“Othello” contains some of Shakespeare's most compelling characters, but it comes with hefty baggage. For all the brilliance of the text, the subtext keeps striking a troubling chord that can make a theater troupe wary of tackling the piece.

“It's the greatest play of Shakespeare's we haven't done,” says Ian Gallanar, founding artistic director of the 14-year-old Chesapeake Shakespeare Company. “One reason is because you've got to wrestle with the race issues. There's a kind of racism in the ether of this play. You can't pretend it doesn't exist.”

Gallanar decided the time had come to do the wrestling. He's directing the company's first “Othello,” which opens Sept. 16.

The play's title character is an outsider in ethnicity and upbringing, a Moor, serving as general in the Venetian military. He secretly marries a white woman, Desdemona, whom, as he says, he loves “not wisely but too well.” Iago, a disgruntled lieutenant passed over for a promotion, plants doubts in Othello's mind about Desdemona's fidelity, doubts that eventually turn to fatal rage.

At a time of heightened racial tensions in Baltimore and much of the country, a production of “Othello” cannot help but take on added weight.

“Racial prejudice is very much in the forefront of what people are seeing today in the media, Facebook, everywhere,” says Gerrad Alex Taylor, one of the company's associate artistic directors. “At Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, we realize the city we're in, and we try to do work that speaks to our community. This play is a prime example of that.”

One way the company is doing that is by offering extra events.

There was a staged reading last week of Lolita Chakrabarti's play “Red Velvet.” It explores the life of African-American actor Ira Aldridge, who, in the 1820s, became the first black man to play Othello on a London stage.

Toni Morrison's “Desdemona,” which gives fresh voice to the heroine of “Othello” and other women from the play, will receive a staged reading during the Baltimore Book Festival later in the month.

And as a prelude to one of the performances of “Othello,” George Washington University professor and Shakespeare scholar Ayanna Thompson will give a talk titled “Renaissance, Race, and Othello Today: A Community Conversation.”

Such supplemental activities were not offered when Chesapeake Shakespeare tackled another of the Bard's most problematic plays for the first time in 2012 — “The Merchant of Venice,” a work layered with anti-Semitic sentiments.

“We tried to let that play stand on its own, and that didn't sit well with some of the audience,” says Lesley Malin, the company's managing director. Adds Gallanar: “They didn't know why we would do such a play. We realized we didn't give people an ample opportunity to talk about it. With ‘Othello,' certainly, attention must be paid, as the line goes, to the racial part of the play.”

Thompson, for one, will pay plenty of attention in her talk.

“I think ‘Othello' and ‘Merchant' are unique plays by Shakespeare in that they helped create certain narratives in race and religion we have inherited,” Thompson says. “The narrative structures were, in some part, established by the popularity of Shakespeare's plays in 19th-century America and the ways that ‘Merchant' and ‘Othello' traveled around the U.S. during slavery.”

Thompson finds a direct link between “Othello,” with its practice of white actors donning blackface to portray the title role, and black minstrel shows.

“It was very pleasurable for Elizabethan or Jacobean audiences to see someone playing a tragic black figure,” Thompson says. “But this was a play about performing blackness, not about a black man. It helped create minstrelsy, which was used very insidiously to mock black masculinity. Blackface didn't stop in the U.S. until the 1950s; in the U.K., not until the 1980s.”

When Aldridge, unable to get much work, left America for Europe and found success performing Shakespeare, he was an exception to the rule. His audiences, Thompson says, were startled by the effect of an actor of color playing Othello.

In the next century, an occasional exception could also be found, as in the case of Paul Robeson. But white actors continued to own the role of Othello for a long time. Recent decades have seen productions that turn the play upside down — a white Othello in an otherwise all-black cast, for example, or a black Othello paired with a black Iago.

That said, it's most common today to find black actors in the title role.

“Now, it's a play about a real black man, instead of someone playing one,” Thompson says. “There are some unexpected consequences of that.”

For one thing, not everyone has welcomed the change.

“I'm friends with black actors and, offstage, they are very frank discussing how they don't really like the play,” Thompson says, “or the way the play is usually [marketed] with ads showing Othello without a shirt. But in mixed company, the actors will say it's a fantastic play. It's hard to talk about it honestly.”

Ads for the Chesapeake Shakespeare production do not show a bare-chested Othello, but, rather, actor Jason B. McIntosh in very regal garb. And if McIntosh has any reservations about tackling the part, you'd never guess.

“I've never done Othello before, but you could say I've been preparing for it my entire acting life,” McIntosh says. “When you're a large black man and have classical training, this role is going to be on your bucket list. It's exhilarating and daunting. This is a mountain to climb. I have never worked hard at, or been prouder of, anything in my life.”

McIntosh, a professional, Washington-based actor who has appeared locally in recent Everyman Theatre productions (he's in the “Othello” cast courtesy of Actors' Equity Association), does not take the troubling aspects of the play lightly.

“Race is definitely a cog in the wheel of this show,” he says. “And I can see that, especially in this city, there would be much interest in this play now. Being called a Moor, which is how they refer to Othello, is equivalent to being called [the n-word]. It's not a term of endearment.”

But McIntosh finds much more in the work.

“For me, race is secondary in the play, an annoyance, always static in the background,” he says. “If you play up the race too much, you lose the focus. It's also about jealousy, pettiness and a person's inability to see past their own faults.”

For McIntosh, the meat of the matter is the doomed love in “Othello.”

“Everyone knows how it's going to end,” the actor says. “The trick is trying to convince an audience that maybe, just this time, Othello won't kill Desdemona. Othello is very awkward. It's his first time in love, so he's not equipped to handle it. I don't think he ever thought he'd fall in love. Women baffle him. He has no clue, as is the case with most men.”

For all of the misfortune in the play, there are lighter moments as well.

“There's a very funny scene like the kind you could see in any 1950s TV show,” says Washington-based Diane Curley, who plays Desdemona, “with Othello coming home and barraging his wife with questions.”

Even uber-villain Iago, portrayed by Chesapeake Shakespeare resident company member Jose Guzman, has his sunny side.

“We've been working on finding those moments where we can bring out the humor that Shakespeare gave us,” Guzman says. “Iago adds a lot of levity, which is part of his twisted nature.”

The rest of that nature, of course, propels the play to its horrible end.

“Iago engages in rigorous psychological warfare,” Guzman says. “One of the worst things you can do is manipulate your fellow man into believing something that isn't true.”

The whirl of conflicting forces and motives in “Othello” remains all too familiar four centuries after the play's premiere.

“The question of who do we trust and why is so relatable today,” Curley says.

Adds Guzman: “There is a hatred of the foreigner, especially the dark-skinned foreigner, in the play. There's also the frailty of the mind, the ego. The reason I love this play so much is it is a true cautionary tale. We have many toxic people in our lives. They may seem very friendly, almost mesmerize you. But you have to wonder: ‘Do I have an Iago in my life?' ”

Gallanar sees “Othello” as a journey “to some of the darkest parts of what it is to be a human being. Shakespeare cuts to the stuff we don't like to celebrate,” he says. “There's some scary [expletive] there. But it's not a hopeless piece of art, either. There is hope for something better.”

tim.smith@baltsun.com