Word: othellos
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Williams: They approved our idea for the three shows: Lend Me a Tenor, Othello and Slavs...
...angry, hectored basketballer assaults his coach, and within days Johnnie Cochran turns up at the player's side and the airwaves are filled with agonized exegeses of the black player-white coach issue. Why, the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington is playing Othello in reverse colors: a white man (Patrick Stewart) is Othello; Iago, Desdemona and everyone else is black. Not enough conversation...
...They look for signs of hope. In an issue last year of Lingua Franca, Duke professor Frank Lentricchia, a major figure in the politicization of literary studies, poured out his misgivings about "the pounding chatter about sexism and so on." Even if the profession succumbs for good and Othello is taught forever as just one more wrongful instance of white male shenanigans, Alter and his friends will still have the last consolation of literary critics. In a lot of wars, the best writing comes from the losing side...
...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 black dress before upright microphones...
...people are exposed to his writings in high school, and so a larger number of people read his works. But Shakespeare has also leaped across the divide of "high culture" to popular culture. Kenneth Branagh recently had a hand in making Shakespeare a common Hollywood name with Henry V, Othello, Much Ado About Nothing and now Hamlet...