Interview with Keith Hamilton Cobb, American Moor Playwright
I met with Keith Hamilton Cobb, actor and playwright of American Moor. We talk about the genesis of the play and how racism in American theatre is a microcosm of our larger society. Keith will be participating in discussions and screening an older version of his play at the upcoming Elm Shakespeare Company event Building a Brave New Theatre, Exploring Race and Shakespeare in 2020. (More interviews here.)
Follow Keith here:
American Moor website
Facebook.com: @AmericanMoor
Twitter: @AmericanMoor
Instagram: @khc_americanmoor
American Moor is Now Available at Bloomsbury.com
Keith’s Bio:
Keith Hamilton Cobb has spent the majority of his working life on stage and is readily recognized on the streets of New York for several unique character portrayals in television.
He is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in acting, whose regional theatre credits include such prestigious venues as The Actors Theatre of Louisville, The Shakespeare Theatre of Washington DC, The Denver Theatre Center, The Huntington Theatre Company, The Orlando Shakespeare Festival, The Geva Theatre Center and many others. He has performed such classical roles as Laertes in Hamlet, Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, Tullus Aufidius in Coriolanus, Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as more contemporary roles in David Mamet’s Race, August Wilson’s Jitney, and Lynn Nottage’s Ruined to name but a few.
He has been a teacher and a director at Westchester Community College and at Youth Theatre Interactions, Inc. in Yonkers, NY, and has worked with juvenile offenders incarcerated within the New Jersey Correctional System. He has also been a teaching artist in the New York City school system.
However, Mr. Cobb is most widely recognized for the landmark roles he created for television, among those the role of Noah Keefer for ABC’s All My Children, for which he garnered a Daytime Emmy Award nomination; the role of galactic mercenary Tyr Anasazi for Gene Rodenberry’s Andromeda; the role of Damon Porter for CBS’s The Young and the Restless; and the role of Quincy Abrams for the series, Noah’s Arc on the Logo network.
The span of his career includes twelve years in Los Angeles where he has guest starred on multiple television half–‐hours and dramas including The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Boston Common, Suddenly Susan, One on One, The Twilight Zone, and CSI Miami.
American Moor is not Mr. Cobb’s first play, but it is the one that is most timely, most truthful, and the one which he is most suited to perform, for it is a vision of race in America with the entertainment industry as microcosm. And he is now able to reflect upon a lifetime in that industry where no one who was anything like him ever wrote the rules. American Moor is his song to the unheard, unseen other.
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If you’d rather read the interview, a rough transcript is below.
Interview with Keith Hamilton Cobb - Actor and Author of the play American Moor
Michael Van Osch: Hey, this is Michael Van Osch. Welcome to the Hark Journal, where we send you a two minute meditation on Shakespeare’s wisdom to help you have a better life and career. And today I’m really happy to be joined by Keith Hamilton Cobb, actor and playwright. And we’re going to chat a little bit about his play American Moor.
So Keith welcome. How are you?
Keith Hamilton Cobb: I’m well, sir, thank you for having me.
Michael Van Osch: Hey, thanks for participating. I love it. We have got, some really great upcoming events at the Elm Shakespeare Company in New Haven that you’re going to be a part of. And, I just want to tell the folks what it is. It’s called Building a Brave New Theatre, Exploring Race and Shakespeare in 2020.
And, you are going to be part of that. I believe that this Friday, October 29th. You’re going to be kind of featured on in this, this zoom event. So tell us a little bit about the event that you know of and, then let’s talk about your play.
Keith Hamilton Cobb: Well, the event is… when, when the artistic director, Rebecca Goodhart, called about me being a part of it, what I think she is trying to do and what I think many theaters across the country are trying to do right now in this historical moment is create conversation, at the point where, American racial bias and race politics and social justice meet American theatre .
Yeah, which is, a noble endeavor. I don’t know, if it can ever truly be unpacked or made right. But it is a noble endeavor. And, this is part of that. I have a play called American Moor that I wrote in late 2011 or 2012, that has developed over seven or eight years and had an off-Broadway run at Cherry Lane Theater that closed just about a year ago next week, the beginning of, well, we’re actually at the end of October.
So, so, so it was, it was a year ago, three weeks ago.
Michael Van Osch: Gotcha. Gotcha.
Keith Hamilton Cobb: And, the play is a study of the experience of American black men through the metaphor of Shakespeare’s iconic black hero Othello. and it has to do with a seasoned, African-American thespian, auditioning for the role of a fellow opposite of a director who is half his age and white, who, because of his White American perspective, replete with his white American privilege, chooses the attempt to dictate to the actor, how the character should be played and, shenanigans ensue, I guess that’s the simple way to put it, but it, it, it really, is a study of, how we in America are, choosing to navigate, or, just as often as not, not navigate, these, overwhelming, overlying issues of race, they sort of govern all that the country does, particularly in this historical moment. It is a, a piece that really sits at the intersection of race and, and, and Shakespeare and race and the American theater, and also, attempts to unpack what theater American theater is for. What can it do? Is there a way to make it that serves us as opposed to giving us, simply entertainment again and again and again, and very often the same entertainment that doesn’t grow, that doesn’t change.
So, Rebecca Goodheart, it seems, saw this play somewhere. It’s been several incarnations around, around the country. it might’ve been the last one, in, in New York. and so is there a way to make this a part of the discussion that we’re having in October, and there was really not because we can’t make theater. We can’t show up on stages and invite audiences and do and write and do shows. and I said, you know, I do have this video version, from 2018 that we shot. We were invited to Shakespeare’s globe, London to be part of, conference. they call their Shakespeare and race conference.
It was the first one. It was the inaugural, Shakespeare and race conference. Again, convening of scholars and writers and actors from all over the world to discuss these issues. And, they asked us to play this play at the Sam Wannamaker Playhouse. And they did an archival video, which is a bit raw and a bit rough around the edges and in an environment that we never expected to be playing in, which was this Jacobean replica theater with a candle lit chandelier’s.
And there’s something really, really striking about this play on that stage, that that moves people. But I qualify it because it was two years back in the creative evolution of the piece. So the definitive play that you can now buy, from, Bloomsbury Methuen, via by the Bloomsbury site or at Amazon, is, is, just a couple of years removed from what that was in terms of the text.
And I tell people who, want to see this version. I’ll show it to you, but you also have to read the definitive version just so you know that, you know, what, what this act, this display actually became, what it actually is meant to be. So we’re going to screen that, as part of the brave new theater event, and then have a conversation around it.
And I don’t know, you would have to ask Rebecca about, you know, who’s invited to take part in this conversation and, and, and who she’s a mast to unpack the issues that the plate was forward. But what, what my experience has been that the, the reactions of everybody who sees it are quite visceral. So the discussions are always really quite lively.
And if there is, you know, we all, we all want to engage these discussions, but they’re very hard to engage and they’re very hard to, Issues or there’s this morass of issues that are sort of inextricably linked and it’s hard to take them apart and figure out a way forward. And because it’s so hard, we tend to engage for an hour and talk a little bit and go away and feel like, okay, we’ve talked about race.
We’re good now. And the fact of the matter is there is you can’t stop talking about this. We cannot, we cannot stop engaging in this discussion and we need really potent thoughtful minds who have been engaged in this discussion or wanting to forever to come and speak with us and jog people’s minds as the play does the play moves people to think in ways and see things that they, they had never seen before, you know, and that’s been voiced and echoed again and again and again, throughout the play’s history.
So, this is a situation I hope where I’m always hoping that we can plumb some new depth and cover some new ground or discover something that we’ll, we’ll, we’ll push the envelope, move the conversation forward, you know, but it starts with, it starts with the play, you know, look at this. What do you think.
Michael Van Osch: And I’ll, I’ll put up on the show notes here, too, all the information about where people can catch it elmshakespeare.org and all the other information on it too. But let’s talk a little bit about the creative process of American Moor, and I know it started seven or eight years ago. I’m guessing out of your own experiences in the theater but tell us how it came to be.
Keith Hamilton Cobb: In a nutshell. It really, you know, I saw people. It was the combination of, my life over, over a lifetime, living as an African-American male and, and, and, and what that looks like in there. I think to all African-American men growing up in this country, there are, a set of experiences that we all share.
You know, we may, synthesize them or quantify them differently, but they’re, they’re basically you look hard at the same experience. And, when, when I began to explore life in the theater and began to grow up and come to full manhood in the theater, I also began to realize that the theater is like everything else in this country. You know, you have an overarching structure. built on something that for all intents and purposes is untenable, right?
Untenable capitalism built on the ownership of African American bodies, African bodies, and that structure being maintained in some form or fashion up until this current day. And, and that’s not a, that’s not an overall winning design you can’t you. We cannot ultimately go anywhere, but down with that design and anything within.
This them, the, the American structure goes in that direction is influenced by that. And so to the American theater. So I was looking around as I grew realizing that they were reasons for how I was treated versus how somebody else has treated the roles that I was getting, the roles I wasn’t getting.
Sometimes it was because I wasn’t, you know, I, I wasn’t up to the competition. I might not have been good enough other times, I’m sure it was any number of other things, you know, and anybody can make, in retrospect, anybody can make an excuse for anything, but my life and career has been what it has been by and large because I am who I am in this structure, you know?
And that all came to a head after a particularly angering audition. And I had really reached an age in my life where I, I understand that I needed to let it all go. You got to audition, you leave it in the room, and you go, then you go and eat or play, play basketball. Is it wherever you go, whatever you want to do, what you want to do, you know?
And in this particular instance, I couldn’t let it go. It was an audition for A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Oberon, which I played three times before I did the audition. And, the director who was about half my age said, well, I want to see this and this and this and this in the character.
And he had taken all of those things out of the text. He had excised the texts. So the auditions would be short, right? He didn’t want five pages. He wanted three and the scene was five pages long. So he took two pages out, you know, and I wanted to say to him, you know, all the things that you wanted to see, you have removed, Shakespeare you gave them to you, but you have taken them out.
So I don’t know if it’s you, me, but somebody here is an idiot, you know? And I’m not allowed to say that. No, of course not. What, where would he, you know, so, you know, I did, I did the audition again and he dismissed me, you know, and I went away and it was nothing more extraordinary than that, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t let that go.
And that had been the first, in a long time where I kind of felt like I just, it just stayed on my mind and somebody said, you need to write this down. I was like no and I’m not going to write, you know, I don’t want to do a one man show solo show. I don’t know. I’m not interested in that shit.
And he said, no, no, no, this is ,right. It’s going to help. And. You know, I got home and in the course of a couple of days, vomited out this emotion, you know, random sort of disparate emotion, and you can’t handle the public you’re, you’re raw emotion. You have to shape it. So, you know, I gave it a little bit of shape, but I gave it to various colleagues, and they said, you know, there’s, there’s, there’s really interesting, intense energy here.
That is not usual. This is, these are, there’s some unusual things dynamics in this, you need to continue to evolve it. And so I did. And about a year later, we presented it to a first public audience. And the responses were from people who were not African American men. They were from, little Jewish high school girls.
They were from, older women who said, I compete with ageism and sexism everywhere in my life. And I have to pick my fights and want people to see my value for what it is for my wisdom, for what it is when I’ve amassed. This is me; this is me, everybody across every spectrum was saying, you know, I’m a trends gender postal worker, and in my profession, I deal with these things all the time. This is me and I listened and looked at that and said, Oh, okay, wow, this is, so this is something else. And you know, it starts with my experience, but it’s, we all have this. We all have this. And maybe the end is creating a connective tissue between me and everybody else via display.
If we could all see that this is our humanity. And that we have to transcend it so that we can all live better. While that one that’ll be a great thing, but how do I do that? How do I do that? Besides run behind this play, continue to produce this play, continue to grow this play and present it to a larger and larger audience.
So that’s what we’ve been trying to do. You know, and that process is still going on. And ironically, that process is fraught with all of the racial bias that is in the play. You know, all of the, the racial bias, the racial politics, the racial, the navigation of, of race and privilege issues, social justice issues that plague us in our culture, you know, it’s what the play is about, but it’s also, what it’s about when you’re taking this play to the white structured American theater and saying, please produce my play.
Right? So there’s something, there’s something, ironically meta and terrifying. About that and his manifested in, in, in, in truly deeply disturbing ways, over the years, a lot having to do with the fact that the country does not ever want to be called on the carpet. You know, it does not. It prefers the lie, the narrative that is as old as American slavery.
You know, I mean, it’s number of lies, but I mean, we can, we can view it as one cumulative lie, you know, American exceptionalism, American altruism and all that included, it’s all nonsense. Right. And rather than confront that in our rabidly capitalist culture, where, where people, you know, What is it?
One, one 10th of 1%, you know, owns everything and they can live quite comfortably, you know, forever, you know? It becomes, it becomes hyper inconvenient to, to have this discussion in any real way to, to face the guilt that is generated by a country that continues to perpetuate itself in the way that this country does, you know, so it’s easier just to kind of, or to give it lip service to give it, Oh, we’ll talk about it for an hour and then we’ll go away and go back to whatever we’re doing.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah. That’s what I was going to say. Then you mentioned that before about, assuaging that guilt by dealing with it in short little pieces but then how does real change actually take effect?
And what, what do we do? I mean, it’s, it’s a bigger question, but, but how can we, is it just a matter of continuing to, from an artist’s perspective, create what is relevant to you and about your story, and then put it out to the world, put it up to the world, put it out to the world.
And that’s what we as artists can do?
Keith Hamilton Cobb: Well, certainly I think from an artist perspective that is true. I tell students all the time, if you are, if you are a theater maker, Yeah, they ask, they ask, well, what advice do you have? And I say, well, if there’s anything else that you just as soon do go do that.
Cause this life sucks, you know? But if this is what you are, you can’t say no to it, you have to do it and you have to learn how to do it well, you have to, you know, give it lots of time and attention and. And practice hone your skills and then go out there and make the stuff that you make. It’s not going to be easy, you know, unless you’re extremely lucky.
It’s not going to be even looked at a lot the time. You’re not going to, you know, gain a lot of respect from a culture that doesn’t revere theater. Doesn’t revere art, sees art only as a buy and sell. Things for making money. No, nobody’s gonna particularly care about you, but that shouldn’t stop you from doing it because what your contribution is what your contribution is, what your purpose is, is what your purpose is.
Oh, so you have to do it not only for you, but really for us, it’s hard to see that you may, you may, ultimately, if you never do then leave and do something else personally, I can’t do anything else. Right. Except continue to make, make the work. And, I think that the difference between me and, large theater making institutions is that they’re there to make the, that they’re to generate cash again. What is inside the overarching structure does what the overarching arching structure does, right. So, so theater for money is a legitimate and real thing, but that’s not what art is for.
Right. Our art is meant to heal us. Art is meant to grow us. It’s meant to help us transcend to become a better society. So see ourselves to look at ourselves realistically, honestly. There’s no reason for me to stop doing that as, as, as best I can. We will. We, we will save ourselves commensurate with the commitment we make.
Not only, not only in theater, but in everything, including focus on this discussion. That’s trying to happen right now. And I say, I stress the word trying, because it’s, as we say, it’s kind of like, yeah, I want to discuss it for 15 minutes and then go back to doing what I was doing. Yeah. Well, to the extent, to which we commit to that discussion, which we can never really quite unpack.
It’s too big. It’s 400, 500, 600 years old and has been, worked on, has been meticulously built to be intractable. Right. And, and, and, and, and, and, and undefeatable to commit to doing the work of undoing it in whatever way, whether you’re a politician or a theater maker, you know, is, is Herculean, right. But if you, if you are a, if, if you are ultimately a lover of humanity, if you want the humanity, you see that, that the human condition that you see, the human, cumulative culture that you see to be something better than it is, you can’t, you don’t just keep doing the same thing. Right? So, you know, American Moor is one contribution and I continue to strive for others. And others do as well.
Certainly there are theater makers. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the, We See You White American Theatre movement, but you know, these are people who have said, okay, we see the structure here it is. And now you have time to make it better. You’re not making theater. So in this space of time, let me disabuse you.
Have any idea that what you are doing is good, explained to you in, in glaring detail, what’s wrong with it and explain to you how you can make it better. You have all that on the table. What are you going to do once the pandemic ends? Right. Right. I mean, you can’t, now you can’t say you don’t know any of this right now.
You can’t say that we didn’t know there was a discussion to engage. What are you going to do? That is a, that is a form of social service. It seems to me, you know, to, to make that statement loudly, it was differently and continue to, and see what it changes so that we have a more, representative American theater representative of the culture, you know, represent representation in the theater is like representation in Supreme court. You know, people are talking about court packing, you know, like, it’s this terrible idea. But when there was a nine member court established, like the country was what, one 10th, one 20th, the size, I don’t, I don’t know what the statistic is, but, you know, and, and predominantly white and slave, that was it. It was here. Right? So, you know we need our Asian judges. We need our Latino judges. We need them our judges of other, other gender and sexual persuasions.
We need, you know, we need representation on the Supreme court that you know, represent the nation and, and, and, and the theater as well. There are a gazillion stories to tell them a gazillion perspectives in this quote, unquote melting pot, you know? And so isn’t the work to figure out how to do that, even though it’s not immediately lucrative.
And I say immediately, because ultimately it will be, ultimately as we continue to grow and change, that will be the norm. How do we create a new norm? The norm is to push in that direction. And so, yeah, that was a thing. And there were reasons for that to be a thing, but we need to continue to look at this over here.
You continue and look at it, look at it, look at it and look it until that becomes the thing that becomes the go-to. Well, of course, of course. I want to see a play with, you know, non-normative gender and color, because that’s who we are. That’s what’s here.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah. And it seems to me like, if there’s anything good, that’s come out of COVID and that, that would be that since it’s happened, there’s been able to be a little bit of space to say, there’s something wrong here.
Let’s address it. Let’s talk about it. And you’ve got nothing else to do in the theater except make zoom things. and so, you know, let’s, let’s make it now that this change starts am I right in that?
Keith Hamilton Cobb: I hope that that is what is happening. Yeah. We’ll see. Yeah. There is certainly time. There’s certainly space to be sitting in rooms, having those discussions right now, whether it be in person or over zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom does offer us that right.
Well, you could convene people all over the country, right. You know, you could, you could convene artistic directors from the theaters all over the country right now to sit and discuss this in a zoom room.
Michael Van Osch: And, you know, I guess that’s what a Rebecca and the Elm Shakespeare company is really trying to do with this event too, and, you know, kudos to them.
And I’ll let me just tell everyone else briefly what’s going on with that. One more time. So October 29th, you’re going to be featured and as well as the, your performance of American Moor,
Keith Hamilton Cobb: Preview the video
Michael Van Osch: video. Yeah. Sorry and then November 12th, it’s a panel discussion.
The BIPOC director forum that’s happening, November 19th is a performance Becoming Othello, A Black Girl’s Journey.
That’s Deborah Ann Byrd. And then a December 4th discussion on who Shakespeare, W H O S E, whose Shakespeare? And then December 10th, the last one is a performance called Amplified! A Celebration of BIPOC actors and training. So there’s a lot of different things going on, but it looks like it’s all going to be very interesting.
And there you go, like you said, but because of zoom, we’re able to not be hiding in our little homes and say, we can’t talk to each other. So, one last question about American Moor. And, and where, where would you like to see it go? Just from a personal artistic perspective?
Keith Hamilton Cobb: I have wanted a Broadway run of this show because I think it is wholly worthy of one.
I think that Broadway creates national conversation around a piece. And I think that the, the issues that the place seeks to expose are worthy. if not essential to, I believe they certainly are essential to a national discussion. And I think it frames the discussion in a way it is impactful in ways that I haven’t seen other theater pieces be.
So it has the power to create intense discussion around these issues that could be dial moving. You know, I have the potential to be, transcendent of the conversation status quo, right now. And so we have always been striving for that, you know, and, COVID kind of shut that all down, right.
Because we were off-Broadway and then that sort of, ended. So I turned my attention to the publishing of the work. So that’s out there and it’s, you know, colleges and high schools around the country are teaching it often in tandem with Othello. But looking at it in various classes. And it’s, it’s interesting because the piece speaks to diverse disciplines. You know, whether you’re a women’s studies, a diversity inclusion, Africana studies, poly-sci studies, theater, English, you know, it is sort of the convergence point of all of it.
And when you, when you read it or view it, you will, you, you will see, why and how that is. So, so it’s enjoying this, this, this really exciting academic track right now. And along with that, I’m just doing the work to keep it visible as a performance piece. Yeah. At a time when we can’t perform, you know, as best I can. So that when that the ability to perform comes back around, we are able to put it on stages again, you know, hopefully garner an well audience as we can.
It’s this piece. It’s nothing else. It’s interesting because it’s nothing else in my body of work that I do that I feel this way. Yeah. I mean, I believe some ancestors were shouting really loudly in this piece and, make this talk about, talk about this, see what you know, when you talk about a life of purpose, there was so much that has happened over the last 10, 15 years in my, my life and career 20 years, I, I would say, why me, why this, why is this such a struggle?
Why is this? So, you know, why is this so hard? You know, and looking at this play, I couldn’t have particularly put this piece together. Had I not had those life experiences in the way that I had them. So, you know, I think that there’s some really, really powerful energies here that need to be given continued attention.
Michael Van Osch: Given attention. Absolutely. Well in our little way at Hark Journal, hopefully we can help that along as well. And I’m really looking forward to a Friday night, on the Elm Shakespeare dot org and other conversations. And again, thanks for doing this. You know, for the folks that, that haven’t met Keith, he’s got resume about a mile long.
That includes television and film work in LA, as well as regional theater companies all over the country and the big names that you know, and I’ll put his bio in the show notes as well, because it’s so impressive. And also a teaching artist as well. Of course. So Keith it’s, it’s been, really great to meet you.
I appreciate you, sharing your time with us. I got one question left. I asked this to everyone I interview and that is if Shakespeare was on this zoom call with us and you got to ask him one question, what would you ask him?
Keith Hamilton Cobb: Did you write all that shit, bro?
Tell the truth.
Michael Van Osch: Now you’re under oath on zoom. Yeah. Good question. Well, hang on for a minute here, after we say goodbye, but again, Keith Hamilton Cobb. Thanks so much for joining us and, we’ll talk to you soon.
Keith Hamilton Cobb: Okay.
Michael Van Osch: Thanks.
