Coriolanus
1999-2000 Season
O, WORTHIEST RIVAL
Keith Hamilton Cobb returns to The Shakespeare Theatre
ROBERTO AGUIRRE-SACASA
"I sin in envying his nobility, And were I anything but what I am, I would wish me only he."
—Coriolanus on Tullus Aufidius, Coriolanus, Act 1
Keith Hamilton Cobb, returning to The Shakespeare Theatre after five years to play Coriolanus’s rival, the Volscian general Tullus Aufidius, tells the story of how he came to be an actor in a disarming manner, without pretension. "I was 18, writing a lot of esoteric, self-indulgent poetry," he begins. "I started studying Shakespeare from a literary point of view and was having a really tough time with it, wondering why exactly."
Two years later, while attending a Broadway performance of Othello with Christopher Plummer as Iago and James Earl Jones as the Moor, the young would-be poet came to a realization: "The reason Shakespeare wasn’t coming off the page when I read it was because you weren’t supposed to be reading it, you were supposed to be doing it," he explains. "So I decided acting was the direction I needed to go in." Cobb, who had stifled the imperative to act as a young boy, nurtured it at New York University, building skills he strengthened at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, where he understudied—of all things—the role of Aufidius. "By that point," Cobb says significantly, "My hair had begun to grow."
An interlude about Cobb’s hair: It is long. It is braided. It is, perhaps, the handsome actor’s most distinctive feature. And although Cobb says he might cut it for a role, he absolutely will not cut it for an audition. "It was very clear to me while I was kicking around New York looking for work that nobody was going to hire me to do August Wilson or Lorraine Hansberry because I had this hair," the actor says. "I really felt like my hair was a manifestation of who I was, and I felt if I was going to supplicate myself on the altar of the American theatre, I was at least going to do it as myself."
Like a master tactician, Cobb has parlayed his strengths—not just his hair, but his striking looks and imposing stage presence—into a successful acting career that began, truly, in regional theatres around the country, usually performing in the plays of Shakespeare. "That was where people were taking the chances in cross-racial casting," he explains. "When you get into the hugely mythic realm of Shakespeare, anybody can be pretty much anybody…as long as you’re talented." At The Shakespeare Theatre, for instance, during its 1993-94 season, Cobb appeared as Tybalt in director Barry Kyle’s Romeo and Juliet and Octavius Caesar in Joe Dowling’s Julius Caesar.
Cobb was eager to join a theatre’s resident acting company—any theatre, so long as he could hone his craft—but was unable to since, as the actor puts it, he doesn’t seem to "fit into any boxes." He looked for work elsewhere and found it, immediately after Romeo and Juliet, in New York, on the soap opera All My Children ("a sprawling morality play," Cobb calls it). "My hair had crossed the line from ethnic to exotic, and I now looked like a leading man, a sexual animal," Cobb says, and what was originally intended to be only a recurring role on a finite amount of episodes, the brooding Noah Keefer, instead proved so popular with television viewers that he remained on the drama in a leading role for two years.
Since leaving All My Children, Cobb has worked steadily in television; all the while, however, he has been itching for a chance to return to his passion, the theatre. "The Romeo years are now behind me. No one is going to hire me to do Romeo anymore and I never got to do it, so there is cause for lament," he only half-jokes. "The Lear years come later, but right now I’m in my warrior years, my Brutus years, my Cassius years, my Aufidius years."
"They’re good years," Cobb says. "And great roles. I’m totally jazzed."
9/19/2005
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