peter feng's questions about the implications of casting parts by race, gender, natinality, age, sexual preference, etc. simply demonstrates the critical importance of having shared conventions (i.e., artificial and arbitrary but stable rules of how to read certain conventional signs), a set of conventions that our post-modern world with its post-modern discourses and its post modern effort to interrogate all these discourses necessarily lacks . . . remember that in Bill S's time the Globe could have men or boys playing the parts of women and no one minded of course to cast a man as a woman or a jew as a gentile or a dog as a cat is politically suspect, not only because it deprives the latter group ineach case of equal work rights but because it presumes that one can speak for another . . . it is political arrogation and thus a form of cultural imperialism . . . or so one might claim pushing certain common insights to their furthest extreme i think we have to recognize that ALL theater is predicated on the idea that one person CAN speak for another not that all acts of impersonation are thus legitimate, merely that the act of impersonation is not, in and of itself, to be despised Mike Frank Cambridge MA <[log in to unmask]> ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]