“Last week, Clarion University in Pennsylvania was forced to cancel its planned production of Lloyd Suh’s Jesus in India. The reason: casting. Three of the characters were written as Indians, and the predominantly white school had cast two white actors and one mixed-race actor in the roles. Earlier the same week, Katori Hall objected passionately in The Root to a Kent State University production in Ohio of her two-hander The Mountaintop, in which the role of Martin Luther King Jr. was played by a white actor.” Diep Tran looks at why the issue isn’t as simple as let-the-best-actor-get-the-role.