The Compulsion to Perform: Parents, Children, and Whiteness in Catch as Catch Can

LON. The past’s the past, Rob.    
ROBBIE. Not really, Pop, not really.

It is true, in every play, that the bodies onstage change the story being told. An audience infers power dynamics from the relationships between characters based on their differences in age, race, and gender. The cadence of any playwright’s words changes depending on the voice that delivers them, which might be shaped by the actor’s ethnicity, geographic origins, or socioeconomic background. Even if these layers of meaning aren’t written into the script, they become inseparable from the audience’s perception of the characters.

This is the principle that Mia Chung points to when she writes, in the introductory notes to the script of Catch as Catch Can, “The theatrical doubling of character is core to the play's meaning.” Each actor plays two characters of different ages and genders, and so, no matter who is cast in each role, they must inhabit a character whose actual body would look different from their own. By dissociating each character’s gender and age from that of the actor playing them, the play posits that these attributes have little to do with physical appearance, and much more to do with the performance of identity. Through intergenerational theatrical doubling, in which each actor plays both a parent and their grown child, Mia invites us to consider the ways that familial legacy – including inherited values and assumptions around race and gender – dictate what “roles” we feel compelled to play in our everyday lives.

This proposition was interrogated with rigorous artistry in the play’s world premiere in 2018 at Page 73, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll and featuring Jeff Biehl, Michael Esper, and Jeanine Serralles. Our production explores it from a new angle by populating this story with an entirely Asian-American cast. In her script notes, Mia specifies that “the play can be performed by an all-white cast or a cast that is all of East Asian descent,” but that either way, “the actors perform white, working class, Irish American, and Italian American characters in New England.” When Asian-American actors embody these characters, they are not just playing across age and gender, but race as well. This casting conceit, therefore, highlights whiteness as an identity that the characters perform – and, ultimately, reveals the toll that this performance takes on them. 

The concept that identity is a performance, rather than a fixed or inherent quality rooted in biology, was originated by Judith Butler in her seminal book, Gender Trouble, published in 1990. Butler, a feminist scholar, theorizes that one’s gender is the cumulative effect of one’s actions, each of which might affirm or defy the gender norms associated with one’s physical features. These actions are sometimes conscious decisions, but more often are unconscious reiterations of culturally ingrained gender roles. Sociologist Nadine Ehlers builds upon Butler’s notions of performativity in her 2012 book Racial Imperatives, arguing that race is not a corporeal fact. Rather, Ehlers asserts that “racial discipline is sustained through the performative compulsions of race, and that all subjects are produced and produce themselves through a kind of labor (discipline) that can be seen as (performative) racial passing.” In other words, racial categories are precarious and mutable, and are only maintained when people’s actions conform to them. Again, those actions are socially learned and are rarely an expression of individual agency. 

The Phelans and the Lavecchias, the two families we meet in Catch as Catch Can, are deeply connected to their respective Irish-American and Italian-American heritages. Both demographics have a historically complex relationship to whiteness: they were considered a separate (and inferior) race by white(r) Americans when they first immigrated to the United States, and they “earned” their whiteness through a series of strategic political alignments that can be seen as a collective form of performative racial passing. 

When they arrived in the U.S. in the 1820s, Irish immigrants were relegated to ill-paying, dangerous jobs and poor living conditions. They were also subject to vitriolic stereotypes and physical attacks. This dynamic began to change in the 1850s, when Northern white workers became politically advantageous to the pro-slavery Democratic Party. In order to win national elections, they needed more voters in Northern states, and, since most middle- and upper-class voters would not vote for a pro-slavery party, Southern plantation-owners made special appeals to Northern immigrant laborers for their support. Since the plantation-owners and immigrant laborers had few political interests in common, they formed a coalition over their shared sense of whiteness. In doing so, the Democratic Party worked to redefine whiteness as a matter of skin color, and not national origin. By relaxing one racial boundary, they were able to reinforce another: as historian Noel Ignatiev wrote in his 1995 book How the Irish Became White, “the assimilation of the Irish into the white race made it possible to maintain slavery.”

If adopting pro-slavery politics was one strategy for gaining acceptance from those in power, another was to weave oneself into America’s origin story. The first large wave of Italian immigrants came to the U.S. in 1870, many of whom were from impoverished regions of southern Italy and Sicily. Similarly to the Irish, they were met with racist rhetoric that undermined their safety and barred them from jobs and adequate housing. In 1891, eleven Italian men were murdered by an angry mob in New Orleans, prompting Italy to break off diplomatic relations with the United States. In order to placate the Italian government, President James Harrison introduced Columbus Day as a one-time holiday. Brent Staples explains in his 2019 New York Times op-ed, “How Italians Became ‘White’,” that through the advocacy of Italian-American immigrants, Columbus Day became the annual institution we know today. They positioned Columbus as America’s first immigrant – a narrative that is clearly inaccurate on multiple accounts (and obscures the violence he inflicted upon countless Indigenous Americans) – in order to secure a higher status in American society and protect themselves from discrimination. 

In a play about intergenerational legacies, these histories provide useful context for the Phelans’ and Lavecchias’ worldviews. They are deeply concerned with protecting their whiteness, namely by discouraging interracial marriages that might detract from its purity. Roberta Lavecchia, an Italian-American seamstress in her late 60s, feels a sense of relief that her son’s marriage ended before he could have children with his Korean ex-wife, even though she and her husband are willing to accept their relatives’ white Jewish and Polish-American romantic partners. The parents’ anxiety around accepting Asian-Americans into the family – an anxiety which the children internalize – is emblematic of the precarity of their white identity and their need to continually reify it through racist statements and exclusionary actions. Underlying this need is the inherited fear that, because whiteness is earned through performative racial passing, whiteness can be revoked if one fails to perform. The constant pressure to “produce” oneself “through a kind of labor,” in Ehlers’ words, is exhausting. Catch as Catch Can illuminates the cumulative effect of this exhaustion on parents and children alike. 

Examining these characters in relation to the long American histories that have shaped them strengthens the play’s proposition that multiple generations live in each of our bodies, and that we perform race and gender the way we do because of the way our ancestors live in us. With this play, Mia invites us to reflect on the histories we carry, the identities we enact, and the ancestors we bring to life through our actions.