said no. I cancelled the production. I lost the showcase. I kept the play. That was more than thirty years ago, and I have spent the time since thinking about what that moment meant, not just for me but for every playwright who has watched the American theatre transform casting from an artistic decision made by the author into an institutional mandate imposed over the author’s objection.
Miscast is the book that thinking produced.
The argument is simple. The playwright creates the characters. The playwright determines what the characters are. No institution has the right to override that determination. When Lin-Manuel Miranda casts actors of color as the Founding Fathers in Hamilton, that is authorial choice, and it is art. When an institution imposes non-traditional casting on a playwright’s work without the playwright’s knowledge or against the playwright’s wishes, that is something else entirely. It is expropriation. It is the seizure of creative authority from the person who did the creating. And it is now standard practice in the American theatre, codified in equity agreements, hiring mandates, and the Dramatists Guild’s own 2021 Inclusion Rider, the first contract addendum in theatre history that asks playwrights to redirect their copyright authority toward institutional demographic objectives.
That is a sentence worth reading twice.
The book traces the full arc. It begins with the all-male stages of fifth-century Athens, where Medea and Clytemnestra were performed by masked men in a civic festival that excluded women not because they lacked talent but because the stage was a function of democratic citizenship and women were not citizens. It moves through the Restoration revolution of 1660, when Charles II returned from French exile and issued a royal warrant requiring female roles to be performed by women, ending two thousand years of all-male convention in England overnight. It examines the blackface minstrelsy of the nineteenth century, which I argue is not the opposite of non-traditional casting but its structural cousin: both treat the actor’s body as raw material on which someone else’s vision is painted, the one through burnt cork, the other through institutional policy, with the same underlying assumption that the controlling authority, not the playwright, decides what the body on stage means.
That claim will make people uncomfortable. It is meant to. The surface justifications of blackface and non-traditional casting are opposite, one rooted in white supremacy, the other in racial justice, but the structural relationship between the performer’s body and the institution that governs the stage is identical. The body is canvas. The institution holds the brush. The playwright, in both systems, is irrelevant.
The book then turns to case studies that give the argument flesh. Samuel Beckett’s refusal to allow the American Repertory Theatre to cast women in Endgame in 1984, which established that a playwright’s stage directions are not suggestions but legally enforceable elements of the work. August Wilson’s 1996 address at the Theatre Communications Group conference, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” which declared that Black plays require Black directors and Black actors, and which remains the most important speech about race and the American stage delivered in the last half century. The casting of Hamilton and the 2022 revival of 1776, where color-conscious casting was deployed to reimagine the founding mythology of white America through non-white bodies, with radically different results. The removal of a white ASL interpreter from a performance of The Lion King because the actors on stage were Black, which raises a question the theatre has not answered: is an interpreter a performer or a conduit? Ali Stroker’s Tony-winning performance in Oklahoma!, which asks whether a wheelchair in a scene that depends on physical running is an artistic disruption or an artistic contribution, and who gets to decide. Eugene O’Neill’s Irish families, in which the ethnicity is not decoration but architecture, load-bearing walls that collapse if you remove them.
Each of these cases is examined at length, with sources documented and arguments presented with as much candor as I can bring to the page. I have tried to be fair. I have also tried to be honest. Where those two imperatives conflict, I chose honesty. That choice runs through the entire book, and it is the choice I have made in every professional decision since I founded The United Stage on the principle that the playwright has the right to direct the first public performance of the playwright’s own play.
I have been a dues-paying member of the Dramatists Guild of America since July 2, 1984, member number 45010, enrolled on the advice of a freshman playwriting teacher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who read the first one-act play I ever wrote and told me to join immediately. I did not understand at eighteen what that membership meant. I understand it now. The Guild was built to protect the playwright. Its Bill of Rights, maintained since the first Minimum Basic Agreement of 1926, affirms the playwright’s right to approve casting, the creative team, and production elements, to be present at rehearsals, to own the copyright, and to protect the integrity of the text. This book criticizes the Guild’s Inclusion Rider, and I want to be clear that the criticism is offered from within the Guild, by a member who has been paying dues without interruption for more than forty years, who believes in the Guild’s foundational mission, and who writes this book in its defense.
The book also benefits from the expertise of Janna Sweenie, my collaborator on American Sign Language educational materials, who contributed her knowledge of Deaf culture, interpreter ethics, and the NAD-RID Code of Professional Conduct to the chapter on the Lion King interpreter incident. The precision in that analysis is hers. The errors in the book are mine.
Miscast is not a book about inclusion. It is a book about authorship. The distinction matters more than any other distinction in the American theatre today, because every institution that promotes non-traditional casting claims to be expanding inclusion, and some of them are, but the mechanism by which they do it requires seizing creative authority from the person who created the work. That seizure is the subject of this book. That seizure is what I spent thirty years watching. That seizure is what I said no to in a rehearsal room at Columbia, and what I am saying no to now, in print, at full length, with documentation.
The playwright decides. That is the ground on which this book stands.
Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage? is available now from David Boles Books in Kindle eBook ($9.99), paperback ($16.99), and free PDF download. David Boles is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and has been writing for the stage, for television, and for publication for more than four decades.
#artOwnership #augustWilson #bolesBooks #casting #columbiaUniversity #cuny #davidBoles #dramatistsGuild #nonTraditional #playwright #production #samuelBeckett #television #theatre -
Miscast: The Playwright Decides, and No One Else Gets a Vote
There is a moment in the life of every playwright when someone walks into a rehearsal room and announces that the character you wrote is not, in fact, the character you wrote. The director has a vision. The institution has a policy. The casting committee has decided that your Irish Catholic mother from the Southside of Chicago would be better served by an actress who has no connection to the world you built because connection, in the current theatrical climate, is less important than representation, and representation is whatever the people who control the stage say it is. You sit there. You watch your play become someone else’s argument. And you have two choices: you can let it happen, or you can pull the production.
I pulled the production.
That story appears in Chapter 11 of Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage?, my new book, now available in eBook, paperback, and PDF from David Boles Books. The anecdote is from Columbia University, where I was earning my MFA, and where a director proposed splitting a single character in my play into bipolar twins under the banner of non-traditional casting. I said no. I cancelled the production. I lost the showcase. I kept the play. That was more than thirty years ago, and I have spent the time since thinking about what that moment meant, not just for me but for every playwright who has watched the American theatre transform casting from an artistic decision made by the author into an institutional mandate imposed over the author’s objection.
Miscast is the book that thinking produced.
The argument is simple. The playwright creates the characters. The playwright determines what the characters are. No institution has the right to override that determination. When Lin-Manuel Miranda casts actors of color as the Founding Fathers in Hamilton, that is authorial choice, and it is art. When an institution imposes non-traditional casting on a playwright’s work without the playwright’s knowledge or against the playwright’s wishes, that is something else entirely. It is expropriation. It is the seizure of creative authority from the person who did the creating. And it is now standard practice in the American theatre, codified in equity agreements, hiring mandates, and the Dramatists Guild’s own 2021 Inclusion Rider, the first contract addendum in theatre history that asks playwrights to redirect their copyright authority toward institutional demographic objectives.
That is a sentence worth reading twice.
The book traces the full arc. It begins with the all-male stages of fifth-century Athens, where Medea and Clytemnestra were performed by masked men in a civic festival that excluded women not because they lacked talent but because the stage was a function of democratic citizenship and women were not citizens. It moves through the Restoration revolution of 1660, when Charles II returned from French exile and issued a royal warrant requiring female roles to be performed by women, ending two thousand years of all-male convention in England overnight. It examines the blackface minstrelsy of the nineteenth century, which I argue is not the opposite of non-traditional casting but its structural cousin: both treat the actor’s body as raw material on which someone else’s vision is painted, the one through burnt cork, the other through institutional policy, with the same underlying assumption that the controlling authority, not the playwright, decides what the body on stage means.
That claim will make people uncomfortable. It is meant to. The surface justifications of blackface and non-traditional casting are opposite, one rooted in white supremacy, the other in racial justice, but the structural relationship between the performer’s body and the institution that governs the stage is identical. The body is canvas. The institution holds the brush. The playwright, in both systems, is irrelevant.
The book then turns to case studies that give the argument flesh. Samuel Beckett’s refusal to allow the American Repertory Theatre to cast women in Endgame in 1984, which established that a playwright’s stage directions are not suggestions but legally enforceable elements of the work. August Wilson’s 1996 address at the Theatre Communications Group conference, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” which declared that Black plays require Black directors and Black actors, and which remains the most important speech about race and the American stage delivered in the last half century. The casting of Hamilton and the 2022 revival of 1776, where color-conscious casting was deployed to reimagine the founding mythology of white America through non-white bodies, with radically different results. The removal of a white ASL interpreter from a performance of The Lion King because the actors on stage were Black, which raises a question the theatre has not answered: is an interpreter a performer or a conduit? Ali Stroker’s Tony-winning performance in Oklahoma!, which asks whether a wheelchair in a scene that depends on physical running is an artistic disruption or an artistic contribution, and who gets to decide. Eugene O’Neill’s Irish families, in which the ethnicity is not decoration but architecture, load-bearing walls that collapse if you remove them.
Each of these cases is examined at length, with sources documented and arguments presented with as much candor as I can bring to the page. I have tried to be fair. I have also tried to be honest. Where those two imperatives conflict, I chose honesty. That choice runs through the entire book, and it is the choice I have made in every professional decision since I founded The United Stage on the principle that the playwright has the right to direct the first public performance of the playwright’s own play.
I have been a dues-paying member of the Dramatists Guild of America since July 2, 1984, member number 45010, enrolled on the advice of a freshman playwriting teacher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who read the first one-act play I ever wrote and told me to join immediately. I did not understand at eighteen what that membership meant. I understand it now. The Guild was built to protect the playwright. Its Bill of Rights, maintained since the first Minimum Basic Agreement of 1926, affirms the playwright’s right to approve casting, the creative team, and production elements, to be present at rehearsals, to own the copyright, and to protect the integrity of the text. This book criticizes the Guild’s Inclusion Rider, and I want to be clear that the criticism is offered from within the Guild, by a member who has been paying dues without interruption for more than forty years, who believes in the Guild’s foundational mission, and who writes this book in its defense.
The book also benefits from the expertise of Janna Sweenie, my collaborator on American Sign Language educational materials, who contributed her knowledge of Deaf culture, interpreter ethics, and the NAD-RID Code of Professional Conduct to the chapter on the Lion King interpreter incident. The precision in that analysis is hers. The errors in the book are mine.
Miscast is not a book about inclusion. It is a book about authorship. The distinction matters more than any other distinction in the American theatre today, because every institution that promotes non-traditional casting claims to be expanding inclusion, and some of them are, but the mechanism by which they do it requires seizing creative authority from the person who created the work. That seizure is the subject of this book. That seizure is what I spent thirty years watching. That seizure is what I said no to in a rehearsal room at Columbia, and what I am saying no to now, in print, at full length, with documentation.
The playwright decides. That is the ground on which this book stands.
Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage? is available now from David Boles Books in Kindle eBook ($9.99), paperback ($16.99), and free PDF download. David Boles is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and has been writing for the stage, for television, and for publication for more than four decades.
#artOwnership #augustWilson #bolesBooks #casting #columbiaUniversity #cuny #davidBoles #dramatistsGuild #nonTraditional #playwright #production #samuelBeckett #television #theatre -
Miscast: The Playwright Decides, and No One Else Gets a Vote
There is a moment in the life of every playwright when someone walks into a rehearsal room and announces that the character you wrote is not, in fact, the character you wrote. The director has a vision. The institution has a policy. The casting committee has decided that your Irish Catholic mother from the Southside of Chicago would be better served by an actress who has no connection to the world you built because connection, in the current theatrical climate, is less important than representation, and representation is whatever the people who control the stage say it is. You sit there. You watch your play become someone else’s argument. And you have two choices: you can let it happen, or you can pull the production.
I pulled the production.
That story appears in Chapter 11 of Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage?, my new book, now available in eBook, paperback, and PDF from David Boles Books. The anecdote is from Columbia University, where I was earning my MFA, and where a director proposed splitting a single character in my play into bipolar twins under the banner of non-traditional casting. I said no. I cancelled the production. I lost the showcase. I kept the play. That was more than thirty years ago, and I have spent the time since thinking about what that moment meant, not just for me but for every playwright who has watched the American theatre transform casting from an artistic decision made by the author into an institutional mandate imposed over the author’s objection.
Miscast is the book that thinking produced.
The argument is simple. The playwright creates the characters. The playwright determines what the characters are. No institution has the right to override that determination. When Lin-Manuel Miranda casts actors of color as the Founding Fathers in Hamilton, that is authorial choice, and it is art. When an institution imposes non-traditional casting on a playwright’s work without the playwright’s knowledge or against the playwright’s wishes, that is something else entirely. It is expropriation. It is the seizure of creative authority from the person who did the creating. And it is now standard practice in the American theatre, codified in equity agreements, hiring mandates, and the Dramatists Guild’s own 2021 Inclusion Rider, the first contract addendum in theatre history that asks playwrights to redirect their copyright authority toward institutional demographic objectives.
That is a sentence worth reading twice.
The book traces the full arc. It begins with the all-male stages of fifth-century Athens, where Medea and Clytemnestra were performed by masked men in a civic festival that excluded women not because they lacked talent but because the stage was a function of democratic citizenship and women were not citizens. It moves through the Restoration revolution of 1660, when Charles II returned from French exile and issued a royal warrant requiring female roles to be performed by women, ending two thousand years of all-male convention in England overnight. It examines the blackface minstrelsy of the nineteenth century, which I argue is not the opposite of non-traditional casting but its structural cousin: both treat the actor’s body as raw material on which someone else’s vision is painted, the one through burnt cork, the other through institutional policy, with the same underlying assumption that the controlling authority, not the playwright, decides what the body on stage means.
That claim will make people uncomfortable. It is meant to. The surface justifications of blackface and non-traditional casting are opposite, one rooted in white supremacy, the other in racial justice, but the structural relationship between the performer’s body and the institution that governs the stage is identical. The body is canvas. The institution holds the brush. The playwright, in both systems, is irrelevant.
The book then turns to case studies that give the argument flesh. Samuel Beckett’s refusal to allow the American Repertory Theatre to cast women in Endgame in 1984, which established that a playwright’s stage directions are not suggestions but legally enforceable elements of the work. August Wilson’s 1996 address at the Theatre Communications Group conference, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” which declared that Black plays require Black directors and Black actors, and which remains the most important speech about race and the American stage delivered in the last half century. The casting of Hamilton and the 2022 revival of 1776, where color-conscious casting was deployed to reimagine the founding mythology of white America through non-white bodies, with radically different results. The removal of a white ASL interpreter from a performance of The Lion King because the actors on stage were Black, which raises a question the theatre has not answered: is an interpreter a performer or a conduit? Ali Stroker’s Tony-winning performance in Oklahoma!, which asks whether a wheelchair in a scene that depends on physical running is an artistic disruption or an artistic contribution, and who gets to decide. Eugene O’Neill’s Irish families, in which the ethnicity is not decoration but architecture, load-bearing walls that collapse if you remove them.
Each of these cases is examined at length, with sources documented and arguments presented with as much candor as I can bring to the page. I have tried to be fair. I have also tried to be honest. Where those two imperatives conflict, I chose honesty. That choice runs through the entire book, and it is the choice I have made in every professional decision since I founded The United Stage on the principle that the playwright has the right to direct the first public performance of the playwright’s own play.
I have been a dues-paying member of the Dramatists Guild of America since July 2, 1984, member number 45010, enrolled on the advice of a freshman playwriting teacher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who read the first one-act play I ever wrote and told me to join immediately. I did not understand at eighteen what that membership meant. I understand it now. The Guild was built to protect the playwright. Its Bill of Rights, maintained since the first Minimum Basic Agreement of 1926, affirms the playwright’s right to approve casting, the creative team, and production elements, to be present at rehearsals, to own the copyright, and to protect the integrity of the text. This book criticizes the Guild’s Inclusion Rider, and I want to be clear that the criticism is offered from within the Guild, by a member who has been paying dues without interruption for more than forty years, who believes in the Guild’s foundational mission, and who writes this book in its defense.
The book also benefits from the expertise of Janna Sweenie, my collaborator on American Sign Language educational materials, who contributed her knowledge of Deaf culture, interpreter ethics, and the NAD-RID Code of Professional Conduct to the chapter on the Lion King interpreter incident. The precision in that analysis is hers. The errors in the book are mine.
Miscast is not a book about inclusion. It is a book about authorship. The distinction matters more than any other distinction in the American theatre today, because every institution that promotes non-traditional casting claims to be expanding inclusion, and some of them are, but the mechanism by which they do it requires seizing creative authority from the person who created the work. That seizure is the subject of this book. That seizure is what I spent thirty years watching. That seizure is what I said no to in a rehearsal room at Columbia, and what I am saying no to now, in print, at full length, with documentation.
The playwright decides. That is the ground on which this book stands.
Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage? is available now from David Boles Books in Kindle eBook ($9.99), paperback ($16.99), and free PDF download. David Boles is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and has been writing for the stage, for television, and for publication for more than four decades.
#artOwnership #augustWilson #bolesBooks #casting #columbiaUniversity #cuny #davidBoles #dramatistsGuild #nonTraditional #playwright #production #samuelBeckett #television #theatre -
I gave a talk on #franzBoas a couple weeks ago - the hegemony-smashing #antiracist founder of American #anthropology, who swam upstream during the leadup to WW2 (and got pushed out of his job at #ColumbiaUniversity for it - good job Columbia!).
So close to being ready to share it online! Stay tuned!
-
The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·
The Many Shades of Complicity in the Epstein Files Fallout
-
The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·
The Many Shades of Complicity in the Epstein Files Fallout
-
STRONG LANGUAGE WARNING: Dozens protest after federal agents detain Columbia student
Dozens of students gathered at Columbia University's gates in protest after agents from US Department of Homeland Security misrepresented themselves as searching for a missing person and detained a student from Azerbaijan in campus housing. #News #Reuters #Newsfeed #world #USA #UnitedStates #ColumbiaUniversity #student Read the story here: 👉 Subscribe: Keep up with the latest news from…
-
"NEW YORK (AP) — Federal immigration authorities arrested a Columbia University student early Thursday, triggering protests on campus along with allegations that agents had entered the university-owned residence under false pretenses."
#ColumbiaUniversity #EllieAghayeva #Mamdani #Trump #ICENews #ICE
https://apnews.com/article/columbia-university-student-dhs-ice-f76e678d014680390322703d46eb3b9c -
"Columbia University said on Thursday morning that one of its students was arrested by federal immigration officers who apparently misrepresented themselves to gain entry to a residential building to make the apprehension."
#ColumbiaUniversity #DHS #NYC #ICENews #ICE
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/26/columbia-student-detained-federal-agents -
Columbia says DHS detained student after agents entered university building https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/26/columbia-student-detained-federal-agents #ColumbiaUniversity #UsNews #UsImmigration #NewYork #IceUsImmigrationAndCustomsEnforcement
-
The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·Immigration Agents Arrest Student Inside Columbia Building, School Says
-
Neuroscientist resigns from Columbia amid revelations about Epstein ties https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/25/richard-axel-columbia-university-resignation-epstein #ColumbiaUniversity #JeffreyEpstein #UsNews #NewYork #HigherEducation #UsUniversities
-
The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·
Leader of Columbia Brain Institute Quits Over Friendship With Epstein
