Shakespeare Bulletin

2015 was quite the year for “black” Shakespeare. Several performances (The Classical Theater of Harlem’s The Tempest, produced as their annual “Uptown Shakespeare in the Park” at Marcus Garvey Park in New York City; Debra Ann Byrd and Dathan B. William’s The Sable Series: The History of Black Shakespearean Actorsat MIST in Harlem; and Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvetat Shakespeare & Co. in Lennox, MA) in different ways staged complicated, loving tributes to African American relationships with Shakespeare whilst salvos from the culture wars and debates over cross-racial casting blasted from both the US and the UK. Predictable outrage followed a June 2015 Washington Postblogpost featuring [End Page 524]a Sacramento, CA public school teacher who said she would prefer to stop teaching Shakespeare and instead offer her multiethnic students a wider range of literatures that speak directly to their experiences. A few weeks later, critics on social media questioned Sir Patrick Stewart’s expressed desire to play Othello “as white” and Trevor Nunn’s all-white Wars of the Roses at the Rose Theatre. The black performances that summer could be read as an intervention, a much-needed transfusion of energy and introspection into a conversation as anemic as it is loud and recursive.

American Moor, a solo show written and performed by Keith Hamilton Cobb, is a searingly honest, deeply humane theatrical biography told through the actor’s experiences of first discovering a love of Shakespeare and then finding that, as an African American male, Othellois both the Holy Grail and something of a mirage for any black actor who wants to explore Shakespeare’s canon.

The title, American Moor, suggests the United States’ unique relationship to Othello. Since Paul Robeson’s 1943 debut on Broadway, it has been a commonplace that Othello is a “black” role, an assumption confirmed by the credits of almost any black actor. (Watching the play, I was reminded of my own amusement at looking at the Playbill for the 1997 “photo-negative” Othellostarring Patrick Stewart and discovering that almost every black actor in the cast—even the very young ones—had played Othello). Yet American Moorsuggests that, like “acceptance” of black people in the US, the acceptance of black actors as Othello is entirely conditional. In the tradition of George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museumand Ntozake Shange’s Spell#7, the play turns a politically savvy eye on this question of black ownership of Othello and, more broadly, on the ways—subtle and not—in which the theater excludes black actors.

We entered the theater watching Cobb stand in a corner of the almost empty stage with a copy of Othello; he waited for his Othelloaudition as we waited for him to begin. When the performance “opened,” he moved center stage to tell us “the story of my life” through his blossoming love of Shakespeare: a love he has maintained while navigating the theater’s—and America’s—assumptions about blackness, which drive black actors into an endless stream of stereotypical roles. The policing of his place in the Shakespeare world began early, when, in acting class, he elected to perform Titania’s “forgeries of jealousy” speech. In response, he was told in an agonizingly indirect fashion that he should perform something he’s more right for: Aaron, Morocco, or Othello. In the face of “the play’s relevance [being] urged … perpetually,” Cobb rejected Othello outright, seeking [End Page 525]spaces where he could display the magic of his craft and of Shakespeare’s language. American Moorgave Cobb the space to perform these denied opportunities. He appeared the ultimate code switcher, nimbly moving from Shakespeare’s most eloquent verse—Titania, Richard II, and Hamlet made an appearance—to the multiple accents of New York City. The play’s writing was equally seamless: afterward, several...