ABSTRACT
A black man and a white woman, the potential for creative pairing and the forces that are threatened by it: Shakespeare's Othello and the political drama of the 2008 election. Othello is not only a play about race; it is a play about apparent difference, real difference, and underlying commonality, about imagining "outside the box" and anxiously staying within it, about perception and apperception, about a dangerous interweaving and a tangled web. At a time in the country's history when some felt that "chaos is come again", when a black man and a white woman invited to imagine creative societal change. Othello is also about a tragic aspect of creativity, the inclination to psychologically create others, often without noticing it, into the darker images of ourselves and then to violently separate from them. As someone once said about the dynamic of projection, "We don't see things as they are; we see things as we are."
