Othello is one of Shakespeare’s masterpieces, it is a story that was ahead of its time and has survived the last 400 plus years of racist tropes, stereotyped renditions of people of color and blackface performances. Thankfully we are at a time when most of those approaches to this story are now a footnote in history. At its core this is a powerful love story that descends into murder and manipulation at the hands of a sociopath, if it sounds like a modern “Krimi”, that’s because it is.

You cannot work on this play and not address the racism that is present. One thing I hold a very strong opinion of is that this is not a play about racism. Iago is a raging racist, but the play itself deals with so many other aspects of human nature that it is reductive to label it a play about racism. If you want to look at Shakespeare’s play about racism, watch a production of The Merchant of Venice; in that story, all the Italians hate the Jews and the vengeance they enact on Shylocke far exceeds his own brutal sense of justice.

I have worked on Othello in many ways and at different times in my career, that experience informed how I would approach our process. With this iteration of the story, I chose to scale down the plot to its most essential elements. A military environment filled with adventure, danger, honor and glory, a more than qualified outsider who is put in charge, a young woman married and out in the world for the first time, a desperate suitor who doesn’t even exist in the eyes of his love, a woman who has proven herself in the patriarchal world of the military and yet is firmly under the boot of a selfish and manipulative husband, a dashing and promising young officer who only wants to please his mentor and a disgruntled twisted underling looking for a way to destroy it all.

This is very much a play about people who live a military life. War is such an essential, twisted and haunting aspect of human nature, we ask our populations to train and then kill each other, all for resources; be it knowledge, minerals, land or what I expect our future wars to be based on … water. Soldiers are trained to be professional murderers. The US Marine Corp proudly has a saying which is “Every Marine is a Rifleman”. Unlike other branches of the military, the Marines are all trained to be killers even the cooks and accountants. Referring to their recruits as such is meant to help in their reprograming from young adults to weapons of war. It’s only been since World War II that we have studied and addressed the profound effects of war on our soldiers. When Shakespeare wrote Othello, PTSD wasn’t part of the equation, and yet just like with so many other aspects of psychology he intuitively understood it’s effects and created characters suffering from such damage. Our goal with this version of the story is to not simply dismiss Othello’s actions as those of a man struggling with his fragile masculinity but to address the real-world effect that being a killer has on a fighting force and how that cost is transferred to the people who love them.

PJ Escobio – August 2024