American Moor

The first half of American Moor introduces the format of the one-person play. When the play begins, the Actor is alone on stage, speaking to himself, but “he slowly becomes aware of the audience” and begins to speak to them (6). In a one-person play, which is also called a solo performance, the actor on stage usually tells their story to the audience, even addressing them directly. Even in this play, after the Actor becomes aware of the audience, he stops rehearsing his lines and enters a story-telling mode, introducing the main topic of the play by saying, “I was an English major when I first went to school. I loved the words. But then, I saw Shakespeare...” (6). The Actor involves the audience in his narrative as he introduces his relationship with Shakespearean verse. This style of address breaks the “fourth wall,” which is an invisible, imagined barrier between the audience and actors. Usually, in plays, the actors pretend that they cannot see the audience, who are blocked from their view by this fourth wall. However, in a one-person play, the fourth wall is broken, as shown by how the Actor addresses the audience, demonstrating his awareness of them.

In American Moor, breaking the fourth wall also serves a narrative purpose: The Director is part of the audience, too, seated “two-thirds back and center” (12). As the tension between the Actor and Director builds, the rest of the audience must decide with whom they are allied. Keith Hamilton Cobb gestures toward the interpretive role of the audience when his stage directions describe the Actor as “only imposing if you see him that way” (5), which forces the audience to examine their own potential biases.

The character of the Director represents the theme of Systemic Racism in Theater. The Actor holds the rest of the audience in confidence as he returns to them often to confide his thoughts and frustrations about the audition process, during which the Director’s biases are on full display. An initial example of this is when the Actor addresses the intersection between theater and tone policing, which is an often racially-charged tactic used by people in power to dismiss ideas that are communicated in loud or emotional tones by minorities. The Actor tells the audience that he must be sure to watch his tone when he is talking with the Director. He says that “people in our American culture, who are not Black like [him], they do not respond in the same manner to Black men, like [him], raising their voices, even slightly, as they do with one another…or even changing tone” (10). The Actor observes that white people aren’t threatened by other white people who speak loudly—it is only when Black men like him raise their voices or speak emotionally that they get frightened. Since the Director is a white man, the Actor is aware that the Director, too, will likely hold the same prejudice against him and perceive his “changing tone” as hostility. So, the Actor ensures that he keeps his tone even when he communicates with the Director.

The Director’s character also shows that those who have the power to make important decisions in theater are largely white men like him who have the relevant educational degrees but little life experience. The Actor sets up a juxtaposition between his own “extensive experience” and the Director’s “grossly limited experience” (15). The Actor has a lifetime of experience as a classical actor and the lived experience of being a Black man in America, which gives his performance of Othello nuance and uniqueness. Despite this, the Director’s formal education holds more sway in the theater, and he gets to dictate how the Actor must portray Othello. The Actor tells the audience that he has been in “many rooms like this […] standing in front of some…guy” who “studied with somebody who studied with somebody who was British” (14). He conjures up a recurring scene he finds himself in, and he is always trying to impress a white director without talent or vision who feels like Shakespeare is his artistic provenance.

The Actor comments on this unequal distribution of power and his own powerlessness as a Black actor. He notes that he doesn’t “get to audition directors,” and if he gets the role, he will be forced to “toddle off […] to do [the Director’s] show” (15). Part of the Director’s vision for his show entails the Actor playing Othello as highly emotive, doing “a number” for the Venetian Senate. The Actor realizes that the Director is “implying that [he] need[s] to do ‘a number…’ for [the audience]” (19). By paralleling his situation with Othello’s, the Actor emphasizes how he and Othello are both powerless and forced to perform against their wishes for white men, despite the hundreds of years that separate the Actor from Shakespeare’s time.

This section of the play also touches upon Interpreting Classical Literature in the Modern World, with the Actor questioning who gets to determine how Shakespearean plays must be interpreted and performed. The Actor believes that traditional recitations of Shakespeare don’t do justice to the verse. He says, “these silly, cerebral fucks who get to do this shit are more interested in starin’ downstage and recitin’ some poem […] than they are in talkin’ to the person standin’ on stage with them” (9). The Actor believes the plays must be performed like a conversation rather than stiffly and pompously. Importantly, when he talks about the people “who get to do this shit” (9), he draws attention to the fact that theater—and especially Shakespearean theater—is usually the bastion of the privileged. In Elizabethan and Jamesian England, even female characters were played by teenaged boys, so Shakespearean plays have historically been the provenance of white men like the Director.

The Actor says that this trend even impacts who “[gets] to do” Shakespeare in the 21st century. His claims hold weight since, even in 2024, when the Black British actress Francesca Amewudah-Rivers was cast as Juliet in a production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, she received a “barrage of deplorable racist abuse” for playing a “white” character, despite her bona fides starring in the “Shakespeare plays Macbeth and Othello as well as Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone” (Khomami, Nadia. “‘Too Much to Bear’: Black Actors Condemn Racial Abuse of Romeo & Juliet Star.” The Guardian, 2024). The backlash against Amewudah-Rivers’s casting shows that biases about who gets to interpret Shakespeare or play his characters perseveres well into the 21st century. In American Moor, the Actor’s own experience as a Black Shakespearean actor has him auditioning before incompetent white directors and typecast into roles based on his race—for instance, his acting coach didn’t think the Actor could do the role of Romeo justice since the Actor is a Black man. Also, the Actor’s progressive, intelligent ideas are constantly dismissed, highlighting the privilege of those who get to make these decisions.