“No tools with which to hear”: Adaptive Re-Vision, Audience Education, and American Moor

Chapter 4 explores Keith Hamilton Cobb’s play American Moor (2012) and its confrontation of how the white gaze stereotypes and therefore delimits Black masculinity’s relationship to Shakespeare and American culture. The play uses Othello as a touchstone, for as the actor auditions to play “the Moor” for a young, white director, overlaps appear between his experience and Othello’s. The chapter’s argument thus builds on the work of Peter Erickson and Margaret Jane Kidnie to contend that American Moor champions a turn to what “adaptive re-vision.” This term expands on Kidnie’s important assertion that “adaptation” is the standard against with “authentic” or “original” performance is established. Adaptive re-vision pushes back against the racialized nature of this commitment to authenticity by describing a performance that may approximate whatever is deemed “original” but that intentionally takes a critical point of view, embracing instead of rejecting adaptation as a mode for critiquing the white-oriented perceptions, traditions, and standards shaping Shakespearean theatre. This recuperative adaptation thus embraces Erickson’s concept of re-vision, accepting adaptation at the level of perspective, namely, a perspective that does not need to conform to the right/white one that has so long shaped the authoritative standard for performance. Importantly, Cobb models how to undertake this journey through audience education; essentially, strategies that strive to help audiences be receptive to the racial adaptive re-vision that American Moor poignantly encourages.