Staging Othello in the Time of Trump
This article first appeared in The Hat, a new publication about Off-Broadway theater founded by Kara Cutruzzula and Colin Macdonald.
The tragedy Othello is not considered one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays” — ones that defy categorization — but it is certainly problematic. It’s a play about racism, but it is also a racist play. There is even some question about whether the play should continue to be produced.
The play is not called Iago, but the villain has far more lines than the title character. Iago, in fact, is one of Shakespeare’s largest parts, trailing only Hamlet and Richard III in total lines in a single play. While the actor playing Othello waits in the wings, Iago appears on stage first and ensnares the audience with his many soliloquies. He speaks in direct language with humorous asides. Othello, when he finally gets a chance to speak, does so in language that is distancing, ornate, and antiquated even in Shakespeare’s time.
In an interview with The Hat, Eric Tucker, the co-founder of Bedlam, detailed his approach to producing the play now. He has also chosen Othello to return to Bedlam’s roots of doing stripped-down versions of plays using only four actors. As written, Othello has nearly 20 separate roles. Bedlam’s 2013 productions of Saint Joan and Hamlet, playing in rep with four actors each, helped put the theater company on the map. Terry Teachout, the late Wall Street Journal drama critic and passionate admirer of their work, said Bedlam’s production of Saint Joan was “the most exciting George Bernard Shaw revival I’ve ever seen, bar none.” Tucker has a hot hand lately. Bedlam is coming off two recent hits that he directed: Are the Bennett Girls OK? and Music City, which is readying an encore run this June at St. Luke’s Theatre.
The Hat sat down with Tucker between rehearsals at Bedlam’s home on the Upper West Side, the West End Theatre, a well-used church on 86th Street between West End and Broadway, and spoke by phone with Ryan Quinn, who plays Othello.
EBEN SHAPIRO: Exactly one month into his second term, President Trump took to Truth Social and fired Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, abruptly ending the 40-year career of the highest-ranking Black man in the military. Would Othello, the great general, even have a job today in the time of Trump? Why do this play now?
ERIC TUCKER: What does a predominantly white audience get out of watching this Black man kill his white wife? I don’t really think I want to do this play unless we lean into the racism. And once you do, you can’t help but say, “Oh, my God, it’s so about today.” This is America, right? Especially in this city, who want to feel, “Well, we’re not KKK racist. We’re not MAGA, or whatever you want to call it, racist.” But there is this other thing underlying, which is that we all know that Black people in America are treated differently than white people. We’re all just sort of complacent in a society that still is a white patriarchal society. We know that. And it feels like now with Donald Trump that there’s just been this sort of permission for all that other stuff to bubble up.
Iago’s motivation is much debated. In your view, what prompts Iago’s despicable deeds?
I think Iago is one of these guys that are out there who just don’t like a person because of their skin color. Plain and simple.
How does having only four actors serve to reinforce the racism of the play?
Ryan [Quinn] plays Othello, and then he also plays servants, messengers, and the prostitute. So anyone in the world that we’ve built that is Black is a servant or a prostitute. He’s treated almost like a slave.
But he’s also a celebrated general.
It can turn on a dime. They can take it away as easily as they can give it.
As the director, what do you want the audience to take away from this production?
We have to believe at the end of the play that Iago’s the villain and Othello’s a victim, even though he kills his wife. He’s a victim. It is a lynching. Not only does he kill her, but the worst part is, of course, that he has to live to see the mistake he made. And take his own life. So he pays for it. The big thing is making sure we know who’s the bad guy.
And the production also holds a mirror up to the audience.
It almost takes something like what you see happening now, everything that’s been going on with ICE and immigration. We really didn’t get crazy, you know, in our minds until we see a couple of white people get killed. And then that makes headlines. People are being killed by law enforcement who are Black or people of color every day. They don’t even make headlines. I’m hoping that at the end of the play the audience will feel that maybe that could not have happened if there wasn’t a system in place that let Iago and people like him get away with things.
Bedlam has a history of pared-down productions. Why bring it back now? What is the genesis of that approach?
Honestly, the way it started, it was economics. It’s economical. Also, if you’re casting a big Shakespeare, you’ve got to cast 20 people — you’re not going to get 20 people of equal power. If you reduce it, then everybody can be an equal, on the same plane. And I do also think you listen to it differently. It makes people have to sort of listen a little harder to follow it. It elevates the message we’re trying to get across.
How do you make it work logistically, the actors playing different roles?
We’ve done it before in different ways. I’ve done everything from small-cast stuff where you’re changing hats or glasses. There are accents. With this production, there are very, very few props, no costume changes.
Everybody plays multiple parts?
Iago is only Iago. It felt like he already talks so much, for one. And he’s so duplicitous, he’s being more than one person anyway.
You not only direct but you play the role of Iago. So talk about acting again. How does that feel? How’s the muscle memory?
Remembering the lines? It’s hard because when I sit down to get into the memorizing phase, my brain doesn’t want to switch off from the directing of it. So I really have to just dedicate time to walking around, trying to memorize it. It’s tough to do both when you have that many lines. It always comes second, and then I feel terrible. But it’s been okay for this process.
What makes the role so juicy to play?
It’s fun because he says such crazy stuff and it’s fun to dupe people.
Talk about live theater in the age of AI and digital media.
People crave that. They want to see the other people in the room with them watching the play. There’s something really satisfying about it. I feel that in a packed movie house — that always feels more exciting, right? There is something cool about watching someone do something out of thin air. I’m personally blown away when my imagination has to really fill in a lot of blanks. I love that.
Discuss making art in the time of a tyrant, and the importance of it, and whether art is rising to the occasion.
Sometimes it feels so futile. You see what’s going on around you in the world and think, why am I doing a play? I should go help build houses or anything else. Every day, when I see the news, or see another audacious thing, or certainly with the war, and people being dragged away and put in camps, it feels more dire. I feel like I’m powerless. I feel the stress of it more than ever. We’re all shouldering this stress right now. We’re collectively stressed out about what’s going on. We need those outlets. It’s food for the soul. Without art, then what? We are left with nothing without our own stories. Without art, we lose our civilized selves. What is civilization but being able to collectively look in the mirror and say, “This is who we are. We’re humans.”
For Black actors, playing the role of Othello can often be a high point of their careers. It also can be extra challenging because of the racial slurs directed at Othello, the racism of the play itself, and the violent act that Shakespeare’s script calls on Othello to commit.
Despite that, it has been a role performed by some of the most distinguished actors of the past one hundred years, including Paul Robeson, James Earl Jones, Laurence Fishburne, and Denzel Washington.
Those actors have been a tremendous draw for audiences. Robeson’s portrayal in 1943 ran for 296 performances, a record for Shakespeare on Broadway that stood for decades. Last year’s production starring Washington broke the record for the top-grossing play in Broadway history, with prime seats selling for close to $1,000.
The Hat spoke to Ryan Quinn about taking on such a highly charged role in the Bedlam production.
EBEN SHAPIRO: What were your initial thoughts when Eric approached you about playing Othello?
RYAN QUINN: The first thought is, “Hell yeah!” And then it’s like, “Oh, no.” There’s this original rush of like, “Oh my God, I’ve been waiting my whole life for it.” And then when you have it, you can’t help but think about all of the ancestors that have stepped in the shoes of this character and how do you honor that and honor the text. That way, a kind of madness lies.
Here we are in the time of Trump. What’s it like playing this role in this environment, at a time a segment of the population is openly embracing racism again?
It has always been there all my life. It’s terrible in what it’s doing to institutions. But it’s not like I didn’t feel it or see it before. What will change is how the audience hears it. They’ll hear reverberations of things that we are hearing right now. In a beautiful way, that’s why we keep coming back to these plays. Some things change, with some things staying the same. Shakespeare wrote for a different time and a different era, and racism was different back then; but you’re going to hear things that we still currently hear.
Women are treated pretty poorly in the play too.
We wanted to make sure that we were unpacking the stereotype instead of perpetuating it. One of the big things that we talked about is how misogyny in the West is actually set up as part of racism. The job of the white male is to protect the white woman against the beast of the Black male, right? And so I think a lot of things that we see in our society, even the rhetoric that we hear right now, is based on that. It’s all that culture. They’re connected, especially in our American history. The production teases that out.
Talk about the relationship between Desdemona and Othello.
They see each other in each other’s minds. It is not just lust or intellect. It’s passion and compassion. And somehow in the world that they live in, they were able to see each other. And the tragedy is that the society wouldn’t allow their love to exist. That’s very sad to me.
Some people think this play shouldn’t even be produced anymore. Has there been any discussion of that in the rehearsal room?
A little tiny bit. I definitely don’t agree with that. It’s a beautiful and sad play that deals with complexities, one of which is race. The question of the play isn’t racism. Love is the actual question that we’re dealing with, and how can love happen in a system of honor and misogyny and racism, right? That’s what makes it tragic.
One reading of the play is that it’s about jealousy. Love is another side of jealousy.
I don’t think the play is about jealousy, and I don’t think the opposite side of love is jealousy. It is chaos.
This is a corny question, but if you could ask Shakespeare any questions about the play or the character, what would it be?
I’d tell him, “Thank you.” The play is so good that I wish we could do it for three years. I keep finding new things with it. Part of the fun of it is the puzzle of figuring it out without him here to tell me what it is. And to work with these other beautiful human beings, to read all the essays that people who played it before have written — to get an inkling of how it’s working.
What do you want the audience to take away from this?
I want them to sympathize with a murder.
As an actor, you’ve expressed repeatedly that this is such a great role to play, and it sounds like it’s just fun for you. But as a person — in your soul — is there trauma with this?
Yeah, absolutely. I think Stanislavski said the actor playing it should only have to do it two times a week. I really felt it when we started working on the second act. It’s just scene after scene after scene when the world is broken for him. And it’s hard to do scenes over and over again when you’re living in a broken world. And I have some of the meanest lines. It’s hard to put that on another body over and over again when we’re working on it. It is a lot to carry. After we really went through the last scene in earnest, it was like, how many more of these can we do today?
These interviews have been edited and condensed
THIS WEEK IN AI
from the NYT:
“An elite Wall Street law firm has apologized to a federal judge for submitting a court filing replete with errors created by artificial intelligence, including “hallucinations” that fabricated case citations.
The A.I.-generated errors came in a recent motion in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan and were discovered by lawyers from an opposing firm, Andrew Dietderich, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, wrote in a letter to Judge Martin Glenn on April 18.
“We deeply regret that this has occurred,” Mr. Dietderich wrote.
The firm provided a ledger of the errors, which spanned three pages and totaled around three dozen. A number of them involved the citation of seemingly imagined passages from real cases. Some were clerical errors that the firm said were not A.I.-related.”
Will heads roll? Sullivan & Cromwell generally charges roughly $850 per hour for first-year associates, with senior associate rates reaching up to $1,575. New associates (first-years) earn a starting salary of approximately $225,000 per year, adhering to top-of-market. Somebody is not getting their bonus this year.
THIS WEEK IN PREDICTION MARKETS
ALSO FROM THE NYT:
A U.S. Army special forces soldier who helped capture Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela has been charged with using classified information to bet on the mission on Polymarket, a prediction marketplace, federal authorities said on Thursday.
The soldier, Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who was stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, made more than $400,000 by betting on different outcomes related to Venezuela after learning of the operation, federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. said.
An indictment filed in Manhattan federal court says Sergeant Van Dyke, 38, was involved in the “planning and execution” of the seizure of Mr. Maduro and was making bets up to Jan. 2, the day before the seizure of the Venezuelan leader and his wife, Cilia Flores, from a Caracas compound.
Fascinating interview.