Lantern Theater Company continues its 2024/25 season with the regional premiere of American Moor, actor/playwright Keith Hamilton Cobb’s poetic exploration of Shakespeare, race, and modern America. Led by guest director Kash Goins, American Moor features Thane Madsen in his Lantern debut and Phillip Brown, who returns to the Lantern stage following his Barrymore Award-winning performance in the 2022/23 season production of The Royale.
American Moor runs Thursday, Nov. 7 through Sunday, Dec. 8, 2024, at St. Stephen’s Theater in Center City Philadelphia.
Hailed by The Boston Globe as a “deep-from-the-heart spellbinder” and “a blisteringly eloquent and penetrating meditation on the ever-urgent matter of race in America,” American Moor is Keith Hamilton Cobb’s excavation of Shakespeare’s power in a contemporary American context. An actor waits, preparing, pacing, going over his lines. The director is late. But the actor has been waiting for more than this single audition slot – he has been waiting to be truly seen and heard in the fullness of his experience and identity and waiting for that fullness to be valued in the audition and rehearsal rooms in which he has spent his career. When the younger, white director arrives, we watch as the actor wrestles with his relationship to Othello, the frustrations and indignities faced by a Black classical actor who sees himself in all of Shakespeare’s canon, a process that he knows will not honor his lived experience, and his desire to tackle this towering, troublesome role anyway. The actor lets the audience into his innermost thoughts while also negotiating the tension between the director’s power and his own hard-earned authority – a tension that Othello himself must navigate. Shakespeare’s text and modern lyricism knit together in this vital, propulsive monologue play, holding up a mirror that reflects both 400 years of theater history and the current moment.
Performed across the United States and making its Philadelphia premiere with the Lantern’s production, American Moor has been added to the Folger Shakespeare Library’s permanent collection in recognition of its insistent and penetrating perspective on Shakespeare in a modern world. Originally conceived and written in 2012 with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Keith Hamilton Cobb describes American Moor as “a play about race in America, but it is also a play about who gets to make art, who gets to play Shakespeare, about the qualitative decline of the American theatre, about actors and acting, and about the nature of unadulterated love.” A graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Cobb brings a rich classical performance background to the writing, having performed roles including Laertes in Hamlet, Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, Tullus Aufidius in Coriolanus, and Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream on regional theater stages across the country – as well as numerous roles in television and in contemporary dramas.
If You Go:
Tickets for American Moor are $30 – $47 and are available online at www.lanterntheater.org or by calling the Lantern Box Office at (215) 829-0395. Discounts are available for students, seniors 65 and up, U.S. military personnel, and groups of 10 or more. Performances of American Moor will take place at St. Stephen’s Theater, located at 923 Ludlow Street in Center City Philadelphia.