42 pages • 1 hour read
American Moor
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Summary and Study Guide
Overview
American Moor, a play by Keith Hamilton Cobb, was first performed in 2013 and published in 2020. The 2013 performance was at Westchester Community College (Cobb’s alma mater) in Valhalla, New York. Cobb says the 2013 version of the play was rough around the edges when compared to the polished, updated version that opened off-Broadway at Cherry Lane Theater, New York City, in 2019. In addition to writing American Moor, Cobb, who is a classically trained actor from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, also performs in the main role. Cobb helped found The Untitled Othello Project, a theater group that lays bare the racist ideas inherent in Shakespeare’s Othello and questions whether any future productions of the play could ever avoid these racist tropes—a question that American Moor also engages with.
American Moor is considered a one-person play, because the second character, the Director, appears infrequently only as a disembodied voice. For most of the play, there is only one character: the Actor. He is described as a tall, Black man, talking to the audience about the process of auditioning for the title role in William Shakespeare’s Unlock all 42 pages of this Study Guide Plus, gain access to 8,900+ more expert-written Study Guides. Including features:
