It’s not a role in which you’d expect to discover something about yourself, not if you’re a young African-American woman from St. Louis.
Desdemona is a European noblewoman who gets smothered by her jealous African husband in Othello, the Moor of Venice, a tragedy written by the great British playwright William Shakespeare in the early 1600s.
Rory Lipede is a young African-American actor from St. Louis who has made that big career move to New York. Playing Desdemona for The Black Rep is not her first crack at Shakespeare, but she admits the Bard’s complex, at times archaic language is “a huge battle” to memorize and deliver.
So how, then, is playing Desdemona teaching her about herself? How did early table-top rehearsals shake from Lipede the most candid conversation about herself – and race – she had ever shared on the job with other actors?
Enter Chris Anthony, who is directing Othello for The St. Louis Black Repertory Company (Jan. 2-Feb. 3). She is all about directing Shakespeare for new audiences. Her day job is director of Youth & Education at Shakespeare Festival Los Angeles. She also knows something about St. Louis – she grew up (Rosati Kain) and studied (Saint Louis University) here and even interned with the Black Rep at the end of the 23rd Street era (1989-1991).
Othello is about, among other things, a crime of passion committed by a black man upon his white wife. Anthony (and producing director Ron Himes) had to have known this scenario could be played in St. Louis – by a black repertory company, no less – with explosive impact.
Then Chris Anthony flipped the script – or the setting. And that’s how she got inside Rory Lipede’s head.
Anthony decided to shade Shakespeare’s play with Creole color-consciousness. She set this production in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, the world of the paper-bag test, of the “colored aristocracy,” where if you were black, you could get back. And she let the rules of that world influence her casting. She said, “It was the first time I ever cast a play based on color – color and type.”
For Othello, she cast Andre Sills, a dark black man (from Canada, of all places) with bold facial features. For Desdemona, she cast Lipede, who is very bright-skinned and soft-featured, the offspring of an Irish Norwegian mom and a Nigerian dad.
“In turn-of-the-century New Orleans, color was more blatantly power-based than it is now,” Anthony said. “I wanted to have a conversation about the way skin color plays out, even though we are all, technically, ‘black.’”
Before the players could start this conversation with the audience, the director decided, they needed to have the conversation among themselves.
“We talked about race-based experiences,” Anthony said. “And there was a range of those experiences in the room.” Many of the experiences were troubling. Anthony said, “We as black people don’t give each other the kind of space that we expect others to give us.”
That point certainly got her young Desdemona engaged with the text.
“It was the first time in my life I got to voice my opinion of shades of black, the differences we have among ourselves,” Lipede said. “For me, personally, it was HUGE to sit down and do that table work.”
Having won over her female lead, Anthony is one heart and mind closer to the goal she set for herself and the company in their staging of Othello: “I want black people to feel Shakespeare is as much ours as August Wilson.”
The Black Rep’s rep
Here is an interesting insight from Rory Lipede, St. Louis local and Fontbonne University grad now working as an actor in New York.
“When I lived in St. Louis, I’m not sure I understood the Black Rep’s place in theater in the U.S. It’s always the thing on my resume that clinches the job for me,” she said.
“When I lived in St. Louis, I strove to be part of The Rep. I thought that was when you knew you were good. It’s not. Nationally, The Rep isn’t known, but the Black Rep is, big time. I had to go outside St. Louis to find that.”
Black Rep tickets on sale
Othello runs Jan. 2-Feb. 3. Subscriptions for all five shows range from $140 to $218.75 and are on sale now. Three-play subscriptions are $105. Single tickets range from $33 to $43. Student rush tickets (30 minutes prior to curtain) are $10 with valid I.D. Young people ages 8 -18 will be admitted free with the purchase of an adult ticket on Thursday evenings and at all Saturday matinee performances. Limit one child per adult. To reserve your seat, call (314) 534-3810 or visit www.theblackrep.org.
