An End To Breeches: Why The Literalist Casting of Skins Is The Right Kind Of Extremism
Last month’s issue of American Theatre reprinted prepared remarks by NYU’s Richard Schechner on the limits of progressive casting. As in, he is for eradicating them. He quotes theatre luminary Zelda Fichandler from 1988: “suppose that one assigned roles freely, without prediction from history or from one’s old habits of thought. What if one took nontraditional casting as far as one could?” Mostly the Schechner speech is a polemic on gender roles in realism and the slow fortunate death of gender dimorphism. Schechter references Belle Reprieve, the gay/lesbian Streetcar Named Desire; an all-female version of an Ibsen play; and Helen Mirren in The Tempest. None of which relates to Skins at all, except as the primary incentive to back it.
Kids playing kids should not be radical. That seventeen year-olds are exclusively played by twenty-five year-olds in film & on tv is a peculiar American logic—reverse irony, since as Fran Lebowitz noted, Americans do not believe in irony. In its banishment of the truth this practice is also analogous to the history of “breeches” or “travesty” bent-gender performance in theatre. The implication, totally a truism at this point, is that kids aren’t sophisticated enough to play kids. Kids playing kids who exemplify drug-seeking behavior and squeeze their tits together under malfitted jackets: well, that means there’s a war on.
(Full disclosure: I’d sooner side with the Sinaloa Cartel than the Parents’ Television Council.)
Skins is currently being effigied for, INPO: exploiting children; going a butt too far in the reach for realism; soliciting attention; fluffing the downfall of the family/human civilization; outright sucking. The first two despite no FCC strictures being broken; the middle two despite the ongoing oldness of each. As for the last one, who am I to judge anyone’s work.
In the two episodes I & the unprofessional public have seen, there’s some sexual contraband but nothing to get in a twist over. To reiterate: the perpetual outsourcing of minors’ sex scenes to actors who themselves would be breaking the law IRL if the sexee were underage means I, for one and at least, have a fundamental misunderstanding of what is right and what is easy.
So it’s agreed that kids playing kids on Skins is progressive casting, that hiring age-appropriate actors is ameliorative since age is just a “flexible, historically conditioned performative circumstance” as Schechner would have it. Does it being okay extend to simulated masturbation without Barbara Hershey supervising and waking up matter-of-factly from a perceived overdose?
You guys. Seriously. As Linda Blair is my witness, there’s nothing controversial here. For Elizabeth Wurtzel it’s a movie of the week; A.M. Homes and Jill Soloway are shaking their heads over coffee in my head right now. At any rate the actress who plays Tea, who is 19 and thus cannot help us in our quest for prime sinnuendo, has essentially said fuck what parents think. As it was Tea’s episode this week, she’s the one in the media’s [obligatory firearm reference redacted] right now.
Gregg Araki said the following in a new Fader interview about sexual utopianism in his work: “There’s no consequence to the sex, you know, it’s not like it’s a bad thing or you’re going to be punished for it. It’s really just something that’s seen as part of growing up and sort of a positive experience. It’s what forms you as a person.”
If a kid on Skins occasionally brushes against an adult emotion, how she manages it will be the real foil for audacity, not to mention authenticity. If the show gets that wrong then it will have generally abdicated. But Tea brushed against several adult emotions last night and she seemed okay with it. Then again, wait til they have a kid playing a kid do it. Anyway if Skins somehow expedites a Schechnerian “renaissance of open casting” it’s more than okay that it’ll probably never exceed that “My Girls” cold open.
