Old Play in Manhattan

Othello (by William Shakespeare; produced by The Theater Guild) gave Broadway its first powerful drama in months, its first Negro Othello in history. Playing the noble, credulous Moor was Paul Robeson, who played him 13 years ago in London, a year ago in Cambridge (Mass.) and Princeton (TIME, Aug 24 1942).

A year's thought has fashioned both a better production and a better-balanced one; in terms of tense and vivid melodrama, indeed, this Othello is as good as Broadway can hope to see. If Robeson last week was a less moving figure than he was at Cambridge, he had tempered the violence that marred his scenes of crazed jealousy, he had better caught the hang of his lordly speeches, the meaning of his crucial scenes. Magnificent in stature, magnificent if a little too solemn in manner, magnificent if a little monotonous of voice, Robeson did not bring to the part poetry and drama so much as sculpture and organ music. He was not so much Othello as a great and terrible presence.

As Iago, Jose Ferrer was no longer dwarfed by Robeson, but a proper foil. Too mild a villain last year from not wanting to be too melodramatic a one, Ferrer now is supple, mettlesome, lightly Mephistophelean--a virtuoso who lays bare the workings of Iago's fiendish mind, though not the mainsprings of his enigmatic nature.

Probably the most famous living Negro, Paul Leroy Robeson was born 45 years ago in Princeton, NJ. His father, a run away slave in his youth, was a deeply respected, deep-voiced Presbyterian minister ("When people talk about my voice," say Robeson, "I wish they could have heard my father preach"). Entering Rutgers on a scholarship, Paul wound up in Phi Beta Kappa and a four-letter man. In football he was twice chosen by Walter Camp as All-America end--"the greatest defensive end," said Camp, "that ever trod the gridiron."

In 1923 Robeson graduated from the Columbia Law School, was offered a job in an excellent law office, gave it up because of possible racial complications. Said Robeson: "I could never be a Supreme Court judge; on the stage there was only the sky to hold me back." The stage quickly pitched him to fame in O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings and The Emperor Jones. A scene in The Emperor Jones called for whistling and, because he could not whistle, Robeson sang. Having stirred the audience with his deep, rich voice, Robeson--who had never had a singing lesson in his life--gave a recital, awoke next morning doubly famous.

Conquest of Britain. He went to London, conquered it, then conquered half the cities of Europe. Back in England, he played in Show Boat, The Hairy Ape, Othello. The first night of the London Othello drew 20 curtain calls but, says Robeson, "it wasn't a success to me because I hadn't worked it out yet."

Robeson and his wife Eslanda, a biologist he met while at Columbia, settled down in London. In England he found equality, which he prized above homage. In 1934 he made the first of several visits to Russia. Russia impressed him even more than England: he had thought that race prejudice could never be entirely stamped out and "here was a country where it did not exist." In 1936 he put his nine-year old son, Paul Jr., to school in Russia because he did not want him to contend with race prejudice "until he is older and his father can be with him."

An ardent antifascist, Robeson later went to Spain, sang for the Loyalists on the battlefield, his great voice carrying into the Insurgents' camp. Late in 1939 he decided to come home.

Exile's Return. It was a tough decision to make. To stay in London was a terrible temptation--life was easier there, success greater. To live in Russia had been an even stronger temptation: "I felt I might have functioned there better than any place else in the world." But, a proud man Robeson is almost proudest of being a Negro; a responsible man, he feels most responsible toward his race. "I couldn't live with my own conscience, feeling I was getting the gravy." He stands with his people, but against segregation and abnegation alike. But he came back, too, because he found, like many another exile, that "I was never an Englishman or a Russian, I was an American." For the same reason, and by his own choice, his son came back also.

Merely for a Negro to be able to play Othello on Broadway, Robeson feels, has justified his decision. In terms of morale, its almost as if they abolished Jim Crow in the Army." For him, it is "killing two birds with one stone--I'm acting and I'm talking for Negroes in the way only Shakespeare can." He will play it as long as possible, all over the country (except in the South) even though his $1,500-a-week salary is a fraction of what he can earn singing at $2,000 or $2,500 a night. For Othello he lost 35 pounds, now 230, "practically my football weight"

Lazybones. Two years ago the Robesons moved into a big colonial house with a swimming pool and tennis court at Enfield, Conn. (Cracked their repairman: "He'll have to sing a lot of songs to heat this place.") Once dubbed a lazy man by his wife, Robeson embodies a queer definition of laziness. Besides acting, cinemacting (Song of Freedom, King Solomon's Mines, Show Boat), carrying Water Boy to the ends of the earth, broadcasting and making hundreds of gramophone recordings, Robeson has been working on a vast treatise about African culture, has tackled an invention for improving acoustics. In addition he has learned a dozen languages, including Chinese, Hebrew, Russian, Welsh. For the war effort he has sung in camps all over the U.S. (even in the South), worked for the Treasury Department, broadcast to Europe for the OWI. Robeson has never shilly-shallied about his leftist sympathies, never blinked other minority problems than his own. Says he fiercely: "No Negro would dare be anti-Semitic in front of me."

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