BECOMING OTHELLO: A Black Girl’s Journey

Inspired in 2000, by actor Charles Dutton when he performed at the Playing Shakespeare workshop with John Barton, Debra Ann dreamed that she too would one day play the role of Othello.  --- Roll on 15 years and she finally got her wish.  

Now the Birthplace Trust and the University of Warwick together with Misfit, Inc., the Folger Institute, Southwest Shakespeare Company, Columbia University and the Harlem Shakespeare Festival are working together to sponsor Debra Ann’s planned three-year writing project.  The international project comprises a documentary feature film, a solo show and a small volume memoir which includes research from the Birthplace Trust, the Folger Shakespeare Library and Columbia University Archives.

BECOMING OTHELLO: A Black Girl’s Journey is a 90 minute, 5-Act, living memoir about a young woman’s trials and triumphs with race and the classics, her memorable experiences growing up in East Harlem and her gender flipped journey on the road to becoming Shakespeare's noble, flawed general.  The solo show is complete with moving songs and lyrical language from Black women playwrights, William Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and the King James Bible.