Many Black actors have questioned whether aspiring to play Othello is worthwhile, given the problematic stereotypes the role can perpetuate. To address this fraught relationship with the text, we propose rooting Othello in an all-Black setting, thereby empowering Black performers to reclaim creative, cultural, and political control over its narrative.
By shaking up the traditional telling of Othello, we actually honor the play’s history of experimental casting: Richard Burbage, Othello’s originator, is a far cry from Paul Robeson. Shakespeare scholar Ayanna Thompson notes that professor J. D. Wilson observed, “new points, fresh nuances, were constantly emerging; and all had, I felt, been clearly intended by the author,” after seeing a Black actor (Robeson) play Othello for the first time. Thompson herself argues that experimental casting “could help spur new conversations about Othello as a text, performance piece, cultural artifact, and cultural producer of constructions of race.”
In the spirit of this experimentation, we are eager to uncover fresh nuances within Othello that shift our relationship to the text and prompt deeper conversations about race, colorism, classism, and misogynoir within the Black community, both past and present.