Media Archive

Finding Othello in the Harvard Theatre Collection at Houghton Library

Imagining Othello in a contemporary US context, with director Bill Rauch and actor Chris Butler.

“What I want to do is going to take me beyond the rest of my life,” Matt Aucoin told me. That might sound like excessive modesty — or hubris — but it succinctly describes Aucoin’s ambitions.

Born in Nigeria, Ellams lives in London, where [Ellams’] experience as a black man is very different than in his native country. “I saw all these stereotypes of African men in mainstream media and they weren’t matching up with the African men in my life,” he says.

“There are cross-generational conversations going on; different types of people with different monies in their pockets clashing. There are the same questions about fatherhood, about masculinity, about belonging, about the legacy of colonization coming up,” said Ellams.