Keith hamilton cobb biography of williams

American Moor

“…some plays…take the idea of ‘necessary’ to a deeper level. …AMERICAN MOOR is one such play…a blisteringly eloquent and penetrating meditation on the ever-urgent matter of race in America—though ‘meditation’ seems far too tame a word for the dramatic force Cobb brings to the subject…” —Boston Globe.

“Cobb’s earnest, reasoned script slashes so precisely that you may not see Shakespeare—and a lot of roles played by Black performers—quite the same way for a while.” —Washington Post.

“If you go to see AMERICAN MOOR—and you should—leave any white fragility you may have at home.” —TheaterMania.com

“AMERICAN MOOR…is a witty, passionate, furious, and movingly intimate record of an African-American actor’s often unrequited love for Shakespeare…”—New York Review of Books

“AMERICAN MOOR…offers a promising avenue into the future of Shakespeare performance, a conversation with the text, in a modern idiom, as opposed to a translation of it, that brings us closer to Shakespeare’s language, not further away.”—SlantMagazine.com

In July of 2020 I wrote a blog post reflecting on my play American Moor and how the gatekeepers of the American Theater could not generally abide the showcasing of work that left them looking like the culprit in a systemic neutralizing of truths while that intentionally cultivated neutrality was precisely where they found comfort and cover, particularly with regard to matters of racial inequity.

A year and a half later, not surprisingly, nothing has changed, though one might be fooled into believing it has. The pandemic and the internationally televised lynching of George Floyd evolved some energies that ushered a spate of shows written by, directed by, and about people of color onto Broadway. But because those shows were only nominally if at all indicting of White-controlled structures, they were ushered through the very same gate that is most regularly kept closed. That is to say, if tales of Blackness had to be told on Broadway because no one, thanks to Floyd, could any longer deny the perpetual systemic bias against Black people, those tales would be the ones that did not further indict but rather bathed the gatekeepers in the light of social justice champions for having opened the gate.

When American Moor debuted off-Broadway in the fall of 2019, there was a great deal of positive regard, but there were also a great many questions. These for the most part were not about American Moor, an exploration of the perspective of the African American male through the metaphor of William Shakespeare’s character, Othello, but rather about Othello himself, as if he were an actual person. They were about Shakespeare’s play and not mine. Questions like “Do you think Othello would have understood race the way that you do?” or “Do you think that Shakespeare was really writing about race at all

American actor (b. 1962)

Keith Hamilton Cobb (born January 28, 1962) is an American actor.

Career

He is best known for his roles as the ruthless Nietzschean mercenary Tyr Anasazi in the science-fiction series Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda from 2000 to 2005 and as Noah Keefer on All My Children from 1994 to 1996.

Cobb was born in North Tarrytown, New York; he graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1987. A classically trained actor, he appeared in a number of Shakespearean productions in the New York area before breaking into television in the mid 1990s. One of his first movies was the 1995 film Eyes Beyond Seeing in which he plays a mental patient who claims to be Jesus Christ.

In 1996, Cobb was named on People magazine's annual list of the "50 most beautiful people".

In 1999, Cobb was in two episodes of the Beastmaster television series, portraying a character very similar to his character from Andromeda.

He left the Andromeda TV series at the start of the fourth season, citing dissatisfaction over the development of his character and went back to stage productions.

Cobb's 2015 play American Moor explores the experiences of Black actors performing texts as written and directed by white writers and directors. The play garnered great academic acclaim. The play debuted Off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre in August 2019.

He continues to act in theater productions, including roles as Oberon and Duke Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream in New York's Geva Theater Center, and the bigoted Juror #10 in Twelve Angry Men at Briggs Opera House in White River Junction, Vermont.

Filmography

Awards and nominations

In 1995 Cobb won the Soap Opera Digest Award - Outstanding Male Newcomer

KEITH HAMILTON COBB’S American Moor begins with an actor waiting to audition for the role of Othello in front of a white director. Over the next 100 minutes, the actor reflects on his life in theater, anatomizes the director’s shallow hubris and privilege in asides to the audience, and testifies to the long history of violence against Black men in America. The play asks, whose story is Othello’s? Who gets to tell Othello’s story in America? Why does America still resist hearing Othello’s story?

A searing exploration of art, commerce, and race in the United States, the play has evolved and been refined over hundreds of performances. In the last seven years, the Drama Desk Award nominee Kim Weild has directed the play as it has toured the United States and United Kingdom. Last year, the Globe Theatre invited Cobb to perform American Moor within a kilometer of where Othello, The Moor of Venice was staged in the early 1600s. The Folger Shakespeare Library incorporated the play into its collection as an important contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare’s canon. I saw American Moor at Mount Holyoke College’s Rooke Theatre, while Cobb was in residence at the College and UMass Amherst in November 2018. His program was co-organized by Professor Amy Rodgers and Marjorie Rubright, both scholars of early modern drama, and included a range of community engagement — from talkbacks to an Actor’s Studio.

I sat down with the playwright in Amherst, Massachusetts, in early November to talk about American Moor.

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JOHN YARGO: Your play is so many things — wonderful, infuriating, exuberant. How did this work come together as a synthesis of three decades of experience as a stage actor?

KEITH HAMILTON COBB: At least! I haven’t done the math in a while