Pittsburgh doesn’t need reminders that it loves football, and especially its pro franchise. But can Shakespeare — and some contemporary helpers — teach us something about the injustices and inequities of the world of sports?
Demaskus Theater Collective and the New Hazlett Theater say the Bard can just do it. This week, they will stage the local premiere of “Othello of the Endzone or, The Steel City Tragedy: A Football Game in Four Quarters and Double Overtime.”
Playwright Franky D. Gonzalez’s drama imagines Pittsburgh as the place where the NFL’s first woman head coach is hired, and where she is targeted by a nemesis named Iago and other scheming rivals.
The play, with dialogue updated as contemporary colloquial speech, gets five performances at the New Hazlett, Thursday, Oct. 22 through Sunday, Oct. 25.
“Franky D. Gonzalez has done an excellent job of translating what it is to be an outsider in an institution in a way that correlates to a Black woman’s experience in this ultra male-dominated environment — that we all love, by the way, right?” said Demaskus artistic director Shaunda Miles McDill.
The plot is lifted directly from Shakespeare’s 1604 tragedy, set amidst the nobility and military classes of Venice where Othello, an African prince turned general, is secretly undone by the machinations of Iago, an ensign Othello passes over for promotion.
Shaunda Miles McDill directs “Othello of the Endzone” for her Demaskus Theater.
In Gonzalez’s adaptation, special-teams coach Iago is passed over for promotion by the Pittsburgh football club (which otherwise goes unnicknamed), while Amani Othello, a Black longtime coach with the team, gets the top job instead. And the tragic hero’s lover is not a white girl named Desdemona, but a white wide receiver named Desmond, who’s near the end of his career and battling injury.
In a touch with no real parallel in Shakespeare, Gonzalez offers the O-Line, a chorus of football players who act as one and sometimes give voice to Othello’s bleakest thoughts.
The production stars stage and screen actor, Pittsburgh native and former WNBA player Cynthia Dallas as Othello and Michael Patrick Trimm as Iago. McDill directs.
Dallas knows the sports milieu well: Before knee surgeries ended her hoops career, she starred at Schenley High School and the University of Illinois and was even drafted by the San Antonio Silver Stars. As an actor, she’s played roles at the Pittsburgh CLO and City Theatre as well as on-screen in productions including the Netflix horror film “The Deliverance”; she also teaches acting at Point Park University.
‘The new Globe Theater’
McDill, who grew up on Long Island (and as a New York Jets fan), has been a fixture on the local arts scene for most of the past 15 years. In addition to producing shows and other projects through Demaskus, she’s been a communications staffer at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, a program officer at the Heinz Endowments, and most recently the managing director of Pittsburgh Public Theater.
The Public, of course, recently merged with the Pittsburgh CLO into a troupe called Confluence Theater of Pittsburgh. After McDill’s position was eliminated this past summer, she reactivated Demaskus, which had been dormant a few years.
Playwright Gonzalez is based in Dallas and Los Angeles, and it was in Dallas that McDill first saw his Othello adaptation, in 2023. Early plans to stage it in Pittsburgh never materialized, but McDill found a willing partner in the New Hazlett, for which this is its first-ever co-production with an outside group.
“Othello of the Endzone” playwright Franky D. Gonzalez.
Gonzalez’s original was set in Dallas and included some local references. The version staged here has been localized — AFC North-ed, if you will.
“There were these different pieces that were edited by Franky to make sure that it felt a little bit more like our hometown and the culture that we have here in terms of football,” said McDill.
She finds parallels between the Globe Theatre of Shakespeare — the popular entertainment of its day — and the modern football stadium.
“It is the new Globe Theater, you know? I feel like that is where you see, you know, tribalism and the rivalry and all the things played out. And so one, I felt it was a unique opportunity to marry both in a city that I believe loves both.”
‘Eyes on me at all times’
Just as Shakespeare’s Othello is made an outsider by his skin color, so, too, is Imani in a world of white team owners. And while the Bard’s themes of love, jealousy and betrayal resonate across time, topical issues also inform the play.
Workplace sexism, for one. While there are women coaches today in men’s pro sports, including the NFL, they remain pretty rare.
McDill also notes the recent precipitous decline in employment among Black women nationally, who according to one recent study “bore the brunt of the economic slowdown.” (That Economic Policy Institute report attributed the job losses largely to “massive federal layoffs and buyouts” under the Trump administration, which disproportionately affected Black women with college degrees.)
And that’s to say nothing of how Black women with jobs are treated in the workplace.
“From the very beginning / I have never had any reasonable expectation of privacy,” says Imani Othello. “Never. / Everything I do is scrutinized. / If I want to enter a space, any space at all, / I have to be used to eyes on me at all times.”
“Othello’s not destroyed because of a lack of skill, right?” McDill said. “He’s destroyed because there are people plotting and planning his demise and planting seeds that ultimately lead to his downfall.”