To every time, there is a season, to every season, a Shakespeare play. And for reasons that seem to multiply the more you examine them, this year’s play has been “Othello.”
The title role — a Black general goaded into killing his white wife by his underling Iago — is one of theater’s great challenges. It is technically and psychologically difficult, swinging from affection and command to paranoia and femicide, and the text itself has an ugly history. The character was played in blackface for centuries; while that practice has largely stopped, taking on the role can tax an actor’s spirit.
As Bedlam Theater presents another run of its fast-and-furious “Othello” at the West End Theater in Manhattan, four actors — all grappling this year with playing Othello — reflect on how they approached the part.
Ryan Quinn
In Bedlam’s stripped-down production, directed by Eric Tucker, only four actors portray all the parts. Ryan Quinn’s Othello wears street clothes; there’s no set, no uniform, no Jacobean folderol. Tucker plays Iago, and he makes the villain a pleasant-seeming guy, the neighbor you’d call to jump your car.
“The thing that ignites all of it is love,” Quinn told me. “We may not know all of what it means to be a Black man, and I don’t know what it means to be a white woman. But I’m married to a white woman. My dad’s Black and married a white woman. I understand what it means to love,” he said. “So that was my way in — not only love for Desdemona, but love for Iago, too.”
Quinn’s Othello doesn’t seem deluded or paranoid. Someone the general loves is betraying him; he’s only wrong about which one. “In everything that has led up to this point, Iago’s been Othello’s guide in Venice, he’s been honorable and trustworthy,” Quinn said. “So why shouldn’t I trust him? I’ve trusted him in war, in battle. I put my life in his hand, right? I don’t think Othello’s easily duped. I just think when he loves, he loves.”
Quinn, who also teaches theater at SUNY New Paltz, noted that “actors recoil from the part for two reasons. One, because of that last scene, and how the audience is going to personify it. I had to think, ‘If my Black male students come to see this, am I giving justice to them?’ The second is, as with any of these iconic parts, how do we measure up? But that way madness lies! You have to let that go,” he said. “You need to know that the ancestors are also speaking from you.”
Bedlam’s production is back onstage at the West End Theater in Manhattan, from Nov. 7-29. Read the review.
Wendell Pierce
In Wendell Pierce’s version this spring at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, directed by Simon Godwin, Othello was a grown-up child soldier. “The only thing he has ever known in life is murder and violence,” Pierce told me in a phone interview.
Subtext was Pierce’s watchword. “One of the great discoveries I had in the play was realizing that there are no love scenes between Desdemona and Othello,” he said. “So every scene that I was in with Desdemona became a profession of love, even when it was violent.” This sublimation was his sickness. “Even though I say to her, ‘O thou weed / Who art so lovely fair, and smell’st so sweet / That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne’er been born!’ — all of that was really ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’”
Othello is one of the rare roles in which Pierce felt he had to separate himself from the part. While they were in rehearsals, a former Virginia lieutenant governor killed his wife and then himself. It reminded Pierce of the danger of thinking poisoned thoughts. “I had to take real self care,” he said.
But being Othello also promises a reward like no other. At the Folger Shakespeare Library, Pierce was able to read a letter written by Ira Aldridge, one of the first Black Othellos. “Think of all of these different actors who played the role!” Pierce marveled. “I thought of Earle Hyman and Ira Aldridge and Paul Robeson and James Earl Jones,” he said, before naming contemporaries like André Holland and Denzel Washington. “That is one of the gifts that the role has given me: a kinship with — and connection across time and place and generation to — so many other actors.”
James Udom
Othello’s isolation in the Venetian military — the double consciousness of a Black man in a meritocracy — infused this summer’s Classical Theater of Harlem outdoor production starring James Udom. Because of the dearth of parts for Black men in Shakespeare, Othello is the “proving ground for an actor,” the production’s director, Carl Cofield, told me.
The sense that eyes were on them invaded even the rehearsal room. “We have a shared responsibility in how Black men are portrayed,” Cofield said. “So when we have a Black man perpetrating violence against a white-presenting woman, that’s something that we just don’t do arbitrarily. There was a moment in rehearsal where Othello slaps Desdemona, and we both checked in immediately. We were both like, ‘No, that’s not it, we can’t come back from that, right?’”
Military correctness provided this iteration of the general with both an armature and a refuge. “There’s a rigidity to the character,” Udom told me. “This is somebody who has to be his best all the time.” Udom hired a personal trainer because, he said, “there is a physical uprightness to him that you slowly see degrade over the course of the play. As his mind falters, his body falters as well.”
Udom described Othello’s relationship with Desdemona as being “caught off guard.” The general believes that, after a life of war and racism, he can finally relax. When he stops trusting her, his horror manifests as seizures. “It’s a trauma response to living a life of war, having figured that out, having softened, and then attempting to zip himself back up.” At one point in rehearsal, he had to “go home and light some sage,” Udom said. “This is a dark head space to live in.”
Sharon D Clarke
This summer, the Royal Shakespeare Company announced that the great Sharon D Clarke — the Linda Loman to Wendell Pierce’s Willy in the 2022 revival of “Death of a Salesman” — would play Othello in their upcoming season. When I spoke to her in July, she and the director Monique Touko had been discussing setting their production in a near-future world in which people fight for access to water.
In August, the R.S.C. postponed the production, following Clarke’s cancer diagnosis. “Othello will be my North Star as I undergo treatment,” Clarke said in a press statement.
That’s because, according to our July conversation, Clarke’s vision of a lesbian Othello was already giving her power. She pointed to the struggles such a character would face: “The misogyny, the homophobia, the racism. A woman working in a patriarchy. How has she had to hide whatever vulnerabilities she may have had about coming out?” Her Othello — still on the horizon — will be dangerously insecure around her much younger wife. “Yeah, she could snap,” Clarke said. “That’s her fight or flight response. It’s not flight; it’s fight.”
Still, Clarke was excited by the character’s “unicorn” qualities. She spoke about Othello with something like exhilarated love. “This is a woman who is steely and strong and has a strong sense of self-worth,” she said. “She is bloody good at what she does. Imagine the strength of character it takes to be that woman! I have nothing but admiration for her.”
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