Playwright: Lolita Chakrabarti
At: Chicago Shakespeare Theatre at Navy Pier, 800 E. Grand Ave. Tickets: $48-$88. Runs through: Jan. 21
There's no disputing that William Shakespeare was an Englishman writing in the 17th century, albeit often employing natives of foreign locales—Italy, Cyprus, Egypt—in his scenarios, so that nowadays, it's not uncommon for their portrayers to approximate the ethnicity of these personae.
Indeed, for several decades, audiences arriving at a performance of Othello have come to anticipate an actor of African descent in the title role, along with players roaming the stage as in real life, or reconfiguring classical verse to conform to prose vernacular often distorted by emotion ( with fight directors standing by, should the aforementioned emotion grow too physical ).
Lolita Chakrabarti's historical drama takes us back to an age before any of these familiar practices we take for granted—specifically, London's fashionable Theatre Royale in 1833. This was when enormous playhouses forced actors to maintain full-front poses in order to achieve audibility, when a troupe's leading players/shareholders determined a show's appearance, and the prospect of a—gasp!—Yankee replacing Edmund Kean in a Shakespeare play was nearly as shocking as the novelty of the usurper's race matching that of the Moorish protagonist he was to depict.
The account of how Ira Aldridge broke the color bar and the personal sacrifice exacted by this distinction would, in itself, supply sufficient material for a quotidian "famous first" lecture, but under Gary Griffin's direction, the saga beginning with his excoriation by London critics aghast at his "domestic" acting style, and ending with him donning beard, wig, and whiteface to play Lear in Europe, occupies a universe encompassing a diversity of opinions on issues affecting not merely show business, but its social context as well—the controversy over England's boycott of goods produced by slave labor in the United States, for example, and the economic hardships on both sides engendered thereby.
This doesn't mean that the debate eclipses its instigator. Virtually every scene proposes Aldridge squaring off in verbal combat against an adversary—confrontation emphasized by the addition of seats in Chicago Shakespeare's courtyard theater to convert it into an arena, on whose perimeter onlookers retreat to await the outcome of the argument. This arrangement also mandates a circular Grand Drape whose crimson depths, our hero reminds us, constitute "a crushed map of who was here, folded in"—perhaps waiting for their labors, centuries hence, to be granted full merit by playwrights like Chakrabarti.
