Patrick Stewart's 1997 "Othello"

Ron Canada as Iago and Patrick Stewart as Othello in 1997. (Carol Rosegg/AP)

Here’re a few things I couldn’t squeeze into my City Cast DC piece about Patrick Stewart’s controversial choice to play the title role in a racially “photonegative” Othello at the Shakespeare Theatre Company here in DC — and nowhere else — back in 1997, which was intended as an appreciation of the depth and variety of the dear, departed actor’s career.

When I was working for Smithsonian / Air & Space magazine a decade ago, and preparing an issue celebrating the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, I read XXX and XXX’s excellent (and massive, and now out-of-date, given all the new Trek that has sprung up in the past 10 years) Star Trek oral history The Fifty-Year Mission. Lots of what I learned about creator Gene Roddenberry, was less then favorable, and one of the least embarrassing of those unfavorable disclosures was that he insisted Stewart perform his final audition for the role that made him immortal — Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the sequel series Star Trek: The Next Generation — in a wig. (“As I reconciled myself to my fate — or is it pate? — I realized that I had been given a strategic advantage,” the actor wrote of his baldness in his 2023 memoir Making It So, which does not discuss his 1997 Othello at all Puzzling!) Roddenberry hadn’t been sold on Stewart in the first place — producer Robert Justman gets credit for suggesting the bald Englishman for the role — but Paramount Television execs were won over. Wisely, they decreed that Stewart’s natural pate was more than sufficiently becoming a 24th-century Starfleet captain.

I was not yet a regular theater-goer in the summer of 2000, but I was a Star Trek fan, and that — plus a lucky score at the half-price ticket booth — was how I happened to catch Stewart in The Ride Down Mount Morgan during a visit to New York. The play is a relatively obscure Arthur Miller comedy. Stewart played a secret bigamist who is hospitalized after a car crash, only to have both his wives, who had been unaware of one another, show up to visit him. 

I have only a vague recollection of that evening 26-and-a-half years later, but I know I remember being was delighted by how funny this all-business starship captain could be. This wasn’t a revelation; I’d seen the 1994 Saturday Night Live he’d hosted. I recalled the monologue wherein he’d intentionally gotten most basic facts about the fictional history of Star Trek hilariously wrong almost as fondly as I recalled the stentorian line-reading he’d given to introduce the episode’s musical guest: “Ladies and gentlemen, SALT! AND! PEPA!!” 

Looking up Bruce Weber’s New York Times review of The Ride Down Mount Morgan brought back another detail I now can’t believe I forgot: In the role of swaggering bigamist, Lyman Felt, Stewart wore a hairpiece. 

Again, my City Cast DC piece about how that 1997 Othello fits into Stewart’s large and varied body of work is here. Another thing I’d forgotten, if indeed I ever knew it: The guy who most recently played Othello at STC before Stewart, Avery Brooks, who played the Moor of Venice circa 1990-1, also went on to do seven seasons of Star Trek. Brooks played Commander Benjamin Sisko for seven seasons of Deep Space Nine, 1993-1999. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single, full episode of that particular Trek product, but its reputation is good.