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Meet the Women of Othello

We love hearing from you, the audience member, about what you thought of our productions – including Othello. Recently, some of you noticed how several roles traditionally cast as men are played by women in our production and you wanted to hear from the cast about their experience. Today, we’re bringing your questions to our actors and director Jessica Kubzansky for their insight.

What was the thinking behind your casting decisions?

Jessica Kubzansky (Director): Once I had arrived at the choice to set the play today, that decision informed every casting choice I subsequently made. And those decisions were very deliberate, and we took a long time to arrive at them, because bodies tell stories, and the casting choices that directors make carry profound implications that may affect an audience’s understanding of the play, which feels like a big responsibility.

Generally speaking, Shakespeare wrote contemporary plays for his sixteenth-century audience; even the history plays or the Roman plays reflect an Elizabethan sensibility that would have made them feel very immediate to Shakespeare’s audience, which was part of his genius. So I suspect that if he were writing Othello today

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