To disrupt standards and practices of theater-making that adhere to strict, production-based business models that place profit before creative integrity, thus financially benefiting the few while causing economic, physical and emotional harm to the disempowered artist, and providing us with little depth and relevance in the theater we make.The goal of our art is altruistic, not economic. To pursue and uphold the idea that by providing artists with emotional, financial, and communal support, we’re aiding in the creation of more nourishing art for the community at large.To interrogate white American Theater’s perpetually uninspired recycling of this play wherein the degrading and fantastical depiction of the black hero is not generally considered sufficiently amiss to list Othello among the works dubbed “problem plays.”.Only in such a process of exploration and discovery can we hope to find the rendition of Shakespeare’s play that isn’t the Anglo-American recycling of the ridiculous Elizabethan tale turned racist trope told and embraced for generations. Rather we must seek to provide actors and their creative collaborators the privacy and the leisure to take deep, revelatory dives into all of their unflattering human nature with no pressure to create a stage-ready performance. In fact, in this particular of Shakespeare’s plays, so often done and so seldom done justice, where the stakes are nothing less than the realistic depiction of love, hatred, mental illness and most important, black male integrity, public performance cannot be a concern at all. To tease out the humanity from between the lines of an early modern text-even Shakespeare’s, who left us far more than any of his inferior contemporaries-cannot be accomplished in any 3 to 5 week rehearsal-to-stage production model. But combine it with the intricacies of psyche and you have a thing of infinite complexity that cannot be simply portrayed, particularly in a play where the machinations of many minds and hearts conspire to culminate in the tragic conclusion. Animal nature, at its core can be grotesquely simple, and humans are animals. From a performative standpoint, Othello’s journey, and thus his play, can be no more plausible than he and the characters that conspire to compel his narrative are human.
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