American Moor is a play that Keith Hamilton Cobb wrote and in which he appears as “An Actor.” Throughout his heated 90-minute work he raises a formidable, even explosive, question: At a time when American society has been railroaded into highly disturbing divisiveness, can the unfortunately wide gap between sympathy and empathy be successfully bridged?
What if the answer is no? What if we’re living in a garbled culture where the white Americans are increasingly aware that as much as they may sympathize with black Americans, they will never completely understand what it is to exist where racism is all but built into the DNA and, worse, is having a deeply worrisome resurgence?
Cobb particularizes the searing conundrum by playing an actor auditioning for William Shakespeare’s Othello. Eminently germane to the situation is that he’s asked to strut his Shakespearean, Othello-ian stuff before “A Director” (John Tyson), who’s white. The latter character is sitting, as directors frequently do at auditions, several rows back in the theater and ostensibly alone.
This particular director, isn’t seated alone, of course. He’s seated with the ticket buyers, and it doesn’t take long for them (press night reviewers included) to get that what the actor addresses in response to the director—or in anticipation of what the director might be about to say—can be interpreted as intended for audience-member ears and solar plexuses as well.
When Cobb first appears, which is before the action proper begins, he strolls around Wilson Chin’s set—a stage bare but for a fallen column, an upright column on which a lion stands to conjure Venice’s Piazza San Marco and several chairs. He intermittently flexes his right shoulder seemingly to work out muscle stress and, prominently, holds a paperback Othello edition.
Believe you me, he indisputable impresses onlookers that he’s got the goods for whatever he’s about to do, certainly as directed by Kim Weild. And when it becomes clear the actor he’s embodying is aiming to land the title role, he looks to have a damn good chance.
Or so it seems right up to the moment the audition begins. That’s when things takes a startling turn. The actor lets it be known that he has insights into Othello—a man living in a white society—that a white man simply cannot claim to have. When the director suggests he try this or that, he balks. The balking takes place two ways, with heavy dependence on lighting designer Alan C. Edwards.
The many lighting changes indicate when the actor is actually engaging with the director or when he’s only thinking what he’d like to say to the director. At least, that’s what this observer is fairly certain is going on. During the actor’s thoughts, he’s primarily and forcibly expressing his anger at any number of things, the most obvious in these circumstances being the assumption that all black actors are instantly typecast as incipient Othellos.
This may be true—he’s earlier delivered a few Titania lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream—but the actor’s contemplating the current situation repeatedly turns into a fury. It more than threatens to overwhelm the audition and become the actor’s misplaced opportunity to vent his volcanic anger against the way things are in the world outside the theater.
That’s what he’s thinking. What he’s ostensibly doing in real response to the direction’s notions is (almost politely) resisting them, many of the ideas hardly seeming as inflammatory as he takes them to be.
Audience members, whether sympathizing or empathizing are likely to identity, if not entirely identify, with the actor’s rage, but it also may be that within the confines of Cobb’s play, a point is reached when anger starts to feel like an indulgence. Granted that the pent-up black anger finally emerging throughout the land is at last recognized and even welcomed. But launched at a director whom Cobb has written as a man not a thorough buffoon, American Moor can’t sustain the volume and attenuation of its recognizably honest intentions.
This leads to another aspect of the play, a Red Bull Theater production, that could require a further comment. The actor is greatly enamored (ena-Moor-ed?) of Shakespeare. Perhaps a stand-in for Cobb himself, the auditioning actor has commendably absorbed the classic playwright’s poetic substance. Fine and dandy, but in his conviction that a white man cannot truly understand what’s really occurring in a black man’s heart (the actor bets his chest many times over to emphasis a warrior’s heart), Cobb never accuses the Bard of having the effrontery to create a black tragic hero. If he does, I missed it.
American Moor opened September 8, 2019, at Cherry Lane Theatre and runs through October 5. Tickets and information: redbulltheater.com
