Black theater, black audiences: Interview with OTHELLO director Ozzie Jones, part 1

OTHELLO, Theatre in the X audience, Photo by Tieshka Smith

Ozzie Jones, a well-known director, has made a name for himself directing many black productions, not only in Philadelphia, but in Europe as well. In 1997, as the first African American in Ireland, he directed OTHELLO where a white actor played Othello the Moore in blackface, and a black actor played his evil counterpart Iago—to the applause of audiences and theater critics alike. Last year, Jones directed Philadelphia’s first all-black production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman with similarly positive responses. An established “elder advisor” of Theatre in the X, and an experienced member of the arts community to create theater in underserved areas, Ozzie Jones, in this interview, talks freely about a number of sensitive issues.

“Just Shakespeare. And people understood.”

Eger: You studied and worked abroad. 

Jones: I learned a lot in Europe, especially when I saw the acclaimed Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg perform Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed at the Barbican Centre in London—an eleven-hour production. They projected English translations onto a screen atop the stage. Although the whole production was in Russian, the story was so clear that after a while I stopped looking at the text and, instead, concentrated on the play and the story. 

Eger: How did that experience influence your three-hour OTHELLO production without intermission?

Jones: I did the same thing with OTHELLO. Just Shakespeare. And people understood. I heard nobody who complained. 

The folks at Malcolm X Park understood that Othello loves Desdemona, that Iago doesn’t like Desdemona, that he would do anything to drive Othello into murder, and they understood that everybody gets heartbroken. If the audience understands that, then they understand the whole play—even if they don’t understand all the words.

Eger: That’s quite an achievement—three hours of Shakespeare in one go.

Jones: True, and nobody left. Nobody was fidgeting in their chair. I was proud of that. I have never seen Shakespeare performed without intermission, but we performed it in the park non-stop with kids everywhere. What was exciting to me is living, breathing evidence that Shakespeare is still relevant and can be understood. 

Purist approach to Shakespeare

Eger: Would such a purist approach to Shakespeare really work with non-traditional audiences?

Jones: Many people in the theater community think that if an audience is poor, young, or uneducated, there has to be singing and dancing, and a production must not be longer than 90 minutes. That’s almost an unwritten rule. However, this show is evidence that this kind of thinking is absolutely false. 

Many of our schools don’t even perform Shakespeare because they think that poor kids are incapable of understanding Shakespeare, but our production demonstrates that this notion is absolutely not true.

Black theater, black audiences

Eger: How does this production of OTHELLO go beyond the perceived limits of black theater in Philadelphia? 

Jones: This production and the community’s response to it says: There is no limit to the kind of theater that the black community will go see and embrace. The idea that the people who live in poor black neighborhoods need to have theater with loud slapstick comedy, singing, dancing, eye popping, and booty shaking is a stone cold lie. 

Another false belief is that a play should not exceed an hour and 20 minutes. Our three hour production, with no intermission, is proof that we as artists can and should be making more interesting, more creative, and more inventive work, because the people want it.

 “My focus is on the people I work with.”

Eger: Did you encounter any resistance to your all-black OTHELLO? If not, could such an absence suggest that at least the theater world is open to innovative approaches—and is not based on racial criteria? 

Jones: To quote Thelonious Monk [American jazz pianist and composer with an “unorthodox approach to the piano”]—“I listen to my own music.” My focus is on the people I work with, the work that we are making, and the community we are making it for. If there were any resistance, I would not have heard it.

A director’s dream projects

Eger: You are well known for ground-breaking productions. What would be some of your dream projects as a director?

Jones: I have been working on creating a large series of plays called The Real Book. The idea of my collection is to write a number of plays that are inspired by America’s most important jazz composers and compositions. The Real Book series will be broken up into five parts: Blues, Swing, Bop, Modern, and Queens (women composers). Each section will have four plays. 

Eger: Where are you now with your work?

Jones: I have almost finished the Bop section. The first piece in my Real Book is Chasin’ the Bird. In short, it is my imagining of the dream Charlie Parker had as he lay dying. Chasin’ the Bird was developed and read at Penumbra Theater in Saint Paul-Minneapolis, in 2012.

Kind of Blue is the second work in The Real Book series. Its first public reading was for African Continuum Theater at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., in 2013. And recently, I fully mounted it at Freedom Theater. Kind of Blue is a romantic poem about love and relationships, birthed from the music of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.

The other two remaining pieces are Liver and Onions, inspired by the music of Thelonious Monk, and A Love Supreme, an epic poem inspired by John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. 

The goal of each piece in The Real Book will be to write plays that feel, move, and swing like the sound of the artists’ music—and not bore anyone with a linear, biographical retelling of an artist’s life. A large, long-term goal is to finish and have them performed everywhere. 

But you know how it goes—one step at a time.


HENRIK EGER

For earlier versions, published by Phindie, click here and there. 

[Malcolm X Park, 52nd and Pine streets] August 8-22, 2015; theatreinthex.com

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