Auditioning for the title role in Othello, a Black American actor (Keith Hamilton Cobb) nods and sucks it up when a hotshot white kid director (Josh Tyson) gives him notes. The setup, with the director invisible in the dark, recalls A Chorus Line. But this show—a straight play, not a musical—might just as well be performed solo, leaving the director’s baloney to the viewer’s imagination. The playwright/protagonist is himself a dyed-in-the-wool Shakespearean whose ambivalence—not to say outright hostility—towards the canonical Tragedie of the Moore of Venice is impossible to miss. —Matthew Gurewitsch