An Interview with Kent Thompson, Artistic Director of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival

Kent Thompson, the artistic director of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival since 1989, and I discussed his major production of Othello in 1994 and the problems and rewards the play holds for theatre companies and audiences alike. Thompson's credits are many and diverse. Having directed more than half of the Shakespeare canon, he is well-versed in mounting productions for a variety of theatre companies. He has directed with the Utah Shakespearean Festival, the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival, Boston Shakespeare Company, the Julliard School, and the University of Washington. He also serves on the board of directors for Theatre Communications Group. This interview was conducted on a rainy afternoon, June 14, 2000, at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery. PK

How long have you been with Alabama Shakespeare Festival?

KT

This is my eleventh season at ASF, which means that I have produced about 150 plays here.

PK

And Othello was one of them?

KT

Yes, and I also directed the play in 1994. I particularly picked Othello in ‘94, because I had an actor who could convincingly portray Othello. Many directors won't produce the play unless they know in advance who's going to perform that role, and I was very fortunate to have Derrick Lee Weeden, who during the mid-1990s, went back and forth between the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Also, I produced Othello on our smaller stage, the Octagon, which seats 225. That was a very important choice for me. The choice of playing space had certain financial implications—the Octagon is one-third the size of our Festival Stage, where we normally produce Shakespeare. But I thought it very important to stage Othello in the Octagon because of its intimacy. In my experience, the play often fails because it lacks the necessary psychological subtlety of characterization and tends towards bombast and spectacle. Perhaps this tendency has been reinforced by the Verdi opera, but whatever the reason when the play becomes grandiose or exaggerated, it deflates the actual pain of its tragedy. I wanted the contact between the actors and audience to be intimate, making the pain and anger and racism of the piece impossible to escape. In the Octagon, audience members cannot distance themselves from the action.

PK

Yes, there's a sense of claustrophobia in Othello and, as you point out, also in Verdi's Otello. You focus on a very crucial point here, that the casting of Othello is central to the whole piece. Do you think it is possible to cast a white actor in the role today?

KT

Personally, I don't think it's wise to do so at this moment in our social/ cultural history unless you're prepared to do something wildly non-traditional throughout the production.

PK

Such as Patrick Stewart's photo-negative Othello?

KT

Yes. And even then, it's very hard. There have been recent productions in Europe that emphasized the Spanish-Moorish origins of the Othello story, and avoided the African issues.

PK

The tawny moor as opposed to the blackamoor?

KT

For me the challenge in casting Othello is to find an actor who can believably portray an extraordinary warrior-hero, yet clearly be an outsider. While I think there can be other Moorish or African characters in the play, Othello must be demonstrably higher in status, rank, achievement, and social interaction. He's a loner and a hero. The only way I can envision the character of Iago and the character of Othello working today is if we see Othello misinterpreting the cues he is given by Iago, Desdemona, Cassio, and others in the play. The play has a history of working primarily in one of two ways. The first is portraying Othello in a pejorative way that is now viewed as racist—the exotic African of great passion but little rational thought. This reinforces the racist stereotypes that Iago and others utter in the play, but it's insulting to today's audiences, especially to African American audiences. Second, portraying Othello as a warrior-hero but also a supremely lonely outsider opens up the complexity of the play. All of the spoken and unspoken racism of this world comes back to haunt Othello during the temptation scene (3.3) and after. What has always been implied to Othello—his racial inferiority, his worth only as an exotic fighting animal, the impossibility of deserving the love of a beautiful white woman, his fear of being made the cuckold and gull by a woman—comes back to reinforce Iago's innuendoes.

PK

In your production, Othello is wearing what looks like a World War I military costume (a Viennese general) and over it a caftan.

KT

Yes, we costumed it in modern dress; I guess you could say early twentieth century. In Cyprus we used the desert khaki dress of the twentieth-century soldier. We were not precise in our setting, either in location or date. The modern dress setting was, in part, a budgetary decision—we could better afford to buy or rent men's uniforms than to build Renaissance clothing. In part, it was a pragmatic choice, given the size of the Octagon stage—large numbers of men dressed in the huge garments of the Renaissance simply wouldn't work on that smaller stage. We also included elements of Othello's African heritage in his costumes.

PK

What were some of those items, beside the caftan over the soldier's tunic?

KT

We spent a lot of time researching a variety of things. We looked at Moorish Christians, Moorish Catholics; we looked at the various Arab religious cults and we came up with something that was vaguely Muslim. We were intentionally impressionistic in our design choices because we didn't want to offend anyone who in the audience who was a devout Muslim. Clearly, Othello was not of the same culture, and yet he had to wear the military uniform. Since he was a general, he could get away with various military additions to his uniform that reflected his cultural origins—overrobes, turbans, sashes, jewelry, and caftans.

PK

At any time did he wear a crucifix?

KT

No, he did not; we made the choice not to. We wanted to indicate a tradition of mysticism as his root religion—similar to the superstitious mysticism he uses when describing his mother's handkerchief embroidered with strawberries.

PK

One of the most interesting questions audiences ask about Othello is, “How could he succumb so quickly?” How did you prepare an audience, or better yet, what subtext did you use with your actors so that Othello's fall wasn't so precipitous that people would say Othello was foolish in the beginning and all the grandeur of the senses in 1.3 or 2.1 was simply dissipated?

KT

We worked hard to establish a society fraught with overt and covert racism. We tried to establish this racial bias in every scene, so that the audience could appreciate the cumulative pressure on Othello, especially after he defied that society by marrying Desdemona. Early on, we sought to make the relationship between Desdemona and Othello very special —sensual, romantic, intense. We hoped to demonstrate theirs was one of those extraordinary, almost magical relationships—passionate and thrilling—but also whirlwind. Their love affair was developed in small moments stolen inside the Brabantio household; their marriage was a hurried act of public defiance. The shadow side of such a relationship is that it is not based upon intimate day-to-day knowledge of each other. It is romantic rather than pragmatic. They do not know each other very well. Second, we were helped by the setting for most of the play—the military encampment at Cyprus. An interracial marriage is difficult enough, but when the setting is an isolated encampment of soldiers, the pressures can quickly escalate. Two things happened in 1994 to reinforce our work: the arrest of O. J. Simpson, and a scandal in the U.S. Marine Corps. The press broke the story that Marine Corps commandants were discouraging soldiers from marrying or even from staying married, because it would hurt their careers. This reinforced an age-old military misogyny, where women are seen as temptresses and seducers on the one hand and needy burdens on the other. This seemed to be reflected in the play, certainly by Iago and Cassio but even by Othello himself when he refers early on to the seductive if not hypnotic powers of a woman. In a male-dominated patriarchy, the presence of a wife was perceived as a burden to a soldier, psychologically zapping his social energy. We tried to reinforce this male-dominated world, where Iago seems fairly honest even though he's often a misogynist. Having a “general's general” became a credible and serious problem for Othello, regardless of his deep love and affection for Desdemona.

PK

Let me pick up here on two different things you said. Desdemona and Cassio, especially during the ninteenth and twentieth centuries, have been played as victims—sacrificial, almost as angelic creatures, whereas during the Renaissance Desdemona was more defiant, especially in light of working with an all-male cast.

KT

Yes, we stressed the defiance against Venetian patriarchy and, of course, Brabantio.

PK

In what way?

KT

It was very clear in 1.3. Her open defiance of her father's wishes was straightforward and strong, in no way submissive or fearful. Derrick Weeden played genuine surprise at her request of the Duke to follow Othello to Cypress. She was an independent woman of stature.

PK

How much passion did you see in the subtext of Desdemona's love for Othello?

KT

There was a lot of passion when they came together. We tried to have them make as much physical contact as possible. I knew that this would raise the stakes with the audience because it would tap into their own anxieties about interracial marriages. It was also important to show that Desdemona was from a different culture, that there was an exotic quality about their love, revealed in the way that he describes their courtship story. Essentially, we were trying to show that when they arrived at Cyprus, they actually didn't know each other well.

PK

So that the marriage was not consummated until Cyprus?

KT

If it was consummated, they still don't know each other well. They don't know how the other person really reacts. In a sense they are in an operatic world, but I prefer to think of it as romantic with a capital R. They are engulfed in a tremendous passion. There's this kind of star-crossed “meant to be together” character of their love because of the way that they relate. But in point of fact they have not had many conversations over the kitchen table. They have not had many conversations that deal with pressures that come with married life in sixteenth-century Venice, especially with a marriage of different races.

PK

You raise a fascinating point from the perspective of critical theory that in 1.3, we hear that she fell in love with Othello from the stories he told, so that she is the ear—the passive listener—and when she comes to Cyprus, and certainly later in act 4, she cannot be the passive listener anymore.

KT

And that's the great challenge of the role of the actor playing Desdemona. I chose not to cast somebody who was 22 or 23. Instead I cast an actor who looked in her late twenties and was actually in her thirties. Now that was a modern interpretation to fit in with the clash of cultures that is at the center of Othello. I wasn't looking for someone who was a young girl simply carried away by romance and passion.

PK

Smitten?

KT

Smitten, and where Daddy Brabantio is just a foolish old duffer. Suzanne Irving's Desdemona was somebody who was operating from a perspective of a few years and could have chosen otherwise.

PK

Roderigo, or one of the other “curled darlings” of patriarchal Venice?

KT

Yes, someone who was very important. Now, we also cast Iago with an actor who was a little older than the typical Iago so that he was seen as somebody (in this military world) who was on the cusp of being too old to be chosen as Othello's lieutenant.

PK

Of being passed over.

KT

This became doubly worse in the military encampment of Cyprus—an enclosed world filled with competitive men who know that you were passed over for a younger man. We made it a constant sources of injured pride for Iago.

PK

Kenneth Burke said that Othello is saturated with Iago's whispers. What did you do to have your Othello establish any kind of bond with the audience in terms of Iago's jocularity, in terms of proximics, in terms of just getting them to believe him?

KT

I didn't have to do much. First of all, we had Derrick Lee Weeden, surely one of the most handsome African men in American theatre. Derrick has tremendous presence. His relationship with Iago signals a message of trust and intimacy to the audience. You see a very warm and appealing Othello. He walks on stage and he's the leader of all the people up here. He has a great masculinity at 6'3” and is very muscular —but yet a close friend of Iago's. Othello appeared to have a long-time friendship with Iago—touching him on the shoulder, deferring to him in the presence of others.

PK

What about your Iago?

KT

Dick Elmore is about 5'9” or 5'10”. He is a stocky character actor who at the time probably looked about 45. Like Derrick, he was from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He has this kind of rough-hewn quality. Interestingly enough, Dick also suffers from Tourette Syndrome. Not that we cast him for that reason, but what happens is that when his intensity grows, the side effects of his illness—occasional shrugs or sudden gestures—will either drop away or increase. I don't know that we could always predict these gestures, but Dick played them when they happened —they gave his Iago an unpredictable and disturbing physicality. Figure 19 Derrick Lee Weeden as Othello and Dick Elmore as Iago at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203055656/4740d172-0e41-40cb-ac13-d2e940787db4/content/ch21_page447-01_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>

PK

That's fascinating because after Mercutio, Iago's the most salacious character in the canon.

KT

What I kept trying to work on with the audience was to use Iago against Othello at every opportunity. We wanted them to find him disarmingly amusing up to a point. Then it would turn distasteful, even grotesque. I mean Iago is the sort of guy who sits down next to you and starts with a stereotype: “You know I like those ‘green’ people but you know they drive too many cheap cars with trailers.” It's a kind of suggestive envy mashed in humor and false friendship that Dick captured so well—the quality of “I've got to always be putting someone down.”

PK

So would you say that in the great polarization of life, it's an Othello play as opposed to an Iago play?

KT

They must always work together in the dance that they do in act 4. What Dick tried to do was to show that Iago was never, or rarely, in the limelight. He was perfectly willing, even on stage, to let Derrick's Othello stand in the spotlight and be everywhere. He never wanted anybody to see what he was doing.

PK

Did you have light cues to reinforce that kind of shadowing of Iago's menacing mentality?

KT

Frequently. In 3.3, when Iago lays in the suspicions about Cassio's past relationship with Othello, he literally moved into darker areas each time after he dropped a hint. Othello kept pulling Iago back into the light to see his face. What was also interesting about Dick Elmore's Iago was the way he would inject so much humor into the role, particularly in his relationship with Roderigo. His Iago was an incredible comedian.

PK

How was this accomplished—physically as well as verbally?

KT

There's a lot of physical cruelty that became Iago's signature, especially in the way he treated Roderigo when he's injured, the way he made fun of him, the way he constantly upstaged the duped suitor. There was something about his Iago that underneath all his anger, his desire to seek power, to get revenge that affects every relationship— with his wife Emilia, Roderigo, Othello—that was nihilistic. People laughed at the things that they should have laughed at, but underneath the jokes was a darker, meaner edge to Iago. When Roderigo protested Iago's behavior in 4.2, Iago jostled him about until Roderigo recanted —very much like hazing. The other thing that's very common in Othello is the sense that Iago is continually trying to engineer incidents. The play is rushing forward. Iago can't let things stop, even to the point of being reckless. He can never stop the momentum. I remember telling the cast that when Othello enters the bedroom in 5.2, it should feel like it's the first time we've taken a breath in the play, and of course it is a terrible moment.

PK

Can you describe the prop you used for the handkerchief? Was it large with the strawberries or did you use something a little different?

KT

No, we didn't use one that was particularly large; we just had a lady's handkerchief with strawberries woven into it.

PK

I guess the reason I'm asking is, was there exaggeration of any of the props?

KT

No, not really. What we exaggerated was the lighting, the mood, the atmosphere. When Othello frightens Desdemona in his description of the missing handkerchief (“That handkerchief/Did an Egyptian to my mother give …”), the lighting subtly shifted to shafts of light and shadow, reinforcing the mysticism of Othello's description. In keeping with our military emphasis, the fight scenes were set in the barracks—a masculine, metal and wood, hard-edged room.

PK

How did you choreograph the three fights, especially the most crucial one where Montano and Cassio attack each other in 2.3?

KT

We staged it as barracks violence with a strong, overpowering sense of men going out of control. The fight quickly turned into a brawl—men using benches, torches, anything in reach as a weapon. And the fighting style was ugly—a barroom brawl.

PK

With the small playing area, did the audience gasp, recoil in terror, at the fight scenes?

KT

Most definitely. The fight director, Drew Fracher, pushed the envelope as far as we could safely do so. By the time the fight erupted, the people in the front row occasionally stood up because they were afraid that they were going to be hit. Of course, they were not, but we did it to demonstrate the eruption of chaotic violence. The fight was an explosion of tempers from military men accustomed to blood and gore. If it had not been stopped by Othello, someone would have been badly injured or mortally wounded.

PK

You mentioned the barracks setting several times and also the Marine Corp and that whole ambience of military life. Have you ever thought of comparing Othello to David Rabe's Streamers?

KT

Yes. I have not done that play but I can see how it would be very similar, especially in the military atmosphere and the way turbulence occurs in regular explosions in Othello and Streamers. There's no way else to say it but that the violence winds itself up and then erupts.

PK

Picking up on the homoeroticism in Streamers, how did you address that issue in Othello, especially in 4.1 when Iago and Othello kneel in allegiance to each other?

KT

Yes, we actually had discussions about that idea; we didn't particularly pursue it but we certainly didn't deny it. I don't see the unholy wedding at the end of 4.1 where they kneel down as homoerotic. Rather, I wanted to take the cult of Renaissance male friendship and look at those Renaissance ideas in light of modern military testosterone-based friendship of warfare and valor. I'm not denying that some of it may be homoerotic, but it was not the aim of our interpretation, because it seemed to me that Iago was out for something else, and that was destruction.

PK

And we're right back to the critical conundrum Coleridge talks about—“motiveless malignity.” When the ideal audience member for your Othello left the theatre, what would he or she have come away with as to why Iago did it—a morality play with Iago as vice figure, the devil himself?

KT

I think in my production they came away with the impression of an obsessive envy on the part of Iago toward Othello and Cassio, and a destructive bitterness from a life not working out the way he had hoped it would. I would characterize Iago's chief drive as a nihilistic envy.

PK

Do you think your audience saw Iago's psychology in such a direct way?

KT

Let me relate an incident that illustrates the extraordinary yet popular response of the audience. An elderly woman approached Mr. Winton Blount, the benefactor of our magnificent facility, at intermission. She said, “I just want to thank you for this theater, Mr. Blount.” And he said, “How do you like the play?” He obviously knew that I was standing next to him. She said, “Oh, I love it, but I just know something terrible is going to happen by the end.” As she left, she wiped away a tear. And that was pretty much the response of the audience at the end; they were shattered. What they were witnessing was in fact a profound waste. Iago had, however you define it, an evil trait that resulted in the waste of the lives of Desdemona, Othello, Emilia and others all dragged down and destroyed by his machinations. It was insidious. There was something in the whole business that was sick, and it wasn't the interracial marriage that was sick.

PK

Do you see Othello in act 5.2 as heroic, redeeming himself, loving Desdemona too much and using the murder as a sacrifice?

KT

I think that was what Othello is trying to do, to convince himself that he is doing in the last scene. Derrick was trying to be valiant, with tears falling during his final lines. I think that perhaps one of the traps in the operatic version is that Othello tips to the grand or sentimental too soon. I think the play is more horrific if you resist a “heroic” ending.

PK

How was Othello dressed in act 5.2 when he enters with the lantern?

KT

He was dressed in just the caftan, extremely simple. It could have been that he was coming to bed. He was not dressed for the world of his military duties.

PK

What kind of bed did you use—a four-poster?

KT

It was not a four-poster. It was more like a large ottoman bed, but it was clearly their bed. It had been identified earlier in 4.2 because we had seen it with Desdemona and Emilia.

PK

“The tragic loading of this bed”—did all three of them lie on the bed?

KT

Othello and Desdemona were on it. Emilia lay next to it.

PK

Was your production going on when the O. J. Simpson story broke?

KT

Yes. The O. J. business happened that summer, and of course that spiked interest in our production. The interest was already high, but after the story broke, we suddenly had long lines waiting as standbys to sold-out performances. Yet, I don't think that people necessarily reinterpreted Derrick's performance with O. J. in mind. It seems to me they wanted to see a similar story written 400 years earlier. So it was an odd time. However, it led to a lot of conversation, a lot of audience discussion about this issue. By the way, there are several African American actors who don't want to perform Othello, who doubt that we should ever produce Othello again. They feel that it's a white man's version of a black man's play. I don't entirely agree with that viewpoint, but it was interesting that culturally corollaries were drawn between O. J. and the Moor.

PK

Would you comment on those productions where you will have an African American Othello and an African American Iago, so that you have those anxieties played out, not just racially, but in terms of gender roles.

KT

In recent years, I've seen an African American Othello and an African American Iago in the same production. I think that can work, but you do diminish the given circumstances of Othello—the racism, the charged tension between two cultures. Perhaps it highlights the homoeroticism.

PK

Did you make any substitute cuts in script for Iago? Were there things that you took out because of contextualing or glossing for the contemporary audience?

KT

I'm sure that I did, but I cannot remember the specifics.

PK

I've just published a theatre and cultural history of A Streetcar Named Desire with Cambridge University Press, and while Streetcar and Othello may seem like very different scripts, they are much alike. Would you comment?

KT

We did Streetcar here that first or second season, and I'm sure that we will do it again. I think that there are some similarities in the emotional aspect of the plays and the male-female dynamics that are portrayed.

PK

Culturally, Desdemona has been raised in an environment which is Judeo-Christian, patriarchal, a culture of the law. Venice is law-driven and Stella DuBois certainly is raised at Belle Reve with the same kinds of patriarchal incentives. In both plays you have the “wheeling outsider” coming in (Stanley; the Moor), but in the Othello-Streetcar paradigm there's that sense in which the audience is both lured and frightened by Stanley's and Othello's violence. In your production of Othello, what was the most violent thing that Othello did before act 5? The slap in act 4.2?

KT

No. There was the slap, but there were a couple of times he manhandled Iago, not just putting hands on him but taking him down, clearly dominating him, driving him to fear. One incident came at a traditional moment (act 3, scene 3) when Othello says: “Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore. Be sure of it, give me the ocular proof.” The challenge there was, of course, for Iago to respond, but physically he was no match for Weeden's Othello.

PK

What kind of music did you use in the production?

KT

We used the music composed by Jim Conely. It developed three or four musical motifs borrowing liberally from Renaissance music (the Willow Song in act 4.2 and incidental music when in Venice), percussive modern music for the military encampment scenes in Cyprus, and African tribal music on a single wind instrument for Othello.

PK

Cassio has received much criticism for being nothing more than a dandy. In your production, do you portray him as sincere and faithful or do you envision him as a reckless, foolish young man who brings a lot of this on himself? “This is my ancient; this is my right hand, and this my left”— playing a drunk.

KT

We had an excellent actor, Ray Chambers, who's played a lot of leads here at various times, and he's also very handsome, very good-looking and could look extremely aristocratic and patrician. Cassio clearly was of higher rank and status than baser-born Iago. Yet, his faults were clear and we based very much of the confrontation in 2.3 on his alcoholism leading him down the path of destruction, egged on by Iago's manipulations. Part of Cassio deserves some reputation, but he probably doesn't deserve all of his reputation. Cassio is somebody who is deeply conflicted in his inner self, related certainly to Bianca, and to having his own worries about himself. Alcohol was the accelerant in his downfall.

PK

Bianca was listed in First Folio as a courtesan, yet Edward Petcher has argued in Othello and Interpretative Traditions (1999) that the descriptions in the cast list are not authorial, and since the compositor for the First Folio was under the sway of Iago, there's actually no evidence in the text that Bianca was anything but an honest woman and not a camp follower. How did you portray her?

KT

We tried to portray her as someone who was obviously from Cyprus. She was definitely not of Cassio's class. She came from a lower class.

PK

And how did you signal that to the audience? Dialect, dress?

KT

Dress and behavior more than dialect. She was dressed in a colorful peasant dress. Her public behavior—demanding and hanging onto her lover—clearly embarrassed Cassio. I didn't want to make her simply a prostitute. We tried to establish that Cassio is not being completely honest. To him she's an object of entertainment and sexual gratification, but no more. I guess you could say it was more of the relationship you would expect with a military officer in this machismo world of Cyprus. We tried to make the sexual attraction very strong. There were lots of kisses and hugs.

PK

Were there any indecent gestures in the play to account for this soldierly-like image?

KT

Some of the soldiers used indecent gestures with reactions to Bianca, and Cassio wiped his mouth after a sloppy kiss from Bianca. There was also a transformation in Cassio when he was with Desdemona. You saw his manners come back. He was from Florence and he knew her background and he knew how to play his cards.

PK

ASF has the reputation of being a theatre that takes risks. What “risks” as a director did you take with Othello?

KT

Othello is problematic because of the racial issues, and I think who Othello and Iago are today are problematic because of the types and origins of anxieties that audiences bring with them into the theatre. You have to be very careful when you're doing the play. I don't think it is quite as problematic as that other play about Venice—The Merchant of Venice. The central risk we took was setting in the Octagon—the audience could not escape the racial/psychological/sexual tensions of the play. They were caught in the same room and were too close to objectify their responses. The other risk is that I directed it, and I'm a white man, not a Moor or an African. Even though Othello could return to our schedule soon, it's not a show that I would produce as frequently as the other major tragedies. I want to be very careful, because two out of three of our Shakespeare plays are heavily performed for high school students. But I've also been daunted in the last several years to realize that if I do it again and if I'm brasher about it, it should probably go back to the much larger Festival stage. So, I'm very concerned about pulling off a psychologically subtle Othello in such a large theatre. It could well be that my colleague, Kent Gash, who's African American, may direct it and that will be interesting, to see what new perspective he brings to the play.

PK

There was a time when an actor, Laurence Olivier, for example, could put on black paint, but those days are gone. But have we come to sentimentalize the play?

KT

Do you mean, does it simply reinforce our own feelings/prejudices/values?

PK

Yes, exactly, and for Renaissance audiences, too. Othello is a Moor, but he could also be a Coptic Christian, right?

KT

Yes, and we looked into the Coptic Christians and we looked into several African religions that had been modified by Western religions. I remember going through that process. We carefully wanted to create an Othello whose religious heritage was mixed—another potent source of confusion in his search to establish his identity. We hoped to indicate his Moorish/ African religious background had been put aside for a while.

PK

Suppressed?

KT

Yes, because Othello had to rise through the ranks of a different culture's military. Future Othellos may say, “Now I can let it hang out because I'm Colin Powell.”

PK

And was Colin Powell part of the military complex you had in mind as you interpreted your text?

KT

Surely he was. However we wanted to show a world where there was only one Colin Powell and no other African American generals anywhere, or captains, or government leaders. So there's this extraordinary achievement on Othello's part. Sort of like Dumas Pere's father in the French court where you have an African general and no other Africans anywhere. Like Othello, General Dumas was highly praised but frequently scorned and despised.