Word: othellos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1970
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Note- "All's Well That Ends Well" will play through September 6 in alternation with "Othello" and Shaw's "The Devil's Disciple," which will be reviewed in these pages. The drive to the picturesque grounds on the Housatonic River takes about two and a half hours via the Massachusetts Turnpike, Interstate 91, and the Connecticut Turnpike to Exit 31 (at the bottom of the exit ramp, turn left despite the sign). Performances tend to begin promptly at 2 and 8:30 in the air-conditioned Festival Theatre. There are free facilities for picknickers on the premises...
...actor after actor, the part of Othello proves more a trap than a triumph. Seemingly a model of uncomplicated clarity, the role is replete with opaque ambiguities and calcified misconceptions. Apart from strangling Desdemona and killing himself, Othello initiates less action than any other Shakespearean tragic hero. Indeed, he often seems like lago's stringed puppet. His credulity makes him appear less than normally intelligent, and the rapidity with which jealousy races through his veins suggests that he is as much passion's fool as passion's slave. At the end of Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear...
...American Shakespeare Festival production of Othello in Stratford, Conn., perpetuates a tradition in which the play and its hero shrink with each successive revival. Moses Gunn and his director Michael Kahn proceed along the familiar tack that Othello is good, loving, noble, trusting and innocent until jealousy and grief tear him asunder. Gunn conveys all of these qualities admirably. His stage presence is commanding and his line delivery persuasive, though it is somewhat mannered when he elongates single words for emphasis...
Special Vanity. The trouble lies in the fact that Gunn accepts Othello's image of himself. That image is one of soldierly simplicity and unflawed purity. On those terms, he is totally undone by lago's villainy. But in reality, he is chiefly undone by himself. A different sort of man would have been immune to lago's innuendos about Desdemona's sexual infidelity and the circumstantial evidence of the telltale handkerchief unwittingly supplied by lago's wife (Jan Miner). Othello succumbs to his panicky jealousy either because he is unsure of himself...
...Roberta Maxwell conjures up a prim housewife somewhat baffled by a hubby with a bad case of the sulks. Sne achieves an affecting poignance only in her deathbed speech. As for lago, he should be Lucifer's child trailing a brimstone stench of evil, but Lee Richardson makes Othello's ensign seem more like a nimble, two-faced schemer from the ranks of middle management. Wisely and rightly, racial overtones are muted in this production, for Shakespeare was symbolically concerned with the darkness in men's souls and not the blackness of their skins...