Is there anything as maddeningly, inherently unfair to an actor as an audition? Anything besides a review, that is?
Certainly the actor auditioning for an upcoming production of “Othello” in Keith Hamilton Cobb’s “American Moor” has reasons to seethe. How do you show everything you can bring to a complicated role in five minutes from a cold start?
But this actor — played by Mr. Cobb and likewise called Keith, presumably in acknowledgment of the semi-autobiographical nature of the play — has other beefs beyond the usual absurdity of the situation. If he’s brought some of those beefs into the audition room along with his well-thumbed script, what follows confirms his expectations.
The director, when he eventually shows up, offers no apology for being late. His first comments are about Keith’s height: “Man! You’re tall!” Worse, he immediately sets out to explain, to an actor with twice his experience, exactly who Othello is.
“What Shakespeare was trying to say here,” he starts, as if the playwright were a buddy of his who couldn’t speak for himself.
He wasn’t a buddy, of course. But like the cocky director, Shakespeare was a white man presuming to get inside a black man’s head. For the rest of Mr. Cobb’s fascinating but uneven play, which opened on Sunday at the Cherry Lane Theater, the thick racial tension of that premise predominates. It’s about performing “Othello” but also, in a way, about being Othello: a black man trying to find a path to excellence in a society anxious to keep him in his place.
“Purely by virtue of being born black in America,” Keith says, “I know more about who this dude is than any graduate program could ever teach you.”
If only he had said this trenchant line to the director, “American Moor” might be a more dramatic play. Instead — because Keith wants the job — he stifles the comment, uttering it to himself in one of a series of interior monologues that take up most of the 90-minute run time.
Of course he is speaking to us as well, and much of what he says is eye-opening even in the midst of the theater’s current conversation about cultural appropriation and racial representation. Though “Othello” is now played almost exclusively by black actors — except at the opera house — its directors are more often white. (Kim Weild, the director of “American Moor,” is white, too.) What white directors may miss, or may even actively prevent a black actor from expressing, is at the heart of Keith’s complaint, which grows in fury as it develops.
That can be hard to watch, but the play justifies both the character’s and the author’s fury convincingly. “You think any American black man,” Keith says, “is gonna play Othello without being in touch with his anger — at you?” He points to the director, but seems to encompass the (mostly white) audience as well.
What’s more, this take on Shakespeare makes sense. The speech Keith is reading for the audition is the one in which Othello, before the Venetian senate, answers the charge that he has seduced Desdemona by witchcraft; the director — a straw man of a role deftly managed by Josh Tyson — urges him to perform it with “obeisance” and yet “obsession,” foreshadowing the tragic climax four acts later.
Keith, contending that the war hero Othello wouldn’t need to perform a “minstrel show” for these men, rejects that interpretation in favor of something cooler, but it’s part of the cleverness of “American Moor” that Keith is now in exactly the position the director imagines for Othello. He must demonstrate obeisance and yet obsession. The difference is that though both the actor and the general are mercenaries, Keith does not have a hero’s authority.
“Put on your poker face, Brotha,” he mutters before trying the speech as the director asked; Mr. Cobb is quite expert at showing us how that approach must fail.
“American Moor” is full of connections like that. Just as Othello adjusts his language in speaking to the senators, Keith code-switches between proper round tones and the casual “ain’t” when moving from his exterior to his interior voice. And when his annoyance at the director begins to edge into what seems like paranoia and grandiosity, you may find yourself thinking about the same transition in the Shakespeare.
But as telling as these connections are, they eventually come to seem both calculated and rote. Cycling at predictable intervals between Keith’s long, interior harangues and his brief, prickly interactions with the director, the play acquires a ticktock rhythm that prevents the buildup of momentum. And since there is very little action in either mode — you will wait in vain for a breakdown or fistfight — both, lacking clear contours, grow muddy.
Ms. Weild seems stymied in her attempts to pace and differentiate the material. Her production, for Red Bull Theater, is handsome enough, but does more to create generic atmosphere with its backstage grit and Venetian flourishes (the set is by Wilson Chin) than to help us understand what’s happening in real space and time.
This problem — perhaps the result of overworking the material, which has been in development around the country since 2013 — emphasizes the script’s essaylike qualities at the expense of its playlike ones. It’s all argument, and to the extent that we need to be thinking through its knotty issues, that’s not entirely a bad thing. But arguments alone, even big, important ones, might as well be TED Talks; they don’t engage the full capability of theater.
Nor of actors. Keith, no doubt echoing Mr. Cobb’s own feelings, has a love-hate relationship with “Othello”: mostly love, for its insight and grandeur, but also hate because of the way the character is dangled before black actors, regardless of skill or aptness, as the one Shakespeare role — not Romeo or Richard III — they were born to play.
Truth is, Mr. Cobb probably was. The way he delivers Othello’s senate speech, even while hedging to accommodate the director, suggests he’d be pretty great if he got the part. Unlike in “American Moor,” he could then have the argument and the action all at once.
American Moor
Tickets Through Oct. 5 at Cherry Lane Theater, Manhattan; 212-352-3101, redbulltheater.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
American Moor
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Jesse Green is the co-chief theater critic. Before joining The Times in 2017, he was the theater critic for New York magazine and a contributing editor. He is the author of a novel, “O Beautiful,” and a memoir, “The Velveteen Father.” @JesseKGreen • Facebook
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