Shakespeare from a Minority Point of View: Ted Lange's Othello

American Studies in Scandinavia, 49:2 (2017), pp. 51-69. Published by the Nordic Association for American Studies (NAAS). Shakespeare from a Minority Point of View: Ted Lange’s Othello Seunghyun Hwang Kyonggi University, Suwon-Si, South Korea Abstract: Othello (1989) is a little-known independent film directed and produced by Ted Lange. Released at the end of the 1980s, a decade of mounting racial tension in the United States, the film offers an interpretation of Shakespeare from a minority point of view. This examination of the director’s motives and directorial choices reveals the strategies employed by Lange to make Shakespeare relevant and more available to a non-traditional audience, especially to African-Americans. In addition, delving into the acceptance and distribution difficulties that Ted Lange faced gives insight into the issue of discriminatory assumptions related to applying a minority point of view to a traditionally highbrow domain. Keywords: Ted Lange, Othello, African-American, minority, discrimination Theater artists worldwide strive to find ways such as “erecting a historical space” or investigating “new theater practices” to “connect modern audi- ences, raised on film and TV,” to the works of Shakespeare.1 In the late 1980s Ted Lange developed a strategy to approach The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice from a minority point of view to make the play relevant and more available to a non-traditional audience, especially to African Americans. His efforts culminated in the 1989 independent film Othello. The rejection of the film by domestic distributors, which was based on film quality and discriminatory assumptions related to applying a minority point 1 Michael Kahn, “Shakespeare meets the 21st century”, The Washington Post, August 3, 2012, (Accessed September 25, 2016), https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/shakespeare-meets-the-21st-century/2012/08/03/ 2562cc6a-d4ed-11e1-829d-8eedd9e3ac96_story.html?utm_term=.011134b50524. 52 American Studies in Scandinavia, 49:2 of view to a traditionally highbrow domain, severely limited the viewing of the film as well as the consideration of lange as a dramatic actor. Examin- ing the directorial choices that Lange applied to his interpretation of Othello supports the idea of the cultural universality of Shakespeare, and highlight- ing the film’s historical significance in terms of the racist attitudes that led to the distribution difficulties gives insight into how race was viewed in terms of accepted filmic content in 1980s American culture. The American film versions ofOthello have featured iconic white actors such as Orson Wells and Laurence Olivier. Some sources credit Laurence Fishburne as being the first African American to cinematically corporealize Shakespeare’s Moor in oliver Parker’s 1995 film. However, those sources overlook earlier American films, which feature a person of color in the title role, that were not released by a major film studio but rather by independent film makers.o ne of these independent films is Tedl ange’s Othello (1989). Even though Ted lange’s film was well received at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival,2 I found nothing about this atypical interpretation in academic journals. However, it was mentioned in a few academically oriented books. In What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Inde- pendent Career, Joseph McBride indirectly acknowledges the existence of lange’s independent film and the 1980 independent film directed by Afri- can American thespian Liz White3 by mentioning the actors cast as Othello. McBride wrote, “it took until late in the twentieth century for black actors such as Yaphet Kotto, Ted lange, and laurence Fishburne to be allowed to play Othello on the motion picture screen.”4 In Four Tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Kenneth Muir fleetingly mentions lange’s Othello as an “interesting experiment in mixed-race casting” and White’s Othello as a film that “features an all-black cast.”5 The most extensive discussion of lange’s film appears in This Wide and Universal Theater: 2 ”Othello (1989),” The New York Times (Accessed December 13, 2014), http://www.nytimes.com/mov- ies/movie/154074/Othello/overview. 3 Liz White shot her independent filmOthello in stages between 1962 and 1966 but did not release it until 1980. Peter S. donaldson discusses this film in-depth in “‘Haply for I am Black’: liz White’s Othello,” Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 127-144 and in “Liz White’s Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38.4 (1987): 482-95. 4 Joseph McBride, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career (Lexing- ton, KY: university Press of Kentucky, 2006), 113. 5 William Shakespeare, Four Tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, ed. David Bevington and david Scott Kastan (nY: Bantam dell, 2005), 307. SHAKESPEARE FRoM A MInoRITY PoInT oF VIEW 53 Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now, in which David Bevington highlights it as “a comment on race relations in late twentieth-century Los Angeles.”6 Other books, such as The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory and A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television, merely place the film on a list or in an endnote.7 To compensate for the lack of prior research, I turned to primary sources. The use of a primary source such as a printed review of a specific cultural production or an interview “allows us to immerse ourselves in the look and feel of an era gone by, to understand its people.”8 Articles published in four well-known newspapers (Los Angeles Times, New York Times, The Morn- ing Call and San Francisco Chronicle) and live interviews posted on the Internet proved to be valuable sources. I also discussed the film with Ted Lange during a short phone interview. Direct quotes from these sources are used frequently in this article for purposes of clarity and to give an accurate minority voice.9 The credibility of comments gleaned from various enter- tainment websites is similar to the credibility of comments made in editori- als, so I considered them as opinion rather than as fact. A VHS video tape of the film is a part of the Ted lange Collection at the Jerome lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at The Ohio State University in Columbus, ohio. Research on the film and filmmaker, employing the sources listed above, afforded insight into a minority guided interpretation of Shakespeare and led to a desire to give Ted Lange’s Othello academic attention. lange’s film was produced at the end of the 1980s, a decade strongly influenced by an administration10 that did little to support civil rights on the national level and in which racial tensions were mounting. The leadership of the African American community began to initiate non-violent expres- sions of discontent. In 1985 the National Association for the Advancement 6 David M. Bevington, This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 157. 7 Lisa S. Starks-Estes and Courtney Lehmann, The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory (Madison [n.J.]: Fairleigh dickinson university Press, 2002), 268; Kenneth S. Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 294. 8 Allan M. Winken, The Cold War: A History in Documents (nY: oxford university Press, 2000), 6. 9 Some quotes contain a dialect known as African-American English (AAE) or black vernacular. Quotes from live interviews were directly transcribed, so they may contain incomplete sentences or gramatical errors. 10 Ronald Reagan was President of the United States from January 1981 to January 1989. 54 American Studies in Scandinavia, 49:2 of Colored People (nAACP) boycotted Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple because it was a white man’s film of a black author’s text, even though the cast and crew were mostly black or other minorities.11 Neil Taylor attributes this boycott to the idea that if “a black character is represented by a white actor or a white company or production team, the black spectator may well be caught between an automatic identification with that black character and an alienation from the particu- lar representation of black identity and experience.”12 In 1987, controversy swirled around the lack of recognition of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. The New York Times reported: “Forty-eight black writers and critics have signed a statement deploring the fact that Toni Morrison has not won a National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize - something they attribute to ‘oversight and harmful whimsy’.”13 The appeal for fairness by the African American literary elite brought awareness to the issue and in April 1988 Morrison was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.14 In 1989 in the Cannes Film Festival market two films directed by African American directors were shown, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Ted Lange’s Othello. lee’s film about an intercity neighborhood where “the white-owned Sal’s Famous Pizzeria is torched when black rage and racism ignite”15 became a critical and commercial success. It also matched the racial struggles faced by many African Americans. Willis Edwards, President of the Hollywood chapter of the nAACP, tagged lee’s film as a “power- ful” film “that makes you think about what’s going on in the world and what your responsibilities are in your own community and what you have to give back.”16 on the other hand, lange’s film did not feature an African 11 Neil Taylor, “National and Racial Stereotypes in Shakespeare Films” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, ed. Russell Jackson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 268.

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