Untitled Othello Project

The Untitled Othello Project at Sacred Heart University uses theatrical practices and humanities research to reckon with the play’s racist and misogynist tropes, asking if anyone can perform Othello without reproducing the same toxic representations it has held up for centuries.

About Untitled Othello

Participants of this residency collaborate through workshops and table readings as part of a hands-on, active learning laboratory. Students have the opportunity to collaborate with professional actors and scholars who consider the implications of playing racist characters and of performing victims of racism and misogyny on stage in front of an audience who may have experienced those toxicities themselves.

Upcoming Events

About Othello

Othello is the story of a Black man, a general in Venice, who marries a white woman, Desdemona. Othello’s right-hand man, Iago, seeks to undermine the general, by smearing him with racist epithets and inciting him into a jealous rage over Desdemona’s imagined adultery, set on by Iago. Studying this play with the ensemble, students can interrogate Iago’s racism and see how it is embedded in every character in the play.

The play touches on issues of racial prejudice, intimate partner violence, criminal justice, the psychology of love, revenge, service, race and class conflict, disability, masculinity, femininity, the nature of evil, the discursive development of identity, the history of the Mediterranean world and religious conversion.

Actors, scholars and students in the Untitled Othello Project performed a close reading and rehearsal of the play, which was livestreamed, recorded and discussed in-depth.

Project Goals

• Interrogate the recycling of Othello wherein the degrading and fantastical depiction of the black hero is not generally considered sufficiently amiss to list it among problematic works
• Aid in the creation of more nourishing art for the community at large
• Disrupt standards and practices of theatre-making that adhere to strict, production-based business models that place profit before creative integrity
• Evolve American theatre-making by exposing the next generation of theatre artists to creative practices that expand their perspectives and ambitions with regard to the purpose-driven nature of their profession
• Give scope and definition to the term creative altruism as a practice of social, economic and restorative justice

Why Untitled Othello at Sacred Heart University?

Untitled Othello is an invaluable experience of intensive study for students with reverberations throughout the American theatre, English classrooms and social justice work. The project provides a platform for SHU to further engage in scholarship on diversity, equity and inclusion. 

Artists/Scholars-in-Residence

Keith Hamilton Cobb – Director

Keith Hamilton Cobb is an actor drawn primarily to the stage in his working life, who has also been recognized for several unique character portrayals he has created for television. He is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in acting. His award-winning play, American Moor (published by Methuen Drama), which explores the perspective of the African American male through the metaphor of Shakespeare’s Othello, ran off-Broadway at Cherry Lane Theatre in the fall of 2019. It is the winner of an Elliot Norton Award, an AUDELCO Award, two IRNE Awards and is part of the permanent collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Jessica Burr – Associate Director

Jessica Burr has been honored with the 2019 Kennedy Center ACTF Commendation for Distinguished Leadership, First Prize at the 2016 Secondo Festival (Switzerland), the 2011 LPTW Lucille Lortel Award and NY Innovative Theatre Awards including: Outstanding Production, Choreography/Movement and the Caffe Cino Fellowship Award, among eight total nominations. She was a featured panelist in the 2016 Brave Summit, a forum of women leaders, experts and scholars to drive cultural change. The founding artistic director of Blessed Unrest–with whom she has directed and choreographed over 20 productions (14 world premieres)–she directs, choreographs and teaches at theatres and universities around the world.

David Sterling Brown, Ph.D. – Scholar-in-Residence

A Shakespeare and premodern critical race studies scholar, David Sterling Brown, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of English at Trinity College. His anti-racist research, which centers on pedagogy and on how racial ideologies circulate in and beyond the early modern period, is published or forthcoming in numerous peer-reviewed and public venues such as Shakespeare Bulletin, Literature Compass, Radical Teacher, Shakespeare Studies, Hamlet: The State of Play, White People in Shakespeare and Los Angeles Review of Books. His forthcoming book projects, one of which is under contract with Cambridge University Press, examine how whiteness operates in Shakespearean drama. Through his current Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellowship, Brown has a residency with The Racial Imaginary Institute, founded by Claudia Rankine. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Brown sits on the editorial boards of Shakespeare Bulletin and Shakespeare Survey; and he is an executive board member of the Race Before Race conference series.

Collaboration

Scholars and students are invited to join the conversation. There are many opportunities for interdisciplinary research, and anyone in the University community is encouraged to reach out to discuss opportunities to involve your classes or incorporate your relevant research into the conversation.