Paul Robeson (55 page)

Gerstadt, still in his teens and “full of outrage at the world's injustice,” remembers bursting in on Robeson with regularity to share his latest
breathless enthusiasm. One day he appeared in Robeson's dressing room to announce his fury over the continuing segregation of black troops in the armed forces—and his solution. “Wouldn't this be a terrific time to say the hell with your army, your navy, we're not going to fight if the Negro isn't treated better!—Wow! what a perfect time!” Didn't Robeson agree? “No,” Robeson responded gently, “no, I don't, John. First things first, Hitler first.” Robeson “didn't go on about it,” Gerstadt recalls. He never went on about it, James Monks, another young cast member, adds. He would neither initiate political topics nor, if they did come up, indulge in political harangue; he would give his opinion, but not attempt to overpower in argument or to convert. “He didn't put you down because you differed with his opinion”; his characteristic comment would be along the lines of “Well, that's possible, but have you considered the alternative argument that …”
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“Powerfully cool” is how one associate from those years describes him. Robeson's benign, shrewdly calibrated forbearance contributed to the unheated way the company was able to approach the “black-white” issues within the play itself. No one recalls any semblance of self-consciousness about race—whether among members of the company themselves or in regard to the potential controversy for an audience in a black Othello's playing opposite a white Desdemona. “I don't recall anyone saying ‘we might get in trouble here, do we dare?'” Gerstadt says, no attempt to evade or deliberately to titillate.
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Whether tactics or temperament played the larger role in Robeson's posture of outward equanimity cannot be measured with assurance. This was, after all, an otherwise all-white cast in a nearly all-white profession, and Robeson, at age forty-five, had long since learned the likely limits and durability of white folks' empathy. Robeson the man was not unlike Othello the character in the surface composure that overlay his interior passion and which, under duress, could give way to the warrior's strength. As he would demonstrate before the decade of the forties was out, Robeson could give vehement public vent to his sense of grievance, but the event had to warrant the feelings; he picked his occasions for calm, and his occasions for anger. In regard to
Othello
, he kept his manner cool in order to avoid jeopardizing the broader impact he intended: to make of his portrayal a political statement beyond the purview of art—while preserving the integrity of his performance as art. “I like to feel,” Robeson told a newspaper reporter, “that my work has a farther reach than its artistic appeal. I consider art a social weapon.” And he told the black journalist P. L. Prattis, “Not simply for art's sake do I try to excel in
Othello
, but more to prove the capacity of the people from whom I've sprung and of all such peoples, of whatever color, erroneously regarded as backward.” To Uta Hagen he said, “I do the singing and I do the acting because it helps me make a statement, gives me a platform to say what I believe.”
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“Othello kills not in hate but in honor,” Robeson once said: “It wasn't just the act of infidelity” that led Othello to take Desdemona's life, “it was the destruction of himself as a human being, of his human dignity.” In a number of interviews Robeson gave while preparing the role, he expounded his view that Othello was a great—and persecuted—“Negro warrior,” and that his own responsibility was to convey the tale of a man who had managed to rise to a position of leadership in an alien culture—only to be destroyed by it. To make Othello's jealousy believable—since “under ordinary circumstances” he could have dispelled it with a word to his wife—Robeson felt the foundation had to be laid early in the play by stressing the cultural as well as racial differences that set the Moor apart: his values as well as his appearance accounted for his distinctiveness.
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Robeson, in his own words, “listened carefully to directors and Shakespearean authorities, but in some cases their Othello didn't think and act exactly as I believed a great Negro warrior would do, and in those cases I played it my way.” He made those decisions with great care. His own style in preparing a role always entailed close analysis and cautious unfolding. As a man of erudition, moreover, he approached Shakespearean scholarship with familiarity and respect—and was well aware that both academic and theatrical tradition provided weight for his own chosen interpretation.
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For a century and a half after the play's first presentation, Othello
had
been portrayed as black. Edmund Kean first broke with this tradition when he offered Drury Lane a coffee-colored version—one hailed by Coleridge as a most “pleasing probability.” So well did it please, that tawny half-castes thereafter streamed forth from the stage, with such luminaries as Henry Irving and Edwin Forrest playing a range of rainbow-tinted Othellos. (A Maryland woman in 1868 was so delighted with one of the lighter versions that she felt able definitely to declare, “We may regard, then, the daub of black upon Othello's visage as an
EBULLITION
of fancy, a
FREAK
of imagination.… Othello was a
WHITE
man.”) From the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth century,
Othello
had been popularly performed in the United States as an animated lecture on, alternately, the sin of jealousy, the evils of drink, or the perils of lust—as a Moral Dialogue on any number of questions, excluding only the question of race. A host of famed actors had offered the role in a host of hues—excluding only black.
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But at least once notably before Robeson, and several more times passably, a black actor had played Othello as a black hero. The great Ira Aldridge first opened in the role in 1827 in Liverpool, with Charles Kean as his Iago. For four decades thereafter, Aldridge toured
Othello
to acclaim throughout Britain and the Continent, and in the 1860s was received with particular enthusiasm in Russia. Théophile Gautier was in St. Petersburg when Aldridge performed there in 1863. He had gone expecting an “energetic, disordered, fiery, rather barbaric” portrayal, but found a “quiet,
reserved, classic, majestic” one—“Othello himself, as Shakespeare has created him, with eyes half-closed as if dazzled from the African sun, his nonchalant, oriental attitude, and that Negro free-and-easy air that no European can imitate.” Aldridge, Gautier reported, was the lion of the hour. The United States, however, did not believe in a black Othello. Aldridge never played the role in his native land.
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Margaret Webster agreed with Robeson's insistence on an Othello of unambiguous racial identity. Only with “a great man,” she wrote, “a man of simplicity and strength [who] also was a black man” playing the role, could an audience believe he could command Venice's armies while remaining a stranger in its midst; only then could the sources of Iago's hatred and the extent of Desdemona's courage be adequately measured; only then could the depth of Othello's vulnerability and resentment, his wary susceptibility to tales of the betrayal of his honor, be fully laid bare.
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Webster hired the great stage designer Robert Edmond Jones—who had designed the last previous
Othello
on Broadway, in 1937, and had known the Robesons since their days together at the Provincetown Play-house in the 1920s—to do sets and costumes. She essentially retained her staging ideas from the Brattle production, but in the interim had further streamlined the script. On his side, Robeson prepared for the role by growing a beard and trimming his weight back down to 230. His fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-week salary was a fraction of what he earned singing concerts (two thousand to twenty-five hundred a night), and the demands of the role were greater. He was later to say that playing Othello took the equivalent energy of three concerts; only
Emperor Jones
, twenty years before, had involved a comparable effort.
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He concentrated particularly during rehearsals on bringing more fluidity to his physical movements—an added challenge in a small playing space that heightened the static impression created by his large build. He also worked hard at overcoming his self-acknowledged tendency “to be too loud, too big,” worked to bring his voice down to the level where he could get the full tonal value out of it and “to be constantly careful not to make my lines too musical, not to sing my lines, but to
SPEAK
them
MUSICALLY.”
At the end of a day's rehearsal he typically needed ten to twelve hours' sleep to recuperate, and when not rehearsing he stayed close to his book-filled apartment in New York (rarely going up to Enfield), reading, studying languages (at the moment he was plugging away at Chinese), and spending long hours listening to his huge record collection.
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For four and a half weeks prior to the October 19 Broadway opening, the company tried the show out on the road, first in New Haven on September 11 for one week, then in Boston for two weeks, and finally in Philadelphia (“… we eat and drink like pigs,” Uta Hagen wrote her parents, “talk until all hours, get up around twelve or one in the afternoon”). Although the three-city tour brought in an exceptionally high
gross of $103,000, its progress was not one of unalloyed triumph. Some of the out-of-town critics showered the production with superlatives, but an equal number (and the better-known ones) registered more reservations than had greeted the Brattle tryout of the previous year. In Boston, the best-known theater town, the respected critics Elinor Hughes and Elliott Norton turned in sharply divergent verdicts, representing the generally split decision of their colleagues.
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Hughes served up praise for all hands, but above all lauded Robeson, for a performance that had “deepened and simplified since last summer” and was now wholly convincing; his “tremendous magnetism, splendid size and bearing, rich voice,” and powerful emotional conviction successfully conveyed—for the first time in Hughes's long experience—a believable hero: “At last the tragedy becomes inevitable, not arbitrary.” Elliott Norton turned in a directly contradictory verdict. Aside from a few “breathtaking” moments (for which he mostly credited Uta Hagen), Norton thought the production unconvincing. And for the worst of it he blamed Robeson himself: “His acting does not fulfill the promise of that tentative week at Cambridge.” When Robeson could call on his own experience, Norton felt, he “walks with the great men of the stage”; when he could not, he fell back on strained tricks, vocalizing and declaiming to merely “artificial” effect. Anyone familiar with the vagaries of theater reviewing in the daily press knows that disparate judgments are commonplace, that what passes for considered critical opinion is as likely the product of an ill-digested dinner, rushed deadlines, or the psychological safety of reiterating a prior view. Still, the divided out-of-town verdict necessarily heightened the company's anxiety as opening night on Broadway finally drew near. “We're getting ourselves keyed up,” Uta Hagen wrote to her father. “Hold your thumbs.”
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On the day of the opening, veteran theatrical commentator Sam Zolotow led off his
New York Times
column by declaring that the Theatre Guild was launching its twenty-sixth season that evening with a production of
Othello
that the “theatrical pundits say has all the earmarks of a rare occasion in the annals of the Broadway stage.” The prediction was especially notable—and a gauge of the excited anticipation—for being made in a Broadway season that saw the premiere of
Oklahoma!
, Katharine Cornell and Raymond Massey in
Lovers and Friends
, Margaret Sullavan and Elliott Nugent in
The Voice of the Turtle
, and, during the same week
Othello
was due to open, saw the Frank Fay-Ethel Waters-Bert Wheeler vaudeville show
Laugh Time
move to the Ambassador. This wasn't just another opening of just another show. Margaret Webster later wrote, “I have never been so paralytic with fright,” adding that “for the first time in the United States a Negro was playing one of the greatest parts ever written … and [the occasion] was trying to prove something other than itself.…”
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It did. When the curtain came down that night, the audience erupted
into an ovation that (as
Newsweek
reported) “hadn't been heard around those parts in many seasons. For twenty minutes, and half as many curtain calls, the applause and the bravos echoed from orchestra pit and gallery to give Forty-Fourth Street the news of something more than just another hit.” Burton Rascoe, theater critic for the
World-Telegram
, wrote in his column the next day, “Never in my life have I seen an audience sit so still, so tense, so under the spell of what was taking place on the stage as did the audience at the Shubert last night. And few times in my life have I witnessed so spontaneous a release of feelings in applause as that which occurred when the tragedy was ended.” “The ovation opening night was so tremendous we all cried like babies,” Hagen wrote to her parents. The next day Margaret Webster wrote her mother, “They yelled at us through a long succession of calls and fairly screamed at Paul and finally I had to make a speech to finish it up.… Then they cheered the roof off again. The notices are better than we are—it was just one of those nights. Magic happened—not so much to the performance which, as far as I could judge, was very good but not more so than it has been before, but to the audience, who just got drunk.” A Soviet journalist reported home that “many American writers and journalists” with whom he spoke “consider the 19th of October, 1943”—the day of the
Othello
premiere—as the moment when “the doors of the American theatre opened for the Negro people.” All hands adjourned to Freda Diamond's house on Thirty-eighth Street for a gala party that night, the theatrical celebrants joined by Paul's sister, Marian Forsythe, who came up from Philadelphia, and his brother Reverend Ben Robeson and his family, who came down from Harlem.
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