Civil War series inspires Bard on the Beach's Othello

Shakespeare's play was written more than 400 years ago, but it hasn’t lost its relevance

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      Three-and-a-half years ago, Luc Roderique was having dinner with fellow actor Kayvon Kelly. The topic of conversation: bucket-list roles. Kelly’s included Iago; Roderique’s included Othello, and he had recently finished watching The Civil War, Ken Burns’s famed documentary series on one of the bloodiest periods in U.S. history.

      “Normally, I’m not the type of guy who likes when you take a play out of its original element and superimpose something on it,” Roderique tells the Straight, sitting next to director Bob Frazer at a table inside the Bard on the Beach grounds in Kitsilano. “But there are all these amazing similarities between Othello and the Civil War. It seemed to just fit together perfectly and helped to tell the story, even more than the original setting—for a modern-day audience, at least.”

      Othello was written by William Shakespeare more than 400 years ago, but the play hasn’t lost its relevance. In short: Othello and Desdemona have secretly married. He’s a black man, she’s a white woman. Iago feels he’s been slighted by Othello, and decides to get revenge by setting up a convoluted scheme wherein Othello mistakenly believes Desdemona has been unfaithful, and then murders her in a jealous fit.

      This Othello invites its audience inside Shakespeare’s vernacular, and then situates the narrative 250-plus years later, during the fight for the emancipation of black slaves in America. Every person who exits the theatre returns to our current reality of Black Lives Matter, racism, misogyny, and violence against women. It makes for a powerful experience that Roderique would like to see prioritized in the theatre community.

      “It is important to do shows like this in big venues like this,” Roderique says. “Big producing theatres like Bard on the Beach and the Arts Club have a responsibility to put on shows that push boundaries, that raise conversations, especially right now concerning race.”

      Roderique and Kelly were prepared to produce Othello themselves, but first they decided to pitch it to Christopher Gaze at Bard on the Beach. Both actors had been part of the company for a number of years. Roderique, in fact, was in Bard’s previous production of Othello, in which Frazer starred as Iago. The pitch to Gaze went something like this.

      Roderique and Kelly: “We have this idea for Othello set during the Civil War.”

      Gaze: “Interesting, interesting. Come back to me with a director.”

      They asked Frazer, who admits that at first he was “reticent. Actually, I think I said, ‘No,’ ” he says with a laugh.

      “I think you said you didn’t like putting things onto Shakespeare,” Roderique offers, more charitably.

      “I didn’t understand it yet,” Frazer says. “So we did a reading with a full cast and then I really tried to concentrate on the Civil War and I did a lot of reading and I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s going to work.’ The more and more we got together all the time, the more it just made perfect sense.”

      It became such a labour of love that everybody was ready with a contingency plan if Bard rejected their pitch.

      “We were determined to do it, regardless,” Frazer recalls. “At one point, we thought, ‘This is not going to get done. Bard is not going to do this. Okay, intimate production in the Havana!’ We were working so diligently because the play mattered. It didn’t matter who did it as long as the play happened.”

      Eventually, Gaze said yes. Now, three-and-a-half years later, their vision is almost realized. The Civil War setting implicitly contextualizes the racial prejudice and othering that surround the titular character. Roderique and Fraser were also adamant that they acknowledge the extensive violence endured by the play’s female characters. The extent to which this is taken for granted can be seen in Othello’s Wikipedia page, which makes no mention of domestic violence or women’s rights in its subcategory of “Themes”.

      “The violence at the end of the play—at our first preview, there was a guy sitting beside me and he jumped out of his seat in shock,” Frazer says. “He jumped at the horror of what happens. And that’s not us really adding anything into it. That’s what’s written.”

      “The two main women in the play are both murdered by their husbands,” Roderique says. “We didn’t want to make it [the violence] swashbuckling or entertaining or comedic. We wanted to make it real and to make people say, ‘Holy shit, that’s horrendous, we need to talk about this.’ ”

      Othello runs in repertory with Pericles through September 17, at Bard on the Beach.

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