Wendell Pierce can recall the exact evening — the exact moment, in fact — that he unlocked William Shakespeare’s lyrical language.
It was September 1981, and the New Orleans native was a first-year Juilliard student who didn’t exactly see eye to eye with the Bard. “I felt verse was so restrictive,” he says on a late-April morning at a Southeast Washington rehearsal studio, ahead of his starring turn in “Othello” at Shakespeare Theatre Company. “I just wanted to say goodbye.”
