42 pages • 1 hour read
American Moor
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Background
Act Summaries & Analyses
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Themes
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Important Quotes
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The Audience
Content Warning: The source text and this study guide discuss systemic racism and anti-Black prejudice. The guide quotes and obscures the playwright’s use of racial slurs.
A note from the playwright Keith Hamilton Cobb about stage direction says the play calls for a “sole actor on stage to address several different amorphous entities” (4), one of which is the audience. The majority of the play consists of the Actor breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience with his internal thoughts and reactions to his audition process. Cobb writes that “the audience should and will find itself playing many parts. It is not intended that this process leave them in comfort” (4). These many “parts” the audience plays mean they can symbolize many things.
One thing the audience symbolizes is society at large—specifically white hegemony in society. At times, they also symbolize the “white gaze.” The Actor specifically draws attention to the existence of the white gaze when he says the Director, who sits among the audience, occupies “Brabantio’s privilege of place” (44), drawing parallels between the systemic racism that structures society in contemporary times and in Othello’s time. Like the Venetian Senate sits around Brabantio, the audience sits around the Director. The audience—depending on how they react to the Actor—may or may not be complicit in these racist power structures.
To this effect, the audience gets to choose their own fate and what they will grow to symbolize through the play. A stage direction says that the Actor’s monologues are said “only within himself…and to whatever portion of the audience will, or can, listen” (13). So, the audience could come to symbolize the segment of society that grows, listens to people from diverse demographics, and elevates their perspectives and experiences. Or, they could stay entrenched in old hegemonies, like the Director. This will vary from performance to performance.
The Actor’s Copy of Othello
Throughout the play, the main prop the Actor interacts with is his copy of Othello. The book symbolizes the Actor’s relationship to the play and its title character. The stage directions call for “a worn paperback” copy (5), showing just how often the Actor has revisited the text in his studies. The direction continues: “Most often throughout the play he will treat it with reverence” (5). At his current age, the Actor respects and understands the character of Othello, informed by his experience as a Black man in America. He parallels himself with Othello and thinks of him as a “brother.”
When the Actor grows frustrated with how the Director is treating him, his treatment of the book changes. After the Director tells him to play Othello’s speech with higher emotionality, the Actor “tosses the book to the floor” (20). In an aside to the audience, the Actor discusses his interpretation of Othello’s lines, “little shall I grace my cause in speaking for myself” (21), glossing it in his own phrasing: “If I tell you mugs what’s really on my mind—sans the soft phrase of peace—y’all are gonna get your noses all outta joint and say, ‘Oh oh! This n*****’s gettin’ all obstreperous n’ shit’” (21). The Actor puts aside the text and also “puts aside” the text’s phrasing to speak as Othello in his own voice, effectively engaging the theme of Interpreting Classical Literature in the Modern World.
Later, when the Actor is contemplating Othello’s lines, “begrimed and black / As mine own face” (28), the Actor “hurls” the book to the floor. He exclaims, “No! No, Gotdammit, no! What brand of credulous, self-loathing baboon, I thought, must such a man be?” (28). Though the character of Othello was created by a white man in the 16th century, the Actor is nevertheless “ashamed” that people think he and Othello—who talks about his Blackness in degrading terms—are similar. The way he hurls the book to the floor reveals this estrangement. When he retrieves the book, he “smooths the pages, examining the damage he’s done to it” and “holds it with reverence again” (29). Despite the Actor’s frustrations with the character of Othello, he is always “gonna defend and protect this much maligned, misunderstood, mighty character” (30), and go back to the text again, for both Othello’s sake and his own.
Basketball
In large part, this play is about the assumptions people make when they first look at a person. This relates to the theme of Systemic Racism in Theater, since most people look at the Actor, who is a tall, Black man, and immediately see Othello, just because Othello is also a Black man. The Actor introduces this idea by using an anecdote about basketball; he says, “when you’re a tall, Black American male, the one question you get asked more than any other in life is, ‘Do you play basketball?’” (29). Basketball symbolizes the stereotypical notions that a society informed by systemic racism has about Black men.
The Actor parallels the expectations people have about him playing basketball with the expectations they have for him as an actor—that is, that he must play Othello or other racially stereotyped characters. The Actor says that “young Black me” had “visions of playing Hamlet” (27), but he was never given this opportunity. As a young actor entering the business, he hoped that his first role “wouldn’t be one incarnation or another of that same Black boy that Americans of all ethnicities had been so meticulously taught to recognize” (27)—in other words, a stereotyped version of Blackness with no basis in the Actor’s real experience. The Actor says he “suck[s] at basketball” (41), showing the falseness of racist expectations and stereotypes; he extends this idea to show the hollowness of the typical roles that Black actors are expected to play.
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