When the time arrived to shoot the ending of the play, we began to ask ourselves what would the spirit of Moore want to say to the audience at his own funeral? and what would his Auntie Rosie have to say to the officers sent to deliver the official condolences of the United States government and to present her with the American flag. There is a passage in Agamemnon that made me want to become a playwright in the first place. It is so brief yet so full of images and meaning that sum up the human cost of war in seven graceful lines. It was a tall last-minute order and Auntie Pua Johnson’s daughter, Malu Debus rose to the challenge and translated the passage into ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi with stunning beauty:
The god of war, money changer of dead bodies, held the balance of his spear in the fighting, and from the corpse-fires at Ilium sent their dearest the dust heavy and bitter with tears shed packing smooth the urns with ashes that once were men
Ke akua kauā, ka mea loli kālā o nā kino kupapaʻu i paʻa lima i kāna ihe i ke kūpāpā a mai ia ahi kino wailua ma Ilium i hoʻouna i nei wahi i ka lehu kaumaha a ʻawaʻawa i nā waimaka heleleʻi iho nei hoʻopapa palaha i nā ipu me nā lehu i ola mua me kēlā o kekahi kāne
When deciding how to translate Desdemona’s “Willow” song into the world of Desdemona Moore, I couldn’t help but think of Jack Clayton’s 1961 film “The Innocents.” This idea or narrative of the excluded child and the child that is continually silenced is a reoccurring theme in MOORE. Desdemona is constantly being removed from the world of the adults: in General Yoo’s office, in the briefing room in Okinawa, she is never allowed to be privy to the world of the “adults” (the room where it happens) at least not until she finally forces her way into that fatal room of adult knowledge – the room where we meet our own death. It was this feeling of foreboding that led me back to Henry James’ Turn of the Screw and the Innocents. The opening sequence of Jack Clayton’s film has haunted me since I was a child. The little girl, Pamela Franklin, singing “O Willow Waly” with only the black background is as eerie and ghostly as it gets. As I began to research further, I learned of the connection between the song “O Willow Waly” and the Willow song Desdemona sings in Shakespeare’s Othello. Another reason I decided to incorporate the film itself into MOORE was that Deborah Kerr also haunts another film that is closely tied to American imperialism in the Pacific and the Hollywood orientalist gaze: “The King and I.” Below, I have included a short and very interesting documentary with insights and information about the making of the 1961 film “The Innocents,” a ghost story based on the Henry James novel “The Turn Of The Screw,” for more perspective. It is through this lens we can catch a glimpse of Desdemona Moore’s past and foresee her inevitable future.
On the 416th anniversary of the first recorded performance of Othello, a respected general (yet a “lascivious moor”) murdering his wife in a fit of jealous rage, it is high time we change the narrative.
Phoebe Boswell riffs on her conflicted attitudes towards Othello in “Dear Mr Shakespeare,” which co-stars Ashley Thomas aka Bashy. This was the eighth film in the British Council’s series Shakespeare Lives 2016, celebrating the playwright on the 400th anniversary of his death.
One of the main research questions this project seeks to explore is: How do multiracial / multilingual translations and adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays affect the experiences of a diverse American audience? This was a question raised by Shakespearean scholar, Ayanna Thompson at the conference on Shakespeare and Social Justice in Cape Town, South Africa in 2019.
During her presentation titled “Shakespeare and Blackface” / “Shakespeare and Unfreedom,” Ayanna points out many of the historic and structural factors surrounding Shakespeare’s Othello that makes the production a trap for actors of color, seeking to play a role that many believe represents the pinnacle of one’s acting career on the Shakespearean stage. Rather than experiencing this high point of inclusion into the Shakespearean tradition however, the actor of color playing Othello begins to realize that they are actually more like the butt of a joke: duped by Iago, whom because of the structure of the play, the audience often sympathizes with, combined with the fact that Iago has more lines than anyone else and will naturally spend more one on one time with the usually white director, all contribute to the sense of alienation the actor of color playing the title role experiences throughout the rehearsal process and the run of the show. By embracing the structure of the play, changing the genders of the characters, giving voice to multiple languages spoken in the dialogue and basically inverting Othello and Desdemona’s roles, we have sought to change this, while at the same time keeping all of Shakespeare’s dramatic beats in tact. (Hopefully Ayanna won’t have to be called in as the “Othello Whisperer,” this time)
Purpose
The purpose of this study is trifold: 1. To increase understanding of the ways Shakespeare has been translated, adapted, or appropriated to address the issues of race, language, and American imperialism. 2. To unpack some of the practical strategies and choices made by theatrical practitioners when staging Shakespeare’s plays, in order to create dialogue with American audiences around some of the most fraught and challenging subjects in America’s current political moment. 3. To track and analyze how multiracial / multilingual Shakespearean adaptations are being received by a diverse sample of American audience members from around the United States and how those adaptations affect audience understanding of Shakespeare’s plays. All survey forms are anonymous and all data from the responses will be incorporated into my dissertation research. Like the American legacy of colonialism, slavery, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and the ever increasing demographic shift towards a majority minority in a country founded and made stronger by immigrants, the legacy and of plays of William Shakespeare are part of the American story too and belong not to a privileged few, but to each and every one of us. Thank you for participating!
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.
UCSC’s production of The Odyssey 2016. Photos: Steve DiBartolomeo, Westside Studio Images
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.
UH Hilo Performing Arts Dept. / Performing Arts Center
CALL for AUDITIONS
for a filmed production of
Moore: a Pacific Island Othello
a world premiere
Written by Kepano Richter, Directed by Justina Taft Mattos
Moore is a contemporary re-telling of a Shakespearean tragedy, set partially in Hawaiʻi. The central characters are U.S. Marines grappling with issues of race, sex, and politics.
CASTING THE FOLLOWING ROLES:
Most characters will be videotaped using current Covid-19 physical distancing protocols. However, we hope to cast COUPLES who are already physically intimate for the following key roles:
Desdemona & Doc Rodney Boucher
Sgt. ʻOhelo Moore & Captain Cassiopeia Martinez
Lt. Karen Johanson & Sgt. Emiliano
Supporting Roles:
Master Chief Bianca, General Brabantio, Special Agent Ogimachi, Special Agent Montano Jung Kim, Japanese Police Officer, Bass Player, Seabass, Boomer, Cletus, MP, Yakuza, Host, General Yoo, Media Officer, POTUS Trump (on-screen live via Zoom), Uncle Robert, Auntie Rosie, Uncle Billy (sings), Platoon Sergeant, Colonel Sanders, Marine Corporal, Kim Jo-Jong (Kim Jong-un’s sister), U.S. Secretary of Defense, Commandant of Marine Corps
Non-Speaking Roles:
Bartender, Cowboy dancers, Taxi Driver, Dignitaries, Security Officers, M & F Hula Dancers, Marching Marines, Night Club Patrons
To audition please submit these two items by 6/25/20:
a video showing you (full height and/or waist and above) performing two things:
a contemporary monologue (up to 1 minute) or a short memorized piece of text (poem, story, etc.)
singing 15-30 seconds of this song: “Drink With Me” (see karaoke video below)
For more information, or to request a face-to-face audition, contact the Director at jmattos@hawaii.edu Please email all submission materials to the director with “MOORE Audition” in the subject line.
