Building Othello

Othello, a devastating domestic tragedy, presents a herculean task for any actor in the title role. How can the actor both enrage an audience and earn their sympathy all while avoiding the tired “noble savage” trope? Chris Butler’s investment in Othello’s origin story is what enables him to take OSF audiences on this journey up to four times a week.

You may recognize Butler from his extensive work in film and television (Rescue Dawn, True Blood, Designated Survivor, Scandal, among others). However, if you are a longtime OSF attendee, perhaps you’ll remember him from the 2003 and 2004 seasons. “My first season I was brought here by Tim Bond to do The Piano Lesson,” Butler says. “He was directing, and I came up to play Lymon. I also played Twitch in Wild Oats. I stayed for another tour to do Walter Lee in A Raisin in the Sun and Don John in Much Ado about Nothing.” In reflecting on those first two seasons, Butler shares that “both The Piano Lesson and A Raisin in the Sun have been two of my favorite theatrical experiences.”

When asked about the origins of his relationship with Shakespeare, Butler responds, “I remember my high school drama teacher wanting me to do a competition, and so I learned an Othello monologue. After that, Shakespeare and I had a pretty loose relationship.” Butler didn’t get to sink his teeth into Shakespeare until graduate school at University of California, San Diego, where he received an MFA in acting.

Butler remembers people often commenting on the quality of his voice, telling him how well he speaks. A number “of black actors who speak well are given the chance to do Shakespeare,” he says. Many theatres “won’t let us do a lot of other things written by white people—they’re not as open to that—they are far more open to letting us wrap our mouths around Shakespeare.” And though disappointed in one regard, he is grateful in another: “I am thankful for that because [Shakespeare] was a lot of my first jobs.”

Returning to OSF to play Othello seemed an obvious choice for Butler. “As a classically trained black actor, doing Othello at a reputable theatre when you’re the age to do him, you have to do that, if you get the opportunity.” So, while Butler had never met OSF Artistic Director Bill Rauch, who is directing Othello, he knew immediately after they spoke one time that he was going to take on the role.

In that first conversation, Rauch shared his vision for this production: a contemporary setting, Shakespeare’s Venice represented as somewhere in the U.S., the U.S. Navy providing the military context and an Othello who would be an immigrant from a North African country who now lives in the U.S.

Butler says at first he was mildly resistant to the concept, because he wanted it to be more personal. “I wanted to be able to clearly tell my story, or a story that I actively saw daily, that I grew up around and thought I understood without having to twist my brain too much,” Butler says. “When Bill said he wanted Othello to be from North Africa, my response was, he’s a Moor so let’s make him Moroccan and be done with it. Let me do the Moroccan dialect.”

Rebecca Clark Carey, director of voice and text, then sent Butler some dialect samples from North African countries, including a Sudanese and several Moroccan. The Sudanese one seemed to strike a chord. “I was like, ‘alright, let’s play with this.’ ”

As Butler began to explore the implications of Rauch’s choice to make the title character Sudanese, he started thinking about how that could work in a backstory, or the actor’s imagining the life of the character outside of the script. He recalls the 2003 PBS documentary Lost Boys of Sudan, where young children were taken from their villages, militarized and enslaved during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1987–2005). “I researched that time frame,” he says, “and it almost works out. As Shakespeare wrote him, Othello’s personal history is that he was a warrior somewhere else before he was a warrior for his current nation.”

The building blocks of Othello’s backstory began to take shape for Butler. He thought after being a child soldier and doing the march that the Lost Boys of Sudan did, where he might have stumbled upon cannibalism, perhaps Othello was rescued by missionaries in a refugee camp. “So, the stories Othello tells could have actually happened to someone in that situation,” he says.

Butler invests in the circumstances of the character even further, suggesting that Othello, “then being brought to America as a teenager, becomes a Christian and joins the military.” That backstory offered him freedom in building the role.

Investigating the Sudanese dialect, Butler says, also allowed him to be more free with it and embrace the language more than if he was trying to make him a regular U.S.–born guy. “I find his speech patterns to be complicated and elusive, so putting him in a dialect, I don’t know if it’s a shortcut, but certainly makes it a little bit more fun. As opposed to questioning why he is putting these words together like this, he’s putting these words together differently because he’s translating it to a degree.”

Butler says that the cosmopolitan worldview and multiethnic casting of Rauch’s production is “the [Othello] that OSF has to do. It has to be multiethnic here, just because of the way the rep works.” If the cast was all white actors, except for the actor playing Othello, it would make casting the other shows incredibly challenging.

Then in all seriousness he moves the discussion to how “racism and xenophobia and bigotry exist within multicultural communities. To have the character who’s throwing the biggest verbal insults at me being an Asian woman [Amy Kim Waschke, who plays Emilia, Iago’s wife and Desdemona’s defender], in America that could totally happen. A Native American [Derek Garza, who plays Cassio] being considered the all-American boy in our play, that could happen; he’s got a good haircut, good facial features, he’s clean-cut, blends into society. It works. Having a character who is Muslim, Montano [played by Barzin Arkhavan], is interesting.”

Butler says of the work, “it’s exciting, very challenging, overwhelming. I am easily still making discoveries, still unearthing things. There is a little bit of racial stuff for me that I’m actively participating in, in the play.” But it is more important that “I am mostly divorcing myself from representing black culture because normal people don’t kill their wives. I am not worrying about making him a good black man because there is no excuse for his behavior. In three days, you could get me to do some questionable stuff, but not kill my wife.”

It is this attitude that helped Butler navigate the pushback he has received about playing the role. “I was approached by a black woman who presented me with ‘Why are you doing this part? A lot of brothers won’t do this part. Why do you feel ok about doing it?’ It didn’t occur to me not to do it. He’s human. It’s a complicated human role. Is it because Shakespeare didn’t write a lot of black characters, therefore we shouldn’t play the ones that aren’t positively written? I don’t think black actors should shy away from characters who aren’t just positive role models. I think you should try to tell a three-dimensional story about that guy. I don’t think it is harmful to society to tell this story well. I find him an interesting guy, one worth exploring.”