The Broadway Othello
(1942–1943)
Margaret Webster, the Shakespearean director, had seen Robeson’s youthful 1930 performance of Othello in London. “Frankly,” she told an interviewer fifteen years later, “I hadn’t thought he was very good. But he said to me that he himself didn’t think he was very good and that now he had studied and restudied the role and he thought he was ready to play it.” Early in 1942 Webster and Robeson decided to work together, but every New York management Webster approached was afraid of a production in which a black man made love to and murdered a white woman. “Everyone was scared,” Webster later wrote; “a few fell back on the scholastic argument … that Othello was a Moor, not a Negro, or expressed doubts about Robeson’s technical equipment as an actor. But mostly they were just plain scared of the issues which the production would raise.”1
Rather than give up the idea entirely, they turned to the summer-theater route, themselves offering to assemble the cast and pay all freight costs in exchange for a tryout. Most of the summer leasers turned out to be as cautious as the Broadway managements, but two finally came forward who were not: John Huntington of the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, and the team of Day Tuttle and Richard Skinner of the McCarter Theater in Princeton (the town where Robeson had been born). The contracts called for an opening at the Brattle and then a brief run at the McCarter. Only a two-week rehearsal period was allotted, one week in New York for the principals, the second in Cambridge, where the principals would be joined by pickup members of the Brattle Theater’s own company in the secondary roles.2
Webster, who had had a considerable career as an actress, decided to play Emilia herself; ordinarily she avoided taking on the dual function of actress and director—though it was more widely done at that time than today—but she did so now to simplify the tight rehearsal schedule. Two crucial roles remained to be cast: Desdemona and Iago. At the urging of her close friend Eva Le Gallienne, Webster offered the parts to the husband-and-wife acting pair, Uta Hagen and José Ferrer. Both had had recent successes, Ferrer in Charley’s Aunt and Hagen as Nina in the Lunt’s 1938 star-studded production of The Sea Gull (in which Webster herself had played Masha). Though they were already hailed as rising stars, Ferrer had never played Shakespeare and Hagen was still in her early twenties and comparatively inexperienced. Webster’s judgment, seconded by Robeson, was to go with them.3
The company worked ten hours a day, ardor matched by anxiety. “Robeson is going to be very bad,” Hagen wrote her father, “but he’s an angel.” Webster agreed with Hagen’s estimate of Robeson’s acting but not of his beatitude, deciding early on that he was “difficult to direct,” a “special problem.” His ability to “seize on an idea like lightning,” she believed, was due to his energy and intelligence, not to his acting craft. “Not only has he no technique,” she wrote, “which he knows, but no conception of ‘impersonation’. He can only do it if he can get a kind of electric motor going inside himself and this has to be started by some feeling—not Othello’s feeling, but Robeson’s. Fortunately his tremendous vocal resources protect him.…” (Robeson himself acknowledged that a device he used to excite his nightly rage onstage was to imagine his trusted friend Ben Davis betraying him.)4
Tickets for the week-long run at the Brattle sold out within hours of the first announcement, and debate over the production’s prospects took no longer to heat up. Scholars quickly checked in with opinions about whether the casting of a black man in the role of Othello was a betrayal or a realization of Shakespeare’s intentions. Broadway veterans argued over the commercial chances of the venture, whether American audiences would ever turn out in sufficient numbers for a Shakespearean play, let alone one with a racially mixed cast. Theater buffs debated the extent of Robeson’s talent: Had his career up to now been the triumph of personal magnetism over aptitude? Did he, at age forty-four, have the experience and skill necessary to carry off such an assignment? Given the handicaps of an insufficient rehearsal period, a director who did not trust her star’s talent, and, for good measure, an August heat wave in Cambridge so intense that Robeson had to wring out his robes between scenes, the prescription seemed set for opening-night disaster.5
But in the theater, intensity—the charged edge of nervous uncertainty—is more often rewarded than composed confidence. In one of those peculiar “miracles” in which theatrical lore abounds, every element on opening night fell into near-perfect place. When the curtain fell, the audience erupted in ovation. The contingent of Harvard undergraduates ritually pounded its heels and clapped its hands by way of offering Alma Mater’s ultimate accolade. Wave after wave of “Bravo!” accompanied the curtain calls, the clamor so thunderous a reporter marveled that “the staid old walls didn’t burst from the noise and enthusiasm.” Pacification was finally achieved only after the entire company joined the audience in singing the national anthem. Flora Robson, who had costarred with Robeson in 1933 in the London production of All God’s Chillun, was in the Cambridge audience that night and reported to Margaret Webster’s parents (the illustrious actors Ben Webster and his wife, Dame May Whitty), that the evening had been “a tremendous triumph for Peggy and Paul.… It went without a single hitch.…”6
Next day the Boston critics weighed in with a favorable verdict equal in fervor to the audience’s. “A great artistic achievement,” wrote one; an “abundantly deserved” ovation, declared another. The New York Times and Variety also covered the event and competed with the local critics for superlatives. The Times magisterially reassured those who had been concerned in advance of the opening as to whether “a Negro actor is acceptable, both academically and practically,” that Robeson’s “heroic and convincing” performance had indeed captured all the facets of Othello’s layered personality. Variety went further: “no white man,” its critic wrote, “should ever dare presume” to play the role again.7
The critics were not, of course, above caviling. Louis Kronenberger, writing in PM, found Robeson’s performance “uneven”; another chided Ferrer for insufficiently conveying Iago’s “charm”; a third raised questions about the “comparatively small and limited color” of Uta Hagen’s voice. Some doubts were expressed, too, about the effectiveness of the production, with one critic complaining that Margaret Webster’s telescoping of the play into two acts and four scenes had made Iago’s already “implausible machinations” still more incomprehensible. But such incidental complaints were lost in the general huzzahs. Kronenberger, despite his doubts, expressed the hope that, “after further polishing,” the production would “come to Broadway this winter.” Should it do so, the Variety critic predicted, it “would hurl Broadway on its practically invulnerable ear.”8
But the production would not make it to New York for another fourteen months. This time it was not for want of managers—as soon as the reviews appeared, producers swamped Margaret Webster with offers (ultimately she gave the nod to the Theatre Guild). Robeson himself, however, was not available for a quick transfer to Broadway. He was able to follow the Brattle performances with a two-week run at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, but after that he had to meet a variety of prior commitments. The company temporarily disbanded, to reconvene a year later for a scheduled Broadway opening in October 1943.9
Ten days after Othello closed at McCarter, and with scant rest, Robeson resumed his hectic schedule of concerts and political appearances. On September 2 he spoke at a mass rally in Manhattan, sponsored by the Council on African Affairs, in support of the Free India movement, a cause dear to him since the 1930s, when, in London, he had come to know several future leaders of subject nations—including Nehru. “Many of these boys and I found we had much in common,” Robeson wryly told the September rally. What they “had in common,” he went on to explain, was the conviction that the era of colonialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America had to be brought to a close. The current war against the Axis powers, Robeson told the crowd, “is not a war for the liberation of Europeans and European nations,” but “a war for the liberation of all peoples, all races, all colors oppressed anywhere in the world.” The righteous Allied cause should not be contaminated, Robeson argued, by repressive policies historically linked to the constituent Allied nations. He credited President Roosevelt with seeing “very clearly” that the war was one for universal liberation—unlike Winston Churchill, Robeson said—but did not absolve the President or the country of blame for archaic policies and distorted attitudes; colonialism and racism, he insisted, compromised the moral integrity of the struggle against fascism and potentially diluted the commitment to it of oppressed people everywhere. Yet Robeson insisted, too, that blacks had a greater stake in the war than did whites, for an Axis victory “would mean a thousandfold intensification” of their present submerged status, given the “vicious doctrine of race hatred” associated with Italian, German, and Japanese fascism. The FBI agents at the Free India rally summed this up simply by reporting to headquarters that “the Communists” had met.10
Robeson continued to sound his interconnected themes in rallies that same month of September 1942 in California. Speaking and singing before thousands of CIO aircraft workers at the North American Aviation plant and at mass meetings in Los Angeles and San Francisco, he emphasized over and over the connection between “the problems of the Negro today and the problems of oppressed people all over the world, in the Balkans, among the Welsh miners, in the London slums”—and stressed that the common solution to those problems “lies in the overthrow of Fascism.” Apparently the vision was too abstract for one reporter, who asked him to be more precise about the present attitude of blacks toward the war effort. “Some feel the war is theirs and some feel it isn’t,” Robeson answered; “I feel it is ours.” Though he didn’t minimize the persistence of Jim Crow, he felt heartened at “the progress, great progress,” being made against it. A month later, speaking before the nonsegregated audience he had insisted on in the Booker T. Washington School auditorium in New Orleans, he gave a somewhat different emphasis: “I had never put a correct evaluation on the dignity and courage of my people of the deep South until I began to come South myself.… I had imagined Negroes of the South beaten, subservient, cowed. But I see them now as courageous, and possessors of a profound and instinctive dignity, a race that has come through its trials unbroken, a race of such magnificence of spirit that there exists no power on earth that could crush them.” Like many progressives during the war years, Robeson was sounding a fuller note of optimism than he would ever again feel. Yet, all his life, even in the discouraging years that followed the war, he would always emphasize his conviction that blacks had come through the duress of their historical experience with redoubled dignity and spiritual vigor. Unlike many black leaders of the subsequent generation, such as Malcolm X, Robeson continued to stress the success rather than the pathology of black life—a reading as much from his own sanguine temperament as from history.11
In October 1942, accompanied by Larry Brown and Clara Rockmore, Robeson set out on the longest concert tour of his career to date—some seventy performances, one every two to three days, concentrated in the Far Western states but stretching from New Hampshire to Montreal to Pocatello, Idaho. It ended up on April 5, 1943, in Mansfield, Ohio; thirteen hundred people jammed into an auditorium to hear what the local paper called “a sort of United Nations tribute”—a program of songs and folk tunes from Russia, France, England, and China, culminating in “Ballad for Americans” and “The Star-Spangled Banner”—and earning Robeson thirteen encores. He returned to New York after the six-month tour, nagged by a persistent cold, overweight by twenty-five pounds (his normal weight of 230 had ballooned to 255), and underexercised (like many athletes, Robeson disliked mild forms of exercise and at the most might throw around a basketball). He promised himself a period of recuperation—a promise he did not keep—before the onset of rehearsals of Othello.12
Instead, May saw him addressing a giant Labor for Victory rally at Yankee Stadium, along with Mayor La Guardia and Joseph Curran, president of the National Maritime Union. In June he traveled to Morehouse College in Atlanta to receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree, to deliver the seventy-sixth commencement address, and to hear Morehouse President Benjamin E. Mays laud him as “truly the people’s artist,” a man who had experienced and expressed “a common bond between the suffering and oppressed folks of the world” and become champion of their cause, who “perhaps more than any other person” had “made Negro music accepted as first rate art by the world at large,” and whose performance as Othello had “rendered the Negro race and the world a great service” by demonstrating “that Negroes are capable of enduring interpretations in the realm of the theatre as over against the typical cheap performances that Hollywood and Broadway too often insist on Negroes doing.” These words were special balm to a man who had come to resent and regret bitterly some of his own performing history.13
In July, Robeson joined Robert Shaw’s Collegiate Chorale, with Alexander Smallens conducting the Philharmonic Orchestra, for a concert that filled Lewisohn Stadium’s twenty thousand seats. From that triumph it was out to Chicago to sing and speak at a Production for Victory rally at the Apex Smelting Co. plant, then back to Los Angeles in early August to participate in a rally to benefit the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee and to San Francisco to address a CIO-sponsored conference on racial and national minorities. At the Apex plant he confessed himself “a little discouraged” with aspects of the domestic scene after traveling through the West and seeing the extent of opposition to “giving everybody a fair chance”; and in San Francisco he told the crowd that “the temper” of black people in the United States had changed during the war and that if there was to be a solution to the race problem, “Labor will have to rally and understand these problems”: white allies within the CIO would have to help push for more integrated opportunities in the job market.14
By August 1943 Robeson had cleared his calendar to begin rehearsing for the scheduled Broadway opening of Othello on October 19. But just prior to the start of rehearsals the show’s producers, the Theatre Guild, decided to replace Ferrer and Hagen. The Guild objected mainly to Ferrer: his draft status was uncertain, he had received the weakest reviews of the three principals during the tryouts, and, most important, he was insisting on star billing and on substantial salaries for himself and Hagen—while also making it clear that neither would work without the other. Robeson and Margaret Webster took their side. Robeson argued that he worked well with the couple and that their talent warranted their demands; Webster argued that Ferrer simply needed more rehearsal time. When no agreement could be reached, the Guild decided to hire Stefan Schnabel for Iago, and Virginia Gilmore for Desdemona. Margaret Webster had her doubts about Gilmore but was pleased with Schnabel, and wrote her mother, May Whitty, that “Paul—who, as usual, was not to be found for several days while everything hung in mid-air—is delighted with him” as well.15
Hardly. Paul confided his unhappiness over the cast changes to Freda Diamond. There simply wasn’t the same magic, he complained, that he had previously felt when performing with Uta and Joe, and he wished there was some way Bob Rockmore could manage to overcome the contractual stumbling blocks to their continuing. Freda told him to do it himself—he was a lawyer, he didn’t need Rockmore’s intercession. Why didn’t he just get on a train to Ossining (where the Ferrers had a house) and work things out directly with Uta and Joe? Freda says that Paul took her advice, went up to Ossining that same evening, and settled it.16
After smoothing over terms with Uta and Joe, Robeson laid down the law to the Theatre Guild. Flexing the combined muscle provided by his star status and his contractual rights, he declared his refusal to continue unless the Ferrers were rehired. His adamance infuriated Margaret Webster. “Against his inarticulate but immoveable resolve, pleas, arguments, threats, reason broke in vain,” she reported to her mother. “No Ferrers no Robeson, no Robeson no show. And I, as usual, left to straighten it out.” She did, negotiating to buy out Schnabel’s contract (Robeson agreed to pay half of the four thousand dollars), soothing the cast’s alarm over the escalating rumors, persuading the Ferrers to forgo equal billing with Robeson in exchange for being “prominently featured in all display advertising,” and having their salary demands met fully. All the while, she wrote her mother, she behaved “as if I loved them and didn’t want to pitch them off the balcony into 52nd St.”—in order to “get a show out of that big, black jelly-fish and those two conceited little asses and make us all happy and bursting with harmony and enthusiasm!” Robeson later succeeded in getting the Ferrers costar billing as well—in smaller type than his own name, but featured above the title. That, in turn, engendered renewed rage in Webster; she felt, with some justification, that costar status did not accurately reflect the comparative drawing power of the Ferrers as measured against Robeson’s and was, in the bargain, an insult to her own worth as an actress (she had again cast herself as Emilia). To which Robeson responded—at least so Webster reported—that she “had ‘got’ plenty out of it as the producer-director and in effect took the attitude that if [she] didn’t want to be billed below Uta but would prefer to leave the cast that was all right too!!” Webster’s indignation may have been fed by having previously miscalculated Robeson’s temperament. She now recognized, belatedly, that “This sweet, unassuming, dear, big bear of a man could crush us all.” It would seem, she wrote her mother in icy fury, “I have not been playing Svengali to his Trilby, but Frankenstein to his monster.” Expressions of high dudgeon in the theater, particularly during the tension of a rehearsal period, rarely survive as final verdicts. Passions rise and fall, and antagonism quickly transmutes into felicitation when a project culminates in success. To that end all hands now bent their efforts.17
At Robeson’s insistence, a six-week rehearsal period was scheduled—in contrast to the two weeks allotted the cast before the Brattle tryout the preceding year. The praise of the Boston critics in 1942 had seemed to him excessive, even unwarranted. He, more than anyone, acknowledged—indeed, tended to exaggerate—the inadequacies of his tryout performance. He had not yet gotten to the bottom of his role, and he knew it. “It’s not right,” he told Uta Hagen; “I don’t have it.” Forty years later, Hagen admiringly recalls his attitude. “He had judgment about himself that was astonishing,” she said. “He didn’t fall for praise—other people’s accolades never went to his head.” Along with an “enormous capacity for self-evaluation” went unusual modesty about the work. He was determined to get it right, was determined to acquire the needed additional technique to rid his performance of the traces of self-consciousness, tonal monotony, and deliberateness some of the critics had pointed to. He was angry that he had been denied the needed coaching in the past, that he had had directors regard him as a great “natural” talent—the soulful primitive—who should not be tampered with for fear of destroying his instincts, diluting his force.18
Surveying his past experience as an actor, he told one interviewer that at the Provincetown Playhouse during the 1920s, “no one told me anything. They didn’t want any ‘actor’s tricks.’ So I was the former college athlete, playing on muscle.” Growing up in the oratorical tradition of the black church, he had, naturally enough, turned to declamation when in doubt. Throughout the 1930s, “directors assumed that I knew what I was doing, when the fact was that I had no technique at all. They no more questioned my ‘technique’ than they would that of a Hindu dancer.” It was an attitude characteristic of the time: the art of the Negro was pure, instinctive, unique, and would be spoiled if any effort was made to guide or train it.19
Robeson had not been immune to that attitude himself. Throughout the early 1930s he had spoken fervently of the need for Africans to keep their cultural heritage unsullied, to stand apart from the contaminating influences of the West, to eschew imitation. But that was not quite the whole story, either. Robeson sometimes deliberately cultivated the image of a “natural actor who had been deprived of technical training.” He did so, typically, to cover all bases; he let others think he was stumbling through his roles on instinct as a hedge against being judged by standards he himself, with almost knee-jerk modesty, felt unable to meet; should he be found wanting when measured against those standards, he could fall back on his “noble-savage” disguise. In regard to his singing, too, he sometimes adapted this same double-edged defensive posture, on the one hand studying lieder diligently, on the other allowing the view to take hold that “Joshua Fit de Battle of Jericho” marked the outer limit of his range. In truth, Robeson had considerable training over the course of his life both as actor and singer—more at least than he was always ready to acknowledge—and, had he determined to, he could have had still more.20
With the Broadway opening looming, he did turn for help to Margaret Webster. And she did try to provide it. But Webster was accustomed to giving actors line readings; she conceived of the craft of acting as the process of shaping outer form. Her strong points, as a fellow director has said, “were picturing, pacing and energizing a show”—entertainment values, with theatricality stressed over poetry, the well-composed stage composition stressed over the well understood. Typically she would tell an actor where to stand and how to speak—hows, not whys—trusting that her own understanding was a sufficient guide for the others. She was willing to discuss the meaning of a line in a one-on-one huddle—but would then announce her conclusion: “What the old boy meant by that was …” When the meaning seemed transparent to her and an actor’s hesitations incomprehensible, she would simply command impatiently, “Well, just look at what Shakespeare says.” Webster’s skill and intelligence were of a high order, and consequently her line readings were rich. But the external process she encouraged was antithetical to Robeson’s need to move away from outer effect and vocalization.21
Early in rehearsals Webster concluded that Robeson “lacks the quality of real rage.” Of his anger over racism, she said, “he could not bring it onto the stage with him; he could not recapture it.…” In her view, he “was at his best in the gentle passages” and wooed Desdemona “with tenderness and loving humor.” But he “never matched at all” the frenzy and passion the role called for in the later scenes, substituting instead the speech of the pulpit, “sonorous and preachy,” with admixtures of “the slight artificiality of an opera singer.” Robeson acknowledged that he had trouble unearthing his rage on demand—he had been brought up, as a survival tactic, to keep it carefully interred.22
Webster, in turn, acknowledged that, if Robeson lacked the “emotional and nervous concentration which Othello required,” the fault may have been her own. “Had I been more of a ‘Method’ director,” she was later to write, “perhaps I should have been better … about releasing the pent-up emotions in Paul”—thus granting that the essential problem was not Robeson’s lack of emotional resources but his inadequate technique for uncovering and utilizing them. Webster, by her own admission, turned to “tricks to help him—speed above everything; if he slowed down, he was lost.” She gave him accelerated line readings, and she tried to “mask his heaviness of movement by having him stay still, while the other actors moved around him.” “My job,” she wrote, “is to jockey him into some approximation of Othello, and then make a kind of frame round him which will hold the play together. It’s very difficult—like pushing a truck up-hill—yet sometimes when he catches fire (from me) he goes careening off at eighty miles an hour and leaves all the rest of us standing. But he’s so undependable.” His performances showed “immense variation”: “Sometimes they are filled with his own personal quality; sometimes they are an empty house with nobody home.”23
In short, Webster superimposed surface effects, and what Robeson most needed and wanted was inner exploration. Her formalistic gifts and perceptions came out like prose essays, the content impressive and difficult for an actor to dispute—but equally difficult to translate into performance skills. Webster didn’t purposefully withhold her help—she gave it in the only way she knew how. It was not, for Robeson, a fruitful way. “I don’t think she ever helped Paul with anything,” is Uta Hagen’s opinion. “Margaret Webster was a brilliant woman,” but she “belonged in a university.”24
Hagen herself was not able at the time to offer him anything more. She was still in her early twenties and in retrospect feels that she began to learn about acting for the first time only after she met Harold Clurman in 1948. At the time of the Othello production, “I thought I knew more and was better than Paul—and he encouraged me to think so—but I wasn’t.” Robeson did turn to her for coaching, but she says, “I wasn’t equipped to teach anybody” then and wouldn’t have known whom to recommend for training. Prior to the late forties, “training” usually meant the American Academy of Dramatic Arts or the Royal Academy—“terrible then and terrible now,” in Hagen’s judgment. Otherwise there were only limited options available to actors: pre-eminently, Sanford Meisner, Erwin Piscator, and Herbert Berghof at the Neighborhood Playhouse (in 1947 the Actors Studio was founded). For established actors to seek further training was not then a common phenomenon; once a performer had been “recognized,” the product tended to be considered finished—signed, sealed, and approved.25
By all accounts, Robeson got along beautifully with his fellow actors; the cast became “like a family,” and rehearsals were marked by warmth and mutual respect. Robeson knew everybody’s name, even the spear-carriers with no lines or only the obligatory “What ho!” John Gerstadt, a youthful cast member who served as general factotum—making lightning changes for his roles as messenger, servant, and Cypriot—marveled at Robeson’s ability to make him—and everyone—feel “special,” to convey focused concern for him.26
Gerstadt never felt that Robeson’s attentiveness was calculated or compulsive—the star doing a noblesse oblige turn to elicit kudos for egalitarian virtue or to create a patina of backstage solidarity. Robeson’s friendliness was not overemphatic or in any way suspect. He made no special point of asking cast members to call him “Paul”; his easy accessibility made that, in time, seem natural—though this was still a period in the American theater when stars were addressed as Mr. Paul Muni, Mrs. Priestly Morrison, or Miss Katharine Cornell. Nor did Robeson seal himself off in the star’s traditional isolation, to be fussed over by dressers, fawned over by fans. (Gerstadt remembers that Robeson showed up one day to play on the cast softball team in Central Park—producing a storm of mock protest from the opposing team: “This is for cast members only! That man’s obviously a ringer! You’re not Paul Robeson!” “If I’m not Paul Robeson,” he called back, “I learned all those lines for nothing.” The Othello team won the game 24–3.) Robeson kept his dressing room at the theater open, except when he was onstage or making a change. The cast was otherwise welcome to hang out there, a gesture the nonfeatured players particularly appreciated, since the play was housed in the Shubert Theater, a musical house whose communal dressing rooms were quite a distance from the stage—a distance that could barely be covered before the next entrance cue.27
Gerstadt, still in his teens and “full of outrage at the world’s injustice,” remembers bursting in on Robeson with regularity to share his latest breathless enthusiasm. One day he appeared in Robeson’s dressing room to announce his fury over the continuing segregation of black troops in the armed forces—and his solution. “Wouldn’t this be a terrific time to say the hell with your army, your navy, we’re not going to fight if the Negro isn’t treated better!—Wow! what a perfect time!” Didn’t Robeson agree? “No,” Robeson responded gently, “no, I don’t, John. First things first, Hitler first.” Robeson “didn’t go on about it,” Gerstadt recalls. He never went on about it, James Monks, another young cast member, adds. He would neither initiate political topics nor, if they did come up, indulge in political harangue; he would give his opinion, but not attempt to overpower in argument or to convert. “He didn’t put you down because you differed with his opinion”; his characteristic comment would be along the lines of “Well, that’s possible, but have you considered the alternative argument that …”28
“Powerfully cool” is how one associate from those years describes him. Robeson’s benign, shrewdly calibrated forbearance contributed to the unheated way the company was able to approach the “black-white” issues within the play itself. No one recalls any semblance of self-consciousness about race—whether among members of the company themselves or in regard to the potential controversy for an audience in a black Othello’s playing opposite a white Desdemona. “I don’t recall anyone saying ‘we might get in trouble here, do we dare?’” Gerstadt says, no attempt to evade or deliberately to titillate.29
Whether tactics or temperament played the larger role in Robeson’s posture of outward equanimity cannot be measured with assurance. This was, after all, an otherwise all-white cast in a nearly all-white profession, and Robeson, at age forty-five, had long since learned the likely limits and durability of white folks’ empathy. Robeson the man was not unlike Othello the character in the surface composure that overlay his interior passion and which, under duress, could give way to the warrior’s strength. As he would demonstrate before the decade of the forties was out, Robeson could give vehement public vent to his sense of grievance, but the event had to warrant the feelings; he picked his occasions for calm, and his occasions for anger. In regard to Othello, he kept his manner cool in order to avoid jeopardizing the broader impact he intended: to make of his portrayal a political statement beyond the purview of art—while preserving the integrity of his performance as art. “I like to feel,” Robeson told a newspaper reporter, “that my work has a farther reach than its artistic appeal. I consider art a social weapon.” And he told the black journalist P. L. Prattis, “Not simply for art’s sake do I try to excel in Othello, but more to prove the capacity of the people from whom I’ve sprung and of all such peoples, of whatever color, erroneously regarded as backward.” To Uta Hagen he said, “I do the singing and I do the acting because it helps me make a statement, gives me a platform to say what I believe.”30
“Othello kills not in hate but in honor,” Robeson once said: “It wasn’t just the act of infidelity” that led Othello to take Desdemona’s life, “it was the destruction of himself as a human being, of his human dignity.” In a number of interviews Robeson gave while preparing the role, he expounded his view that Othello was a great—and persecuted—“Negro warrior,” and that his own responsibility was to convey the tale of a man who had managed to rise to a position of leadership in an alien culture—only to be destroyed by it. To make Othello’s jealousy believable—since “under ordinary circumstances” he could have dispelled it with a word to his wife—Robeson felt the foundation had to be laid early in the play by stressing the cultural as well as racial differences that set the Moor apart: his values as well as his appearance accounted for his distinctiveness.31
Robeson, in his own words, “listened carefully to directors and Shakespearean authorities, but in some cases their Othello didn’t think and act exactly as I believed a great Negro warrior would do, and in those cases I played it my way.” He made those decisions with great care. His own style in preparing a role always entailed close analysis and cautious unfolding. As a man of erudition, moreover, he approached Shakespearean scholarship with familiarity and respect—and was well aware that both academic and theatrical tradition provided weight for his own chosen interpretation.32
For a century and a half after the play’s first presentation, Othello had been portrayed as black. Edmund Kean first broke with this tradition when he offered Drury Lane a coffee-colored version—one hailed by Coleridge as a most “pleasing probability.” So well did it please, that tawny half-castes thereafter streamed forth from the stage, with such luminaries as Henry Irving and Edwin Forrest playing a range of rainbow-tinted Othellos. (A Maryland woman in 1868 was so delighted with one of the lighter versions that she felt able definitely to declare, “We may regard, then, the daub of black upon Othello’s visage as an EBULLITION of fancy, a FREAK of imagination.… Othello was a WHITE man.”) From the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, Othello had been popularly performed in the United States as an animated lecture on, alternately, the sin of jealousy, the evils of drink, or the perils of lust—as a Moral Dialogue on any number of questions, excluding only the question of race. A host of famed actors had offered the role in a host of hues—excluding only black.33
But at least once notably before Robeson, and several more times passably, a black actor had played Othello as a black hero. The great Ira Aldridge first opened in the role in 1827 in Liverpool, with Charles Kean as his Iago. For four decades thereafter, Aldridge toured Othello to acclaim throughout Britain and the Continent, and in the 1860s was received with particular enthusiasm in Russia. Théophile Gautier was in St. Petersburg when Aldridge performed there in 1863. He had gone expecting an “energetic, disordered, fiery, rather barbaric” portrayal, but found a “quiet, reserved, classic, majestic” one—“Othello himself, as Shakespeare has created him, with eyes half-closed as if dazzled from the African sun, his nonchalant, oriental attitude, and that Negro free-and-easy air that no European can imitate.” Aldridge, Gautier reported, was the lion of the hour. The United States, however, did not believe in a black Othello. Aldridge never played the role in his native land.34
Margaret Webster agreed with Robeson’s insistence on an Othello of unambiguous racial identity. Only with “a great man,” she wrote, “a man of simplicity and strength [who] also was a black man” playing the role, could an audience believe he could command Venice’s armies while remaining a stranger in its midst; only then could the sources of Iago’s hatred and the extent of Desdemona’s courage be adequately measured; only then could the depth of Othello’s vulnerability and resentment, his wary susceptibility to tales of the betrayal of his honor, be fully laid bare.35
Webster hired the great stage designer Robert Edmond Jones—who had designed the last previous Othello on Broadway, in 1937, and had known the Robesons since their days together at the Provincetown Play-house in the 1920s—to do sets and costumes. She essentially retained her staging ideas from the Brattle production, but in the interim had further streamlined the script. On his side, Robeson prepared for the role by growing a beard and trimming his weight back down to 230. His fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-week salary was a fraction of what he earned singing concerts (two thousand to twenty-five hundred a night), and the demands of the role were greater. He was later to say that playing Othello took the equivalent energy of three concerts; only Emperor Jones, twenty years before, had involved a comparable effort.36
He concentrated particularly during rehearsals on bringing more fluidity to his physical movements—an added challenge in a small playing space that heightened the static impression created by his large build. He also worked hard at overcoming his self-acknowledged tendency “to be too loud, too big,” worked to bring his voice down to the level where he could get the full tonal value out of it and “to be constantly careful not to make my lines too musical, not to sing my lines, but to SPEAK them MUSICALLY.” At the end of a day’s rehearsal he typically needed ten to twelve hours’ sleep to recuperate, and when not rehearsing he stayed close to his book-filled apartment in New York (rarely going up to Enfield), reading, studying languages (at the moment he was plugging away at Chinese), and spending long hours listening to his huge record collection.37
For four and a half weeks prior to the October 19 Broadway opening, the company tried the show out on the road, first in New Haven on September 11 for one week, then in Boston for two weeks, and finally in Philadelphia (“… we eat and drink like pigs,” Uta Hagen wrote her parents, “talk until all hours, get up around twelve or one in the afternoon”). Although the three-city tour brought in an exceptionally high gross of $103,000, its progress was not one of unalloyed triumph. Some of the out-of-town critics showered the production with superlatives, but an equal number (and the better-known ones) registered more reservations than had greeted the Brattle tryout of the previous year. In Boston, the best-known theater town, the respected critics Elinor Hughes and Elliott Norton turned in sharply divergent verdicts, representing the generally split decision of their colleagues.38
Hughes served up praise for all hands, but above all lauded Robeson, for a performance that had “deepened and simplified since last summer” and was now wholly convincing; his “tremendous magnetism, splendid size and bearing, rich voice,” and powerful emotional conviction successfully conveyed—for the first time in Hughes’s long experience—a believable hero: “At last the tragedy becomes inevitable, not arbitrary.” Elliott Norton turned in a directly contradictory verdict. Aside from a few “breathtaking” moments (for which he mostly credited Uta Hagen), Norton thought the production unconvincing. And for the worst of it he blamed Robeson himself: “His acting does not fulfill the promise of that tentative week at Cambridge.” When Robeson could call on his own experience, Norton felt, he “walks with the great men of the stage”; when he could not, he fell back on strained tricks, vocalizing and declaiming to merely “artificial” effect. Anyone familiar with the vagaries of theater reviewing in the daily press knows that disparate judgments are commonplace, that what passes for considered critical opinion is as likely the product of an ill-digested dinner, rushed deadlines, or the psychological safety of reiterating a prior view. Still, the divided out-of-town verdict necessarily heightened the company’s anxiety as opening night on Broadway finally drew near. “We’re getting ourselves keyed up,” Uta Hagen wrote to her father. “Hold your thumbs.”39
On the day of the opening, veteran theatrical commentator Sam Zolotow led off his New York Times column by declaring that the Theatre Guild was launching its twenty-sixth season that evening with a production of Othello that the “theatrical pundits say has all the earmarks of a rare occasion in the annals of the Broadway stage.” The prediction was especially notable—and a gauge of the excited anticipation—for being made in a Broadway season that saw the premiere of Oklahoma!, Katharine Cornell and Raymond Massey in Lovers and Friends, Margaret Sullavan and Elliott Nugent in The Voice of the Turtle, and, during the same week Othello was due to open, saw the Frank Fay-Ethel Waters-Bert Wheeler vaudeville show Laugh Time move to the Ambassador. This wasn’t just another opening of just another show. Margaret Webster later wrote, “I have never been so paralytic with fright,” adding that “for the first time in the United States a Negro was playing one of the greatest parts ever written … and [the occasion] was trying to prove something other than itself.…”40
It did. When the curtain came down that night, the audience erupted into an ovation that (as Newsweek reported) “hadn’t been heard around those parts in many seasons. For twenty minutes, and half as many curtain calls, the applause and the bravos echoed from orchestra pit and gallery to give Forty-Fourth Street the news of something more than just another hit.” Burton Rascoe, theater critic for the World-Telegram, wrote in his column the next day, “Never in my life have I seen an audience sit so still, so tense, so under the spell of what was taking place on the stage as did the audience at the Shubert last night. And few times in my life have I witnessed so spontaneous a release of feelings in applause as that which occurred when the tragedy was ended.” “The ovation opening night was so tremendous we all cried like babies,” Hagen wrote to her parents. The next day Margaret Webster wrote her mother, “They yelled at us through a long succession of calls and fairly screamed at Paul and finally I had to make a speech to finish it up.… Then they cheered the roof off again. The notices are better than we are—it was just one of those nights. Magic happened—not so much to the performance which, as far as I could judge, was very good but not more so than it has been before, but to the audience, who just got drunk.” A Soviet journalist reported home that “many American writers and journalists” with whom he spoke “consider the 19th of October, 1943”—the day of the Othello premiere—as the moment when “the doors of the American theatre opened for the Negro people.” All hands adjourned to Freda Diamond’s house on Thirty-eighth Street for a gala party that night, the theatrical celebrants joined by Paul’s sister, Marian Forsythe, who came up from Philadelphia, and his brother Reverend Ben Robeson and his family, who came down from Harlem.41
Contrary to myth, the New York critics were nearly as divided in their verdict as their Boston counterparts had been—though in New York the split was not among the daily reviewers, but between the dailies and the weeklies, with the former nearly all favorable, the latter variously mixed (the disparity perhaps best explained by the fact that the daily reviewers had seen what all agree was the magical first-night performance). The outright panegyrics came from the lesser daily critics—Robert Coleman in the Daily Mirror (“the most absorbing” production of Othello “ever to command the attention of your drama reporter”), Robert Garland of the Journal-American (“in all my nights of attendance on the world of make-believe, there has been nothing to equal it”), and Burton Rascoe of the World-Telegram (“one of the most memorable events in the history of the theater.… It is unbelievably magnificent”).42
The five other dailies (whose reputation for critical astuteness was collectively somewhat higher than the other three) were only a shade more subdued. Praise for Margaret Webster’s production was all but unqualified; she was uniformly hailed for simultaneously satisfying the needs of Shakespeare and the needs of the modern stage—and for doing so with blazing, melodramatic theatricality. All five critics were nearly as positive in estimating the three principals, shading their preferences a bit for one over another and in entering this or that minor reservation about the work of the two also-rans. By a hair, praise for Robeson lagged behind that for Ferrer and Hagen. All five critics agreed that his performance was “memorable” and “towering,” but three of the five felt his “deep organ tones became a trifle monotonous,” the “anguish” coming out as strained declaration, or as “song.” The two major trade papers, Variety and Billboard, had comparable reactions, both lauding Robeson (“a great ‘Othello’”; “a tremendous performance”), both expressing reservations about his occasional tendency “to concentrate more on vocal tones than on acting,” to “expostulate rather ponderously in a monotone.”43
The weeklies, priding themselves on printing more considered judgments than were possible in the deadline-ridden daily press, weighed in with less glowing accounts. They included five of the most respected critics of the day: Stark Young (The New Republic), Louis Kronenberger (PM), Wolcott Gibbs (The New Yorker), Margaret Marshall (The Nation), and the Shakespeare specialist Robert Speaight. Of the five, Kronenberger was the most enthusiastic about Robeson’s performance. He credited him with a “magnificent presence,” in bearing, in voice, in manner fully conveying Othello’s heroic dimensions; yet he regretted Robeson’s “tendency to confuse solemnity with grandeur” and felt that ultimately his success hinged on being “a great personality” rather than a great actor. The other weekly critics were somewhat less impressed. Gibbs lamented that Robeson sometimes employed his “majestic voice” for “meaningless organ effects” (though he doubted if “this matters very much. His reading is admirably clear … and he is ideal pictorially”). Stark Young found him “moving and intense” but lacking in an undefined quality he called “tragic style.” Speaight complained that Robeson’s voice had not been trained for the Bard’s verse, Marshall that his “monumental and inert” body was not the supple instrument of a trained actor.44
Robeson’s own costar concurs. In Hagen’s retrospective estimate, Robeson’s “humanity onstage is what made him a tremendous success as Othello; everyone melted at his personality, even though it came through a rather vocal, verbal, conventional, ordinary shape of a performance—the human presence was so big that they went for it anyway.” Adding his estimate, the acting coach Sanford Meisner recalls Robeson as “impressive physically” onstage, his voice “beautiful and rich.” But, in Meisner’s view, Robeson “couldn’t act the demands of the part, only recite them—very eloquently, like a good reciter, but not emotionally alive.” Impressive as a man in life, as an actor Robeson conveyed to Meisner merely “impressive emptiness.”45
But many whites and almost all blacks would have regarded such measurements as possibly inaccurate and certainly insignificant when placed against the overriding importance of Robeson’s Othello as a racial event of the first magnitude. Many years later James Earl Jones, about to attempt the role himself, paid tribute to the importance of Robeson’s performance (which Jones had seen): “… it was essentially a message he gave out: ‘Don’t play me cheap. Don’t anybody play me cheap.’ And he reached way beyond arrogance … way beyond that. Just by his presence, he commanded that nobody play him cheap. And that was astounding to see in 1943.”46
Most of the black press hailed the production as a milestone in race relations, but almost none of the white press did—although one or two referred to Robeson’s blackness as an asset in heightening the play’s plausibility, and one or two others latched on to the production’s success as a happy gauge of the country’s progress toward racial equality. It was left to Robeson’s old costar Fredi Washington (who for lack of decent roles was currently serving as theatrical editor for the Harlem paper The People’s Voice) to sound a somewhat different note. She interviewed Robeson backstage before the opening and lauded him in her review for having taken “onto the stage his ideals, beliefs and hopes,” for having created “a great social document.” But she stopped short of hailing the event as a tribute to American democracy. It was only possible to hope, she wrote, that “the dynasties of the far-reaching picture world will become adult enough to shoulder their full democratic responsibilities” and to make a film of Othello “for all the small-minded unjust elements of our country … to see, digest and become enriched thereby.” That hope would not be realized. Robeson had been in demand for a decade to portray black stereotypes in film, but he would never be given the chance to portray Othello.47