Word: desdemonas
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...Shakespeare's contemporaries. The audience was thus given a chance to hear them as they might have been originally performed--something rarely done in staging of the plays themselves. Marianne Staniunas '00, Kirk G. Hanson '99 and director Wood (in various combinations) gave skillful performances of the three selections: Desdemona's "Willow Song" from Othello, Feste's "O Mistress Mine" from Twelfth Night ("Youth's a stuff will not endure") and "It Was A Lover And His Lass" (a.k.a. the "hey-nonny-no" song) from As You Like It. Although the visual impact of the singers--who stood in simple...
...more standard of the two, a solid reading that pulls out the stops on an easily played organ. This is, after all, a soap opera of the had-I-but-known variety. All the Moor has to do is ask his wife's servant, "Pray, did thee swipe fair Desdemona's hankie?" and the misunderstanding is resolved as smoothly as any episode of Home Improvement. But then there would be little allurement in the role for some of this century's most dominant actors...
...both donned blackface in famous film versions doesn't mean no one else should try. Parker had the radical idea to cast a black man as Othello, and Laurence Fishburne brings an outsider's dignity to the role of Shakespeare's noblest chump. Irene Jacob is a lovely, sallow Desdemona, and Kenneth Branagh--looking bloated and rheumy, slithering snakelike on rooftops, whispering his venomous gossip as if it's his last confession--makes a fine Iago, a demi-devil working his cool wit to destroy those he might have loved...
...Bashir Salahuddin) enters wearing a T-shirt, things only get a little better. Salahuddin plays the Moor consistently as a casual, soft-spoken general, but his voice is often too soft and always unemotional. As he presents his case before the Duke, Othello explains a little too calmly why Desdemona loves him. Later, when he loses his temper with the drunken Cassio (Jed Silverstein), Salahuddin gets angry too quickly and for too short a time...
...play drags toward its conclusion, Othello, deceived by lago into thinking his wife has been unfaithful, kills both Desdemona and himself in an act of unconvincing rage. Although Jed Silverstein and Alexandra Marolachakis give good performances as the foolish but passionate Cassio and the submissive Emilia, this play has few redemptive qualities...