Throughout the play, the main prop the Actor interacts with is his copy of Othello. The book symbolizes the Actor’s relationship to the play and its title character. The stage directions call for “a worn paperback” copy (5), showing just how often the Actor has revisited the text in his studies. The direction continues: “Most often throughout the play he will treat it with reverence” (5). At his current age, the Actor respects and understands the character of Othello, informed by his experience as a Black man in America. He parallels himself with Othello and thinks of him as a “brother.”

When the Actor grows frustrated with how the Director is treating him, his treatment of the book changes. After the Director tells him to play Othello’s speech with higher emotionality, the Actor “tosses the book to the floor” (20). In an aside to the audience, the Actor discusses his interpretation of Othello’s lines, “little shall I grace my cause in speaking for myself” (21), glossing it in his own phrasing: “If I tell you mugs what’s really on my mind—sans the soft phrase of peace—y’all are gonna get your noses all outta joint and say, ‘Oh oh! This n*****’s gettin’ all obstreperous n’ shit’” (21). The Actor puts aside the text and also “puts aside” the text’s phrasing to speak as Othello in his own voice, effectively engaging the theme of Interpreting Classical Literature in the Modern World.

Later, when the Actor is contemplating Othello’s lines, “begrimed and black / As mine own face” (28), the Actor “hurls” the book to the floor. He exclaims, “No! No, Gotdammit, no! What brand of credulous, self-loathing baboon, I thought, must such a man be?” (28). Though the character of Othello was created by a white man in the 16th century, the Actor is nevertheless “ashamed” that people think he and Othello—who talks about his Blackness in degrading terms—are similar. The way he hurls the book to the floor reveals this estrangement. When he retrieves the book, he “smooths the pages, examining the damage he’s done to it” and “holds it with reverence again” (29). Despite the Actor’s frustrations with the character of Othello, he is always “gonna defend and protect this much maligned, misunderstood, mighty character” (30), and go back to the text again, for both Othello’s sake and his own.