Trans actor has played Othello as two genders
Skyler Cooper takes stage as a man in Livermore festival production
For classical actors, it’s not uncommon to revisit the same role multiple times over the course of a career. For black classical actors, that’s especially true with the title role in “Othello, the Moor of Venice” — the one major role in Shakespeare’s canon that, since at least the early 20th century, has usually been played by a black performer. For actor Skyler Cooper, a trans man, playing Othello twice has meant a much more unusual, if not oneofakind, journey. He first played the part as a woman in Impact Theatre’s socalled “lesbian” production of the play, in 2005. Now, he’s playing the part as a man at Livermore Shakespeare Festival, where Michael Wayne Rice’s production, set at the end of the American Civil War, runs through July 21. Those two interpretations bookend Cooper’s own gradual gender evolution. Cooper, a Brooklyn native and an activist and filmmaker in addition to a stage actor, adopted the “androgynous” name Skyler when he was in the Navy, where he served from 1985 to 1996 as an aircraft electrician. For years thereafter, people who didn’t know him assumed he was male. Then, more than a decade ago, after a woman ac
Skyler Cooper, who played Othello as a woman in a 2005 Impact Theatre production, says he can reach for a wider range of emotions because of being trans.
cused him of being in the wrong locker room, he started using men’s rooms to make his life easier. To most of the world, most of the time, he was male. “I was already expressing my gender the way I wanted to. I was loving the woman that I wanted to love,” he says.
But as his body aged, people started to “ma’am” him again, which felt “disjointed,” “violating” in a way that it hadn’t before, he says. He also felt his gender presentation limited his opportunities as an actor, so he started to make connections among the trans community, deciding he identified as a trans man after he’d already done much of his transitioning.
In Shakespeare’s tragedy, gender and race circumscribe Othello’s central act. Othello kills his white wife, Desdemona (Nicole Odell, at Livermore Shakespeare Festival), after the villain Iago (Malcolm Rodgers) convinces Othello that Desdemona has been cheating on him. He “poisons Othello’s mind,” as Cooper puts it.
In Impact’s “lesbian” production, which was directed by Melissa Hillman, Desdemona “was this validation” to Othello, Cooper recalls.
“I remember someone asked me, ‘How do you kill someone onstage night after night?’ And in that production, it wasn’t her that I was killing,” Cooper says. “It was the thought that she didn’t love me, and as long as she was alive, that thought that she didn’t love me, that I’m not worthy, would still be alive. So, that I could kill.”
Performing the role now as a man at Livermore Shakes, Cooper sees “a difference in the way Othello processes his information, the things that he’s going through, that he’s getting from Iago, the stories that he’s hearing — how it attacks his manhood.
“I don’t know that it attacked this female Othello’s womanhood. It was different. There is still that idea that she couldn’t love me,” but now it’s painful “because in the context of this world, I’m a black man who was a slave, who doesn’t have a lot to offer” apart from his military skill. This Othello “will never rise to the level of a white man. I will never have that immediate respect that someone can just have for the color of their skin.”
Cooper believes this male Othello “fell in love with the way (Desdemona) saw him. He’s never seen anyone love him in that way, and so he fell in love with himself. He saw himself beyond the slave, beyond the black man. He saw a human being. And to have that stripped away is just as painful” as when he played the part as female.
“But again, a commander is a commander,” Cooper continues, and some characteristics have persisted across his two interpretations, such as Othello’s leadership ability. There’s also “a sense of feeling my life matters, a sense of pride.”
“One of the things that people recall about the ‘Othello’ with Impact was how fiery and volcanic she was,” Cooper says. Under Hillman’s direction, he didn’t feel “pulled back” from any emotion. By contrast, “I feel that as a male, men are told a lot to control their feelings — don’t get too hot.” Rice and Cooper are bringing out how Othello doesn’t want to believe Iago’s lies.
As a female Othello, Cooper, because of who he is, could express femininity in ways society doesn’t typically allow. As a male Othello, he can do the same with masculinity. In every choice he makes as an actor, Cooper has options readily available to him that cisgender or genderconforming actors might not always have.
“I get to do things that men oftentimes are not comfortable doing, whether it be crying or losing their temper. I get to do that,” Cooper says.
To be clear, Cooper also understands it’s not that cisgender actors couldn’t make those choices. “We all have that muscle, but you make those choices based on those things you’re used to using.”
“I try to look at it as an asset, the fact that I’m a trans man,” Cooper continues. “I have walked in the world as a black man; people have treated me, in my outside world, as a black male, but my choices have not been pressured by society (about) what a black man should and should not do. I got to choose what I wanted to do and still be seen as a black male . ... As far as a black woman, same thing. I just push back on any notion.”