Terry Teachout, over at the Wall Street Journal, talks some sense about whether Bart Sher can and should direct August Wilson's Joe Turner in NYC:

Lincoln Center Theater's production of "Joe Turner" is already raising a ruckus of the wrong sort. Marion McClinton, a black director who has staged two Wilson plays on Broadway, recently told a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press that the decision to hire Mr. Sher, who is white, was "straight-up institutional racism."

[But] if Wilson is a major playwright, then surely part of the proof of his stature lies in the ability of his work to speak to all men in all conditions.

From one angle, as I've mentioned before, that argument runs the risk of sounding like callous appropriationism.

From The Souls of Black Folk:

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

Wilson probably would've resisted Sher directing Joe Turner—he described his cultural project as building a repertoire by and for black Americans, a repertoire that would shelter black American actors and directors from the double-consciousness of making token black plays for white regional theaters.

Wilson achieved that and then some—he transcended his cultural context and, therefore, his own project. He wrote a repertoire of plays that a huge, broad audience wants to see and direct and be part of. Wilson's work will be performed everywhere, in dozens of languages, for decades to come. Sher's just the beginning—just you wait until the Osaka production of 2154.

There's still plenty of institutional bigotry to go around and kick back against (the very phenomenon of token black/Asian/gay/feminist plays in regional-theater seasons is evidence of that). But it doesn't do anyone any favors to argue that a Tony Award magnet like Bart Sher isn't allowed to direct August Wilson.

(Whether there's a suspicious dearth of black directors who are Tony Award magnets is another argument—and one worth having. Also: Weird that this national-profile debate about race and theater has its roots in Seattle.)

More locally, you should see Pat Graney's new dance piece, House of Mind, this weekend:

(She got those chairs from the Canterbury.)

From a preview of the piece that ran in the paper a few weeks ago:

House of Mind deploys the same combination of structure and surrealism [that she admires in writers like Gertrude Stein and Julio Cortázar]. It begins with one dancer—in a short skirt and kneesocks—walking complicated patterns across the floor, with quick turns like she's tracing the perimeter of an irregularly shaped star. Then another, upstage, doing the same thing. Then another, walking down stairs from a catwalk, and another, opening and closing doors in a small room built high over the stage. The sound clips come from Graney's mother, Stars Wars, Dune, and snippets of music from her childhood ("Crimson and Clover," "White Rabbit," "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"). The scenes are fundamentally domestic: dancers read, play house on an Oriental carpet, bake a cake, take off their pants and eat a snack of cheese and tomato. But they are fundamentally fractured, like the complicated geometry the dancers follow when walking from one side of the floor to another.

Nobody took off her pants and ate cheese last night, but everything else was there—it's a mesmerizing piece with a beautiful score of composition and sampling by Amy Denio.

Women in 40s dresses move around a giant warehouse that Graney and architect David Traylor have turned into a through-the-looking-glass installation of Graney's childhood memories—floors made of sand, her father's study wallpapered with his old police reports, a wall of white buttons with cascading water, a working stove and fridge (the dancers make brownies), a closet full of enormous dresses, a monster's tail unfurled from beneath a bed, a towering wall made of little compartments to store miniatures from Graney's private collection, etc.

After this weekend, it will tour to Houston. And there's an added late show tonight at 10 pm. Step out of the snow and into the sand.