Higher Thoughts and Inspiration :: Keith Hamilton Cobb Returns with 'American Moor'

Keith Hamilton Cobb has had a long career in film and television, but it's his solo stage work "American Moor" that's making noise right now. Tall and African-American, Cobb has faced stereotyping throughout his career; as he summarizes in the play, one query he's often had directed at him as a stage actor is whether he's played Othello. Given that we live in an age in which Shakespeare can be, and often is, cast in a color-blind, gender-creative way (and the plays themselves have been presented as everything from down-to-earth historical pieces to fairytales, to dystopian dramas, to sci-fi epics, and even to – hello, "Donkey Show!" – trippy disco fantasias), there's no reason to pigeonhole someone to one specific role from the whole of the Shakespearean canon. Yet, there are.

But, on the other hand – here we are, with "American Moor" set to return to Boston Stages thanks to ArtsEmerson. Cobb's solo show was here in 2017, winning the IRNE Awards for Besting Visiting Production and Best Visiting Performance; the play also took the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Solo Performance.

The piece is roughly an hour and a half of wry commentary, heartbreak, rage, sorrow, laughter, and hope, all of it unfolding as an African American actor auditions while an unseen director puts him through his paces. The director is a presence that's just as all-seeing, and yet disembodied, as societal mores and conventions; in an ironic twist, the invisible director is also blind – blind, that is, to his own unthinking and ingrained prejudices. It's against this very mindset that Cobb's actor struggles to flourish as both an artist and a man.

EDGE interviewed Keith Hamilton Cobb in 2017, when fringe theater company Office of War Information (Bureau of Theatre) brought "American Moor" to the Boston Center for the Arts. Now, with the play slated for a brief run at the Emerson Paramount, EDGE caught up with Cobb once again to welcome him back and hear about where he's been and what he's heard as the conversation he's helping to spark continues to unfold in these strange times.

EDGE: Fringe theater company Office of War Information brought "American Moor" to Boston almost two years ago for its first run here, and now ArtsEmerson is bringing you back – which is not the first time a small or fringe company in Boston has done something that ArtsEmerson showed some love for and gave another run to. They know good theater when they see it!

Keith Hamilton Cobb: Yeah, and they've been doing great work in terms of their outreach and really creating the conversation around this piece that we know needs to be there and needs to happen. I think it's going to be a real event – it's going to be a real theatrical moment in April, for those two weeks when we're doing this. They have the wherewithal to do the sort of outreach that I couldn't do the first time around, to engage discussion with a wider, more diverse audience – all of which tend to see themselves somewhere in this piece of theater.

EDGE: When O.W.I. did "American Moor" it was quite a simple staging – a black box environment, a chair, and a spotlight. What's the presentation and staging of the play going to be like with the ArtsEmerson production?

Keith Hamilton Cobb: It will be equally simple, but more highly wrought. What I mean by that is we are working on the Robert Orchard stage, which has got to be at least four times the size of the little black box at the BCA. And the idea, the image of backstage clutter that the audience is privy to, we build it in the Orchard – it's still the big, open, empty space, the big hole behind this proscenium arch, but we have a set designer named Wilson Chin who is developing quite a reputation – you can Google him and see some beautiful, beautiful work. He became excited about the play upon reading it and asked to be part of this team, and of course, we were thrilled. He's created that look of backstage theater stuff that we can re-create again and again and again as we go from place to place, as opposed to using whatever's there – which has been the practice up until now.

EDGE: In the nearly two years since you were in Boston last. Where have you taken the play since then?

Keith Hamilton Cobb: Let's see, where have we been? In November of this past year, we were at Mount Holyoke College, where the five-college consortium in Western Mass all contributed to making a two-week residency happen. We did five performance in our host space at Mount Holyoke, and three of the four other colleges converged on that space to see performances – they were performances for the public. But we also did classroom engagement at several of the colleges, with symposiums and things with my creative team – my other actor, my director, and various and sundry others. The classroom work was interesting because we were in Introduction to Theater classes and History of Performance classes, but we were also in political science classes, as well as [there for] English students. So it ran this huge gamut.

That created a lot of online noise in the academic arena for publication of the work. People wanted to actually teach the play, and that's continuing to grow. The big news is that we will be bringing it off-Broadway in September. I think that the [play's] publication will coincide with that production, [and then] we will actually have the hard copy that the schools can use. There is this whole academic element that is growing and evolving alongside the performance life of this play.

The other venue of this play that we hit before coming here to Boston was in D.C. again, where we performed back in 2015. We wanted to return because that city is really still so ripe for the conversations we have in "American Moor." We brought it back, we did a more concerted outreach, we brought in a bigger audience. We had the problem of the government shutdown and the cold weather, but we also got considerably greater turnout than we got the first time. So the reach of the play, the scope of people's awareness, is always growing.

Those were the two big stops, and now we're here. I've got a couple of stops in L.A. We're doing something with A Noise Within, a theater company in Pasadena; there's a stop in London after that, next week, at the American School in London; and then we're here and doing this Boston thing.

EDGE: Has the text changed much as part of the show's growth and evolution?

Keith Hamilton Cobb: I think we've taken about ten minutes out of it. After we did Boston and gained such interesting notoriety for the work, we brought it to New York and did a presentation at the Signature Theater in midtown, and that generated some discussions with New York theater makers. There are a handful of people who are the gatekeepers for what gets to be done there, who gets to do it, what relevance it ends up having. The consensus was, "This needs to come in at under 90 minutes." Now, that's a separate conversation you and I could have about whether or not the play was ever too long. In New York, the play ran at 100 minutes plus, and people were coming back to it two and three times. But we took them at their word, and we began to do some work that removed some elements from the show that I think are still very much important to the story, to the African-American male experience, but maybe not make the most mechanically efficient play. It might be better; it's certainly a tighter play now. I don't know if you saw it again if there's anything that you would miss, necessarily. You would need to tell me.

I think if we do a collegiate publication we would have an appendix where those pieces were put back in so that the reading audience could experience them. They may not be important to the best play, but they're important to me as a writer.

EDGE: So, the Uncut Edition.

Keith Hamilton Cobb: Yes.

[Laughter]

EDGE: You have mostly worked with Kim Weild as director for the show – Kim directed the O.W.I. production, and is at the helm once more for this production with ArtsEmerson. But have you worked with other directors much, and if you have, has that influenced what you do with the material in later productions?

Keith Hamilton Cobb: Certainly it has – each director who has had a hand in this has grown it, but it has been Kim Weild for the past five years. When we get to New York in September, it will be nearly seven years of work since the inception of this play – two that I call the first fruition, and five-plus years will have been Kim's work. There were two other directors on this project: The one I started with was Paul Kwame Johnson, and when we did our first D.C. gig in 2015, that director's name was Craig Wallace.

EDGE: It must be nice to have the constancy of a single director for so long, and despite taking the show on the road for so long.

Keith Hamilton Cobb: Yes, oh, she has been – how should I say? – a constant and positive influence. She's extremely creative. She has a very strong and educated director's eye, and has influenced the work a great deal – less perhaps what's on the page, but certainly what's on the stage. I'm lucky to have her.

EDGE: What ambitions, if any, are still outstanding for you in terms of the play's development?

Keith Hamilton Cobb: Hopefully, as we move it into New York, that is a moment in the evolution of the show where I feel like I will have done everything I need to do with this. I mean, seven years of my life working on this thing! And I can put it there and say, "Okay, now the discussion is yours. I've gotten it here." I cannot myself garner more attention for this play. If this isn't the national discussion we're supposed to have – or any number of discussions – I don't know what else to do. But I'm going to get on to other things.

EDGE: Since you were last in Boston, the political climate has – well, hardly improved, let's say. But is there any shift in consciousness that you're seeing in the culture as you take this show around the country?

Keith Hamilton Cobb: "Progress" is a big word. The culprit at the root of all this that we're living through is the human animal, right? Which has been the same animal on a very base level for thousands of years. It doesn't really change. And whether or not it can progress in largely discernable ways, I'm not sure; I think that the individual is capable of progress and human growth – a spiritual up leveling of the self. And if the play allows people the opportunity to look at things in a new way, and they want to, and they choose to do the introspective work or engage in the discussion, and they walk away thinking about that and it stays with them, and they maybe come back to see it a second time and to discuss it – with me, with others – then, as individuals, they grow. I think that may be, again, very difficult to discern with regard to what effect they have then on the culture as they move forward through life.

But it's all I can do. Theater is supposed to do that much: It's supposed to inspire us to higher thoughts and culturally nurturing ideologies of one sort or another.

EDGE: What do you hear in the post-show talkbacks? Are people growing more aware, more concerned, more engaged with the material?

Keith Hamilton Cobb: There are those people who come who know that it is a socio-political piece of theater, and they want that, they're hungry for that, so, they're available to what that's going to be, and to having that discussion. There are others who may not know quite what it's going to be, and because of the nature of the piece are shocked into, or moved into, focusing on those things and engaging in that discussion. There are others who are completely threatened by it and wish they weren't there once the play starts, and can't add to the discussion because they can't afford to give up the ideas by which they are living.

Then there are others who will never come, you know. I used to tell people, "Everybody who needs to see 'Twelve Years a Slave' isn't gonna go.' It's always the choir you're preaching to when you do a play like that because the people who need to be aware of the horrors of slavery don't want to believe that it ever existed – they're not going. "American Moor" is similar. Once the word is out that it is this thing, a certain audience is going to go, and very often that audience is primed to be inspired, moved, engaged.

There's a question about how much theater like that can do. Are we good enough theater makers, are we good enough writers, clever enough, to get in under the radar? To be changing people's processes of thought and heart while they don't know that they're being changed? I don't know how much theater does that. I don't know that "American Moor" has necessarily done it. I know that it creates huge discussion, and over the seven years I've watched people's lives change in the way that they view what they have just seen, and that's all sorts of people. So, it is a net positive, but whether or not it's doing what really needs to be done? That's another discussion because what needs to be done is we need to start all over, and how is that going to happen? I don't know. I don't know how much hope there is. Is that a terrible thing to say?

EDGE: No. It's honest.

Keith Hamilton Cobb: Yeah.

EDGE: This show is so intense; it must be utterly exhausting to get up and go through the range you go through every night, and talk about what you talk about, and being such great passion to every performance. How do you keep it so dialed up? Do you just read the paper every morning and let the latest outrages and exasperation bolster you?

[Laughter]

Keith Hamilton Cobb: Yeah, well – you know, I think people of African descent in the American culture live it. It's there, just under the surface, because it's so present in everything, All the vestiges of American chattel slavery, I mean all of them, everything – everything that the country is, is built upon that. That's a hard pill to swallow, and consequently, nobody wants to. But that doesn't mean it's not there – that doesn't mean that all our racial animus and inequality isn't built on that. And for people of African descent, the mechanism has been developed to function in spite of that. A performer – a good one – doesn't have to do a whole lot to be taken over by those emotions.

But I will say that it's getting old. I will be happy to be Off-Broadway in the fall, and then really would like to see other black men do this play – take it out into the regional [theater] and into the world, do the licensing and let it go. It's been seven years! There's not a whole lotta gas left in the tank for this. I'm not going to be doing "American Moor" in perpetuity. I have other projects that I want to do – other things that I want to get to – other ways that I want to expand my body of work.

And it's seven years of building the critical mass of interest and energy and attention that allows you to sort of explode onto the scene and be its own thing. People talk about overnight successes, and you say, "Yeah – overnight after twenty years!" All that work of the past seven years, I'm not only the playwright and performer, but I'm the chief cook and bottle washer, too, because there hasn't been anybody else. There's just this thing out there, this untested quantity. Nobody wants to be involved in a "We'll see," they want to be involved in a sure thing. I used to tell my agents in Hollywood, "Once my dog can make the phone calls, what do I need you for?" George Clooney's dog can make the phone calls, you know?

And similarly, now we're at a place where enough interest and attention is coming from enough sectors of the culture that it becomes a bit of a no-brainer for people to get involved and help with the process of moving it forward. It sure took a long time getting there.

EDGE: Having lived with this play for so long and taken it so many places, you must have a rich store of anecdotes. You probably have enough material to write a memoir about this experience. Have you given that some thought?

Keith Hamilton Cobb: You know, I have. I would not know how, and where to begin that, because I feel like so much of anybody's story are really just life from their perspective. Like, I could tell you a hundred different stories about my life in Hollywood, and you wouldn't have to believe that any of them were true. [But it] might be the culmination of a diary of some sort, telling the story of where this character showed up in the span of my life and my life's intention, and how it had sort of stalked the hallways of that life – for no other reason than that I am a classically trained African-American male actor. I think that is interesting, and I think that is a place to bring in many of [my] life stories.

I think there's a book [to be written] about Othello, and my connection to the character of Othello in my life and career, that mirrors a parallel "American Moor," especially if I get to direct the play – which is what I really want to do.

EDGE: So, making the shift to directing plays is another of the things you'd like to accomplish.

Keith Hamilton Cobb: I would really like for somebody to give me the wherewithal to direct. I came away from the last production I saw thinking, "I don't ever want to do this play; it's never gonna be done right, and I don't want to be the guy up there trying to do this in collaboration with someone who doesn't give it the time or attention [that it needs], irrespective of their good intentions." However, if I were to direct a play and I had some monetary support to do it, and a cast that I chose, and everybody was well-supported, it would be extraordinary.

EDGE: "American Moor" is not your first play. You must have many other stories you'd like to tell as a playwright.

Keith Hamilton Cobb: I have another play that I have written half of, but over the last seven years there hasn't been a lot of time to sit and put in the concerted effort of getting that done. It's a research-intensive play, and I'm not good at research. So I really have to get through this in order to be still enough to work on that full time.

Whatever happens after September – we'd love to do an Off-West End run if we could move it there. I don't know exactly what's next, but as I say, we will have the publication. That will be done, that will create conversation, and that's very exciting because it means that this important piece of theater will out there in an indelible way in the world, and that means a great deal to me.

EDGE: It sounds like the whole experience of writing and touring "American Moor" has been enriching, exhausting though it might have been.

Keith Hamilton Cobb: We were visiting some African-American churches here in Boston yesterday, because ArtsEmerson has created relationships with these churches, liaising with them to get them involved in the ethnically diverse theater that ArtsEmerson is generating. I was standing up there in the pulpit, speaking about "American Moor" and feeling deeply out of my element, and I brought up the analogy of the story in Genesis about Jacob wrestling all night long with this angel. Jacob wants a blessing from the angel, and he says, "I'm not going to let you go until you bless me." And the angel is fighting him and ultimately breaks Jacob's hip, so Jacob for the rest of his life has this scar from that fight.

What that seems like to me is this struggle through not only life, which I think all black Americans are saddled with challenges that other parts of the population don't have, but then you're an actor – you're an artist on top of that – and that's a whole new set of struggles. There are ups and downs, but for all but the precious few, it's a fight. It's a fight to get through your life and build a body of work that you're proud of and excited about and that makes money at the same time.

I've often asked, "Why?" Why is life such a struggle? Why seven years – the play was ready when you saw it in Boston in 2017. Why two more years, three more years of fight? And the answer probably is what the angel would say to me: You would not have been able to write this play had you not had the last twenty years – thirty years, really – of stuff to draw from. What would you have been without it? What person would you have been without it? How would you have put this on the page? And look what it's doing. Look how it's influencing people – and not just black people, but people across every sexual and age and racial and gender spectrum. I've all of a sudden sort of been overcome by the idea that "Ah! Life has purpose. It does have purpose." And I wouldn't have known that until now.

EDGE: So, with the struggle, you got the blessing.

Keith Hamilton Cobb: Yeah I think so. I think the angel ultimately gave it up. And I've got Jacob's broken hip, too – I've got the scars to prove it.

"American Moor" runs April 10 – 21 at Emerson Paramount Center. For tickets and more information, please go to https://artsemerson.org/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=american_moor&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::context_id=