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7. The Making of Othello
- University of Michigan Press
- Chapter
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chapter 7 The Making of Othello There is no such thing as having too many good actors. —margaret webster The long road to a Broadway production with Paul Robeson as Othello began in 1939, when he asked Webster to direct him in the title role.1 He had seen her production of Hamlet on Broadway, and he in turn was not unknown to her. She had seen him as Othello in London in 1930; ‹ve years later, she had appeared on the West End with him for three performances in Peter Garland’s melodrama Basalik. (One reviewer said that Robeson played an African king “with the mind of a child and the shoulders of a gladiator,” ‹nally dismissing his performance as a “noble silhouette.”)2 Robeson had received mixed reviews playing opposite Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona and Maurice Brown as Iago. His “dignity, simplicity, and true passion” won praise. For the Times reviewer, he played “thrillingly upon the nerves” with “a tranquil dignity and a melancholy in‹nitely sad.” A dissonant critic observed that Robeson delivered his speeches with “sonorous monotony” and was apt to “falter upon a vowel sound.”3 Webster recalled his London performance as seriously ›awed: “Robeson was never a born player and he had not acquired much acting skill.”4 When Robeson approached Webster about a new production, he said that he had not been very good in London, “but now he had studied and restudied the role and he thought he was ready to play it.”5 Robeson also believed that Broadway audiences were ready for a black actor in the role. 131 Webster agreed, and together, they tried to enlist Maurice Evans as Iago. He refused, saying that the public “would never go for it,” meaning seeing him in a supporting role.6 Others agreed that stars would refuse to play Iago or Desdemona. Though Peggy Ashcroft had done so, “she was English and that was London.”7 Moreover, producers were wary of the public’s reaction to a black actor as Othello on Broadway. For a century and a half after the play’s ‹rst presentation, actors used “soot” black to portray the Moor. Edmund Kean broke with this tradition when he offered Drury Lane a coffee-colored Othello—one hailed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a most “pleasing probability.” From the middle of the eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century in the United States, Othello had been popularly performed as an animated lecture (or a “Moral Dialogue”) on the sin of jealousy, the evils of drink, or the perils of lust. Famed white actors had offered the role in a host of hues.8 At least once notably before Robeson, a black actor had played Othello. The great Ira Aldridge ‹rst opened in the role in 1826 in London and then in Belfast, with Charles Kean as his Iago. They appeared together at Covent Garden in 1833. For four decades thereafter, Aldridge toured Othello to acclaim throughout Britain, Russia, and the Continent. Nonetheless, Aldridge never played the role in the United States. Most people assumed Robeson was the ‹rst black actor to do so, and Webster said as much in the New York Times.9 Contrary to this legend, a number of African American actors had appeared as Othello in professional productions in New York City dating to the 1880s, including the Lafayette Players in 1916.10 However, none had appeared on Broadway. Producers in the early forties did not trust the American public to tolerate a story that required a black man to love, marry, and murder a white woman, even though the play was four hundred years old. “Everybody was scared,” Webster recalled. “A few fell back on the scholastic arguments . . . that Othello was a Moor, not a Negro, or expressed doubts as to Robeson’s technical equipment as an actor. But mostly they were just plain scared of the issues which the production would raise.”11 Undaunted, Webster and Robeson told friends that they would do Othello on a street corner if necessary. They waited two years because of Webster ’s commitments to direct Twelfth Night and Battle of Angels for the Theatre Guild, and Macbeth for Maurice Evans. Finally, in the spring of 1942, Webster was free to attack the problems facing the production. They had decided to ‹nance the production themselves since the usual sources would not back a controversial production. Preliminary to mounting a tryout, Webster and Robeson canvassed summer-stock theaters in the Northeast...