Ted Lange, top center, in a ‘Love Boat’ cast photo. Lange has written a play for off-Broadway, a Civil War drama titled ‘Lady Patriot,’ with an ensemble featuring his former series co-stars Fred Grandy and Jill Whelen.
Courtesy photo
By Bill Vaughan
Entertainment Writer
TED LANGE is instantly recognizable from his beloved TV roles on “That’s My Mama” and as bartender Isaac on “The Love Boat.”
He is also an accomplished writer and director of theater whose latest off-Broadway production, a Civil War drama titled “Lady Patriot,” with an ensemble featuring his former series co-stars Fred Grandy and Jill Whelen along with Chrystee Pharris and Count Stovall, has earned raves.
When we last spoke in 2016, he was mounting “The Cause, My Soul,” a prequel to “Othello” at the Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles. The play placed the passionate Shakespearean scholar in familiar territory in time for the 400-year anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth and his death on April 23, 1616.
Lange was introduced to the bard’s work in Oakland as a ninth grader.
“There were three witches, and I got to be Macbeth! If you can imagine being 14 and told it’s OK to have a swordfight, that was the first hook right then,” he reminisced. Iconic roles as Romeo and in “King Lear” followed through his maturity.
While attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, “Othello” was dissipated.
“They told me all of the things that happen before the play starts. Othello was a Muslim. Desdemona is being wooed by Roderigo. Iago wants to be a lieutenant and he’s getting passed over. In the 90s I lectured to students about this. My play ends exactly where “Othello” begins. Go to my show and you got the backstory already.”
He believes Othello was not a fool, but trusted Iago.
“You could look at Donald Trump,” Lange explained then. “I’ll tell you right now, Jeb Bush finds him one of the greatest villains because Bush walked in like I’m going to get this and Trump said, ‘Buddy, You’re out of here.’ Is Jeb Bush a fool? I don’t think so, but he was dealing with something he’d never seen before. So you take Othello, who is a foreigner. This is not his culture, so the deviousness of a white mind is something that he’s not aware of.”
“They often say Desdemona is a weak person also because she gets manipulated,” continued Lange, “but she’s actually a very strong woman. You have to consider this play takes place in 1571. For a white girl to marry a Black man in an Italian society, the girl’s got to be a strong because she knows what she’s up against.”
The self-titled “footnote historian” has a trilogy completed including the “The Journals of Osborne P. Anderson,” about the Black men who fought in abolitionist John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859; and “George Washington’s Boy, focusing on the first president’s favorite slave and confidant William Lee.
“I want to bring to light those guys,” Lange said. “I found out that George Washington had a Black son from a slave that his brother owned named Venus. Now white historians will tell you it is not true because they don’t want to believe that George Washington would screw a Black slave girl, but he did. He made a thing in his will so that when the slave child, a son named West Ford, reached 21 he was given 61 acres at Mount Vernon and his freedom. That story needs to be told.”
As for why “The Love Boat,” is one of the few hits of that era to not get rebooted, Lange offers this explanation: “It was very unique for the late 70s/early 80s. AIDS wasn’t around then. You had STDs but people were fairly conscious. Right now, there are so many things that can happen. You can’t be jumping in and out of bed even on a cruise ship. You have to figure out a way to bring the reality of today with romance of yesterday.”
For more than 11 years, Bill Vaughan has kept Wave readers up to date with the latest news in entertainment. Now, we are collecting some of those past columns into what we call the Best of Tasty Clips. To contact Vaughan, visit his social media pages on Facebook and Instagram or @tasty_clips, on X @tastyclips, and on LinkedIn to William Vaughan.
