Word: othellos
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...What is Othello about? Sexual jealousy, most people will say at once. True, but it is also a play about miscegenation, about reason and passion, about different personal approaches to good and evil, about inferiority and superiority complexes, about the interaction of two kinds of unusual egoist, and about many other things. There is a whole universe in this play...
...Othello is, perhaps, the greatest work in the world," wrote that famous man of letters Thomas Macaulay. And nothing, I think, has happened in the century since to alter his verdict. Giraldo Cinthio's story of the Moor of Venice, his ensign Iago and his wife Desdemona has, in fact, been the source of several superlatives: it gave us Rossini's Otello, his finest serious opera; it gave us the best of all Italian opera libretti (by Arrigo Boito), which, when set to music by Verdi, became the supreme Italian tragic opera of the Romantic century; and it gave...
...Festival Theatre's artistic director, John Houseman, served as the director of this production. Clearly understanding the special demands of the play, he has avoided all the major pitfalls and most of the minor ones. For the constructive plan of Othello, Shakespeare's most masterly, and most daring, occurs nowhere else in the playwright's works. Othello lacks the usual extraneous trappings and non-essentials. We do not have here scenes of tension or conflict alternating with scenes of "comic relief"; nor do we have any separate sub-plots. Everything is directly related to the main current of the drama...
...cultural reactions (including music and art), and later said, "I wouldn't have been able to learn my lines in this play unless every one of them meant something definite to me. . . .Nevertheless, I still consider myself a Shakespeare man" (a highly acclaimed Hamlet, he will be the Othello at next summer's American Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Connecticut). Mantan Moreland (Gogo), to get a laugh, pulled the Bert Lahr trick of quipping, "I speak my lines, but I don't know what I'm saying." But just as Lahr in private has clear ideas about the play's meaning...
...found itself unable to recover until the rival organization closed down in 1953 and turned its resources over to the HDC. Neil Smith, a former member of the Theater Group, became the president of the HDC, and gave the Club, which the previous year had produced only one play--Othello--a new vitality. In 1953-54 it produced four major shows, of which the biggest was T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral...