Black Theater Artists and Shakespeare

To commemorate Black History Month in February, we’re sharing some of our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast interviews and blog post Q&As with acclaimed Black theater artists—actors, directors, playwrights—and scholars about performing Shakespeare, then and now, and adapting and transforming Shakespeare plays for our time.

Shakespeare, Now

Colman Domingo on Sing Sing and the power of theater
Actor Colman Domingo takes us behind the scenes of making the Oscar-nominated movie Sing Sing. He also shares how he became an actor after a class at Temple University and his own Shakespeare story involving an inventive take on Helena from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

John Douglas Thompson on playing Othello
A Q&A with actor John Douglas Thompson, who played the title role in Othello for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2024. He shares insights about the character and the play, including the way that Shakespeare depicts Othello and Desdemona’s love match in the beginning as one of the world’s great love stories.

James Ijames on Fat Ham
Playwright James Ijames tells us about creating his hilarious adaptation, Fat Ham, which takes the outline of Hamlet and transposes it to the present-day American South. The play won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, played Broadway, and is being staged at theaters around the world.

Kenny Leon on Much Ado About Nothing
Director Kenny Leon’s production of Much Ado About Nothing, starring Orange is the New Black’s Danielle Brooks, mesmerized audiences during the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park (now available on PBS’s Great Performances). Leon shares how he approaches a new production and how Shakespeare’s comedies speak to our present moment.

Adrian Lester on playing Rosalind, Henry V, Hamlet, and Othello
Actor Adrian Lester walks us through big moments in his illustrious career, including Cheek by Jowl’s all-male As You Like It; Peter Brook’s Hamlet; playing 19th-century Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge; and the Everything to Everybody project with the Birmingham Shakespeare Library.

Lolita Chakrabarti on her play Red Velvet
Playwright Lolita Chakrabarti shares historical context about her play Red Velvet, which dramatizes a pivotal moment in pioneering 19th-century Black actor Ira Aldridge’s career, when he takes over for Edmund Kean in the role of Othello at Covent Garden in London in 1833.

Paterson Joseph: Julius Caesar and Me
In 2012 the Royal Shakespeare Company staged the first-ever, high-profile, all-black British Shakespeare production, Julius Caesar, set in Africa. The actor who played Brutus, Paterson Joseph, wrote a book about the experience called Julius Caesar and Me: Exploring Shakespeare’s African Play. Joseph also talks about his early work, his thoughts about race in the British theater, about the proper way to play Brutus, and much more.

Debra Ann Byrd on becoming Othello
Theater-maker and past Folger Fellow Debra Ann Byrd talks about her solo show, Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey, which recounts her experience discovering herself while playing Shakespeare’s tragic hero—plus how she started the Harlem Shakespeare Festival to expand opportunities for actors of color to work in classical theater.

Robert O’Hara on directing Richard III
The award-winning director tells us what it was like to direct Richard III for Shakespeare in the Park in 2022 (now available on PBS’s Great Performances). The production starred Danai Gurira, known for her roles in the Black Panther films and The Walking Dead in the title role. Spoiler: It’s a whirlwind.

Raymond O. Caldwell on Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare and AI, and his “love letter to DC”
In a wide-ranging Q&A, director Raymond O. Caldwell explores divisive politics, youth-related issues, if ChatGPT can write like Shakespeare, and how his fall 2024 production of Romeo and Juliet for Folger Theatre is a “love letter to DC.”

Q&A: Our Verse in Time to Come playwrights Malik Work and Karen Ann Daniels
Playwrights Malik Work and Karen Ann Daniels share more about the creation of Our Verse in Time to Come, a new play commissioned by the Folger for the 400th anniversary of the First Folio in 2023 which performed throughout Washington, DC,  and spring boarding off Shakespeare.

Keith Hamilton Cobb on American Moor
Who should direct Othello? What if a white director and the actor he’s cast as Othello don’t see eye-to-eye on the play’s subtext, the Moor’s motivations, and what the audience is supposed to take away from the production? That conflict is at the heart of Cobb’s one-man show American Moor.

Shakespeare, Then

Earle Hyman: An actor makes history
While Earle Hyman was well known for his roles in the ThunderCats series and The Cosby Show, he made historical contributions in his stage career, which lasted for many decades. He was the first African American actor to play all four of the major Shakespearean roles of Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, and Othello.

A bust of Hyman—just one part of the Earle Hyman Collection, which the Folger Shakespeare Library received as a gift from his family and friends in 2020—is on view in the Shakespeare Exhibition Hall along with other artifacts. 

Duke Ellington, Shakespeare, and Such Sweet Thunder
In 1956, following Duke Ellington’s concerts at Ontario, Canada’s Stratford Festival, staff asked the legendary composer—at that point, one of jazz’s elder statesmen—if he’d consider writing a piece about Shakespeare. A year later, Duke Ellington premiered and recorded Such Sweet Thunder, a suite of twelve tunes inspired by the Bard and his characters. Scholar Douglas Lanier talks about the suite, the second chapter of Ellington’s career, and how they reflect shifting cultural perceptions of jazz.

Black Women Shakespeareans, 1821 – 1960
Scholar Joyce Green MacDonald dug deep into the history of professional theater in the United States to find records of every Black woman who has been paid to perform or recite Shakespeare. She shares stories about four performers who took to the stage in those 139 years: The African Grove Theatre’s “Miss Welsh,” Henrietta Vinton Davis, Adrienne McNeil Herndon, and Jane White.

Shakespeare in the Harlem Renaissance
Professor Emerita Freda Scott Giles tells us how the artists and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance regarded the Bard. Banner Shakespeare productions included Orson Welles’s hit “Voodoo” Macbeth, produced by the Federal Theater Project, and the Midsummer-inspired Swingin’ the Dream, which was a Broadway flop despite the talents of musician Louis Armstrong and comedian Moms Mabley.