While some Othello alumni have felt that it was an opportunity to endow the character with a richer and more dignified humanity, others have felt troubled by the prospect of giving flesh and breath to a racial stereotype. Thompson gives space for the debate among contemporary Black actors about a role that has occasioned many triumphs (most notably, the pioneering work of Paul Robeson) but has also provoked a fair amount of cognitive dissonance. The week before I asked students to read Thompson’s introduction in the Arden Shakespeare “Othello,” which offers an invaluable history of the way the Moor of Venice has been interpreted onstage from the Elizabethan Age to our own. Students were assigned to listen to a Folger Shakespeare Library podcast on the history of Othello and blackface that brought into dialogue two eminent Shakespeare professors, Ayanna Thompson and Ian Smith. The theatrical merits and deficiencies of these portrayals were discussed in the context of Shakespeare, race and performance. Here’s what to expect.Īfter a general overview that included a look at the National Theatre’s magnificent 2013 production with Adrian Lester as Othello and Rory Kinnear as Iago in a modern military revival redolent of Middle Eastern wars, we proceeded to discuss performance traditions, which inevitably brought us to the awkward subject of blackface.Īlongside the 1965 Stuart Burge film of John Dexter’s production of “Othello” with an ebony Olivier, I showed scenes from Orson Welles’ 1951 “Othello,” in which Welles wears a dusky shade of makeup, less gleamingly pronounced than Olivier’s shoe polish black but no less unacceptable.
The Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission approved Destination Crenshaw’s seven inaugural public art projects on Oct. What big names in Black art are making for L.A. I may have been more curious about seeing a young Maggie Smith than I was the great Olivier, but I was in that stage of my education when I was compulsively checking off boxes.Įntertainment & Arts Destination Crenshaw projects get city approval. I went to check out a performance I had heard only positive things about at drama school.
I have a clear memory of my first encounter with the work, which I saw at a decrepit revival house in the East Village one summer night while still in graduate school. I certainly didn’t include the film because I think it’s a masterpiece. A film faithful to Elizabethan stagecraft or to an idea of Shakespeare that arose from a later theatrical tradition? Or perhaps just more textually in line than Verdi’s brilliant opera? Who can say? In any case, it was appropriate for Sheng to apologize. I’m not sure what “faithful to Shakespeare” even means. I didn’t expose my students at the California Institute of the Arts to the film because I thought it was “one of the most faithful to Shakespeare,” as Sheng, whose class was focused on Verdi’s opera adaptation, told the New York Times. Unlike composer Bright Sheng, who was compelled to step down from his class at the University of Michigan for showing the Olivier film, I have neither been assailed for racial insensitivity nor held up as a casualty of cancel culture. But if my conscience isn’t clear - and whose can be? - it remains open for inspection. You might be wondering why I’m freely acknowledging my academic crime. Last spring I included in my Shakespeare on Stage and Screen syllabus the 1965 film of “Othello” starring Laurence Olivier in blackface.
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