Word: othello
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ANYONE CLAMORING for more "traditional Shakespeare after all the radical artsy-fartsiness in these part should zip over to the American Shakespeare Theatre's touring Othello--and be damned. For this glum and unimaginatively "straight" production, with the aid of a flamboyant English directorial hand, skews and disfigures the original play far more effectively than the most startling new metaphor or outrageous directorial noodling. Tom Stoppard could not have done it better...
Plummer could overpower a strong Moor, but James Earl Jones is the most oddly recessive Othello imaginable, laurence Olivier once complained while rehearsing his own exhasting Othello that the part was all climaxes. Jones sadly pretends they don't exist, as if rising to one would obligate him to go for them all. He enters with great dignity, immense and unthreatening grandfatherly, a solemn Buddha. His words seem to wigh as much as he does--they come out undifferentiated, as if he'd learned them phonetically (tough this is preferable to his occasional bursts of temper, when he speaks swiftly...
...knife between his ribs (Plummer is a murderouly bisexual monster). Then there are images worthy of Halloween: Desdomona, tiny and exposed before her night table, singing a bed-time song, with Amelia's sudden entrances from the shadows creating delightful frissons; Desdemona draped horizontally across the bed as Othello enters to kill her, her long blonde hair hanging over one side, a delicate, bare leg over the other (Do all young wives sleep like that?); and, predictably, a subsequent stabbing and strangling both horrifying and erotic...
...that is so, then gossip (whatever its individual destructiveness, which can be awesome-ask Othello) also serves as a profound daily act of community. In her novel Happy All the Time, Laurie Colwin has a character who prefers to call gossip "emotional speculation." Right. Through the great daily bazaar of bitchiness (men can be just as bitchy as women) passes a dense and bewildering parade of follies. They involve sex and money and alcohol and children and jobs and cruelty and treachery...
...Tommy (Robert Duvall), who shouts, cusses, paces, insults waiters, kicks file cabinets, and prowls around the underside of DeNiro's archdiocese like a rhino. While his brother butts heads and creates scenes DeNiro is the man of greatness who always remains smooth, suave, and political. They are Iago and Othello, in a way. And, of course, DeNiro falls, but he falls with style. He never twists or shouts or disclaims. He won't flinch. DeNiro is a hero for a time that suffers from loss of nerve...