MOORE – a Pacific Island Othello: On race and gender.
Part 1. Odysseus Returns
As a man of color in America and a former United States Marine, I had issues with Shakespeare’s Othello that were gnawing at me, right out of the gate. I never really saw myself participating in a production of Othello. Maybe because when first I became involved with Shakespeare as a high school student, someone had told me that if I became good enough I might even get to play Othello someday and it kind of pissed me off. I was like, “What about Romeo?” Hell, I wanted to play Hamlet, not Othello. The racial aspect, however, was the second issue I had with the play. Even if race didn’t exist in early modern England the way it does now, what really bothered me about Othello, especially after being in the military, was his temperament.
First of all, Othello was a general, mind you, with years of combat experience, having at least displayed enough grace under fire to be entrusted by the Venetian government to go and stop the Turkish fleet from sacking the city. For him to be manipulated so easily into murdering his wife, over what basically amounted to a Dear John letter? And even if Iago were telling the truth, the man’s a General. I’ve known 18-year-old privates who received “Dear John,” x-rated breakup-videos from their wives that went beyond heartbreaking, but they somehow put it aside and got on with the mission. It kind of goes along with the territory of being on deployments and the collateral damage of Marine Corps life on relationships and family. (Why do you think the Vikings wore horns on their helmets?) So, I just couldn’t see Othello getting duped and driven so easily to murder, plus once you stage Othello on American soil, everything in that soil clings to the play, just like dirt. All our history of racism and slavery marks it with meaning even if it isn’t intended to. That’s just how theater works. The same play staged in Selma Alabama, Scottsdale Arizona, and Sioux Falls North Dakota is going to mean three very different things.
So, we have to ask ourselves, what are we saying about black men in America if we have a black man get up on stage and murder his white wife in front of an audience? What kind of meaning are we creating just by staging something like that? There are many scholars and actors who believe Othello shouldn’t be staged in America at all. I used to be among them. Then in 2016, I took part in a modern adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey where the character of Odysseus was a homeless veteran returning from the war.
Placing him in uniform and watching him slaughter everybody in the hall then climb atop the mountain of bodies, waving his pistol overhead in victory made several of us veterans in the audience extremely uncomfortable – not because of what Odysseus said, it was the Odyssey, we all knew the story. It was the new meaning the performance took on. By dressing him in the uniform, for those of us who’d worn it, made his actions our actions. As if to say veterans are all a bunch of John J. Rambos, one bad dinner party away from a PTSD killing spree. But he didn’t have to be. That’s when I wanted to return to Othello and take him back to Hawaii. I wanted to rewrite both his story and my own.
And if you want to change Othello’s story then you have to start with Iago.
Part 2. Karen Iago
Iago and Othello always seemed like a broken-up couple to me for some reason. Something was definitely going on there, at least beneath all those layers of sheets that needed to be pulled back: The kneeling scene, Iago’s story about the raging tooth night with the leg and Cassio kissing all over him… I mean who was he really trying to make Othello jealous of? Then you have the rumors about Othello maybe getting it on with Iago’s wife, which definitely sounded like another on-base episode of “The Westpac Wives.” Add all of that to the ways in which American culture has turned our attention lately, when I reread the play, to me, Iago felt more like O’s scorned ex-lover, who for some reason didn’t get her way, so the night Othello decides to run off with someone else, Karen calls the cops on him and tells them that an older black man just kidnapped an underage white girl and if they don’t do something quick he’ll probably force himself on her. Then Karen tries to make it seem as if she wasn’t the one who called the cops in the first place. It all smacked of the incident in Central Park and the “Karen” who called the cops on the birdwatcher earlier this year. Either way, if you take the opening scene of Othello at face value, in Shakespeare’s text a scorned white person, who did not get what they wanted, decides to call the authorities on a highly respected man of color that they are angry with, marking him as black and dangerous to spur the police into action and succeeds in getting him arrested:
“Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise,
Awake the snorting citizens with the bell
Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you.
Arise, I say!!” (Othello I.I. 88 – 92)
Starting with this premise of a previous relationship between Othello and Iago (Lt. Karen Johanson) opened the door to a plethora of new motivations, possibilities, and questions to explore around the issues of sex and gender in a military workspace, fraternization between the enlisted and officer ranks, alcohol, conduct unbecoming, etc. It was all very exciting. And with Helicopter pilot Captain Cassiopea Martinez, a woman of color from the Philippines, being promoted instead of the combat-hardened (and white) Lt. Johanson, the conflicts and rivalries began to take on new meaning and lives of their own. Besides, the United States has a very rich tradition (though seldom mentioned) of women taking on the lead male roles in the American Shakespearean productions. The irony of this reverse cross-dressing is that during Shakespeare’s time, women were not allowed to perform onstage and crossdressing men played all of the female characters. Yet during nineteenth-century America, the concepts of American masculinity began to change. The gender roles of the romantic period that embraced characters like the brooding Hamlet or the womanly tears of Romeo back in Europe, were giving way to a more Jacksonian, frontiersman-like masculinity in America that would embody the aggressive spirit of manifest destiny and the swagger of the American west. The result was a deficit in male actors in the United States possessing the depth or range required for the more “womanly” emotions exhibited by some of Shakespeare’s most beloved Heroes.
Actresses such as Charlotte Cushman however, the first native-born star of the American stage, stepped in to fill this gap. Cushman was most famous for her 1854 -1855 performances as Romeo opposite her sister Susan as Juliet on the London stage. Charlotte was an extremely popular actress in Europe as well as the United States. She played more than 30 masculine roles in her lifetime. From 1852 to 1870 Cushman lived in England and Italy, thereafter settling in the United States.Her other famous male roles included Hamlet and Cardinal Wolsey. It is in this proud, though often forgotten, American Shakespearean tradition of Charlotte Cushman that the character of Lt. Karen Johanson (our female Iago) is in direct conversation with.
Part 3. Desi Moore
(Cont…)