Word: othello
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...within a play Constance Ledbelly (Lindsey Richardson), a frumpish assistant professor from Queens, is struggling with the slings and arrows of outrageous academia. She endures an arrogant and exploitative senior professor, his disdainful girlfriend, and the ridicule of her peers, who dismiss her theory that Romeo and Juliet and Othello were adapted by Shakespeare from lost originals in which they were comedies...
Soon enough, through some incoherent bit of comic book magic, Constance is sucked through her trashcan into the world of Othello, just as Iago is about to play his fatal trick and convince the Moor to murder his wife, Desdemona. Constance exposes the deception and goes on to become Othello's favorite and Desdemona's best friend. She learns, as she had long suspected, that the "real" Desdemona is no fainting flower; rather, she yearns for a life of combat, such as she assumes Constance must enjoy in the Kingdom of Academe...
...soon Iago is up to his old tricks, and, in a clever scene, turns Desdemona against Constance with the same words that had convinced Othello in the opening scene. Constance's only escape is another sudden jump, this time into Romeo and Juliet, where the abundant joys of sexual innuendo are added to those of Elizabethan paraphrase...
...Juliet, Nora Dickey is winningly zany, jumping for any chance at a tragic suicide, and she relishes her lascivious double-entendres so much that we can't help but join in. Erik Amblad is surprisingly good in his brief serious scene from Othello, and plays both Tybalt and Constance's boss with doltish pride tempered by the right hint of self-mockery; his turn in drag, as Juliet's Nurse is low comedy but well done...
Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier have done it, but no black man has ever acted Othello in a major movie. Now LAURENCE FISHBURNE is close to signing on to play Shakespeare's Moor in a version directed by Kenneth Branagh. Some actors, given current sensitivities, might balk at playing theater's most famous wife killer, especially if they had won renown as bad husband Ike Turner in What's Love Got to Do with It? But at least this time Fishburne won't have to wear mean purple bell-bottoms...