Thomas Caron has performed as Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, but Othello, the fourth of Shakespeare’s great tragic heroes, was out of reach for the American actor without resorting to blackface — until he got to China.

“There was no way I was ever going to play Othello in the United States,” said Mr. Caron, 74. The actor is white and was unlikely, because of racial sensitivities, to play a character Shakespeare described as a “Moor,” early 17th-century English parlance for a dark-skinned foreigner.

The bilingual version of the play in which Mr. Caron recently performed in Shanghai reimagines the story’s racial dynamics: Othello, played by Mr. Caron in English, is a clueless American mercenary despised and ruined by a Chinese Iago, a Machiavellian villain consumed by jealousy and a hatred of foreigners.

Instead of Venice and Cyprus, Shakespeare’s setting for “Othello,” the Shanghai version takes place on an island at the mouth of the Yangtze River, where an American has been hired to help fight the Taiping rebellion, a bloody revolt in the 19th century. Iago curses Othello not as a Moor but a “laowai,” a mildly pejorative but widely used Chinese term for Westerners.

“I retell you again and again, I hate that laowai,” Iago says in Chinese.