Injecting Race into the Well Made Play

My friend Sam wrote a fantastically thought-provoking piece about MTC's production of Othello, and our tendency to both inject and ignore our current race relations into a very old work of art.  Some juicy tidbits:

In dealing with the Marin Theatre Company’s recent production of Othello I feel that I have to contend with the injection of ideology into the banal world of the well made play...

But we look into this “period” production of Othello from a world where a black man is president of the United States and an unarmed black teen has been gunned down by his local neighborhood watch and we understand that this is not escapism.

That issues of race are a perennial concern in the American social and political landscapes it stands to reason that theater companies should produce Shakespeare’s Othello. For this reason the current Marin Theatre Company production of the play should be commended. It is of no small importance that the American theatre-going public is overwhelmingly white and that the demographics of Marin County are similarly inclined. So, if raising these issue in these locations is awkward it is also important.

Later:

Another story that should be mentioned in relationship to “Othello” is the recent shooting of Trayvon Martin. Othello is a tragedy in part because a vigilante justice is carried out on the presumption of guilt before innocence. A woman is guilty of adultery just because she appears flirtatious. A victim’s clothing should not be held accountable for rape and a victim’s clothing should not be held accountable for murder. These narratives play in our heads while the theater we are consuming seems to be trying its best to distance itself from these kinds of thoughts.

This piece brings up so much of what has been bouncing around in my conversations about Othello this past week or so since seeing it.  I enjoyed myself during the play; it was a beautiful piece of theatre.  I respect the production team:  many of them are my friends.  But I left the play feeling like it barely scratched the surface of what we could feel as a mostly white audience watching a horrible tragedy unfold.  I found myself wondering about other iterations of Othello:  is there a way to take us away from the black vs. white shorthand that is so hard-wired in our culture that we don't even have to explore it except on a superficial level?

Read all of Sam's essay here.