Drama | Elm Shakespeare Company | Shakespeare | Arts & Culture | Theater | COVID-19
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A screenshot via Zoom of Keith Hamilton Cobb's 2018 performance of American Moore at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe in London.
The young white director offered no apology for his tardiness to the casting of his own production of Othello. Instead, he commented on the actor Keith’s height.
“Man! You’re tall!” he said. After a prolonged musing on his height, he began to explain Shakespeare’s work to an actor with twice his experience.
“Purely by virtue of being born Black in America,” Cobb said to the audience. “I know more about who this dude is than any graduate program could ever teach you.”
Keith—a middle-aged Black man auditioning for the role of Othello— is the focal point in American Moor, Keith Hamilton Cobb’s 2018 reimagining of Shakespeare’s 1622 Othello and his role as a Black American within it. Earlier this fall, Elm Shakespeare Company screened a 2018 production and talkback with Cobb as part of its five-part series “Building a Brave New Theatre: Exploring Race & Shakespeare in 2020.”
The first production was performed at the Jacobean-style, candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, followed by a talkback on Zoom and Facebook Live. The next installment of the series, a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) Directors’ Forum, is planned for November 12 on Zoom. A link to registration is accessible here.
“Building A Brave New Theatre” came out of discussions within Elm Shakespeare—a historically white-led organization staffed overwhelmingly by white people—and SCSU theater students about the company’s capacity to do anti-racist work during and beyond COVID-19. Introducing the series, Artistic Director Rebecca Goodheart said that she is working to learn more about the complicated relationship that William Shakespeare—and his millions of interpreters—had with both race and racism.
“I started reading and educating myself about some of the issues with Shakespeare and race,” she said. “And what I realized is there was a lot I did not know, and I spent my life doing this!”
In return, she reached out to members of the community to question Shakespeare’s place in the Western canon. Spread over five, biweekly sessions, the series asks audiences to consider questions like “Who ‘owns Shakespeare?” or “What do these plays offer our time?”
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Artistic Director Rebecca Goodheart talking with Keith Hamilton Cobb as part of the talkback following the performance.
Cobb’s play answered those questions with a kind of necessary bluntness, and so opened them to further discussions that the company plans to have. In the play, Cobb submits that non-Black audiences—and especially white audiences—have a lot to learn about race in America. Early in the play, his character Keith asks that white director simply talk to him before projecting his own white, Westernized version of the play onto him. The exchange mirrors Shakespeare’s own attempt, as a white man, to conjure and speculate on the ostensible interiority of a Black man like Othello.
“Talk with me,” he tells the director in the show. “We got so much to talk about.”
In response to the director’s stifling micromanagement—think Rhada Blank’s 40 Year Old Version, but not funny—Keith’s frustration grows, just as Othello’s own anger grows after Iago deceives him.
“You think any American Black man is gonna play Othello without being in touch with his anger—at you?” he asks. The question hits home two years after Cobb first asked it on a main stage.
At times, the actor’s comments are meant for the director, but are equally applicable to the mostly white audience. It is not lost on Cobb that the play would most likely be performed in predominantly white spaces; Keith remarks at one point that Othello wouldn't have needed to perform a “minstrel show” for these men.
“Put on your poker face, Brotha,” he says before performing Othello’s monologue as the director asked. In the monologue, set in front of the Venetian senate, Othello responds to the charges that he seduced Desdemona through witchcraft.
In a talkback with Cobb, Goodheart commented on Shakespeare's reputation as “untouchable,” noting that the reputation has led it to be associated with an educated, upper-middle class and often white demographic.
“I have never been that interested in ‘high art,” she said. “It’s one of the reasons we do it in the park. We want it to be for everybody.”
“Building a Brave New Theatre” continues Nov. 12 with a BIPOC Director Forum featuring Carl Cofield (director of the 2019 Afro-futurist Yale Repertory Theatre production of Twelfth Night), Madeline Sayet (of Long Wharf Theatre and the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program), L. Peter Callender, Antonio Ocampo Guzman and Dawn Monique Williams.