Much could be written on the broad subject of colorblind or color-conscious casting in theatre, which often comes down to the weighing of a perceived social good against a perceived artistic good. The moral choices are often not as clear as they might at first appear, and the topic needs an opening-up that gets beyond easily triggered emotions and reflexive political reactions. In opera, the debate shifts into a different gear, not only because music moves us onto a different plane even in works calling for verisimilitude, but because as a practical matter it is hard enough to find a singer of any description to sing an Otello, a Don Alvaro, a Cio-Cio San, or an Aïda without putting an ethnic precondition on the search. But this production choice moves beyond colorblind or color-conscious considerations. The presenters were not anticipating protests over their failure to cast an African-American tenore di forza in the title role. They were trying to give the slip to the Furies of “cultural appropriation” by signaling their sensitivity to its eminently debatable constructs, one of which decrees that no person dast tell the story of another who is not of the same ethnic or sexual persuasion. Without ruling out the possibility that situations calling for such a sensitivity could indeed present themselves, let’s keep a few things about Otello in mind:

In both play and opera, the ethnic divide between Otello and the society in which he moves is a central given condition of the drama. It is both the primary determinant of his outsider status (which he has in all other respects overcome) and his single point of vulnerability; thus, it becomes the crucial motivator of both his actions and those of his antagonists. His easily tapped sexual paranoia is bound up in it. His wife’s disregard of it, even in extremis, is the most powerful proof of the nobility and innocence of her character. To not represent this condition theatrically, to not show us the one dark skin among all the white ones from the moment of Otello’s triumph over his own kind through to the surrender of his sword, is to abdicate artistic responsibility. Even in a production as disengaged as the present one, that failure is the single most enfeebling element.

We used to have this stuff called makeup. It had two functions. One was to assist the definition of facial and bodily features, so that the performer’s presence and identity in a general sense carried out into space under theatre lighting—especially important in larger auditoriums like our opera houses. The second was to more specifically delineate character types or, at the most sophisticated level, individual character. In this last usage, which we can see most vividly in the photos of Chaliapin or of Stanislavski and other actors of his company in a wide range of roles—or, in film, of Laurence Olivier in the very role we are considering—it, along with costume, established quite unmistakably not only a character’s ethnic identity and class standing, but much about his or her life story, habitual attitude, state of mind, and, to use a current term, how he or she “presents.” It was a big part of pretending to be someone else, the instantly visible outer trappings of the performer’s effort to enter into the life of another.