Word: othellos
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Audiences at the Loeb Experimental Theater generally go in with patience, expecting something experimental. However, the capricious strangeness which looms over David Levine's production of "Othello" strikes a sour note, especially because mediocre acting fails to salvage the play...
...downhill from there. When the lights come back on, lago (Erik Amblad) talks to Roderigo (Paul Siemens) over a game of chess. lago, Shakespeare's lines reveal, is angry with Othello for having denied him a promotion. Unfortunately, Amblad does not seem angry at all as he wields one or two inexpressive arm gestures again and again. The stage that seemed to have so much potential becomes a nuisance when actors turn around and throw unprojected, inaudible lines to about a third of the audience at a time. Every lighting change is accompanied by a melodramatic clang, and the actors...
...When Othello (Bashir Salahuddin) enters wearing a T-shirt, things only get a little better. Salahuddin plays the Moor consistently as a casual, soft-spoken general, but his voice is often too soft and always unemotional. As he presents his case before the Duke, Othello explains a little too calmly why Desdemona loves him. Later, when he loses his temper with the drunken Cassio (Jed Silverstein), Salahuddin gets angry too quickly and for too short a time...
...novelist Lawrence Durrell put it, was once home to "five races, five languages, a dozen creeds." Now it is a dull port of Arabic-speaking Arabs bound by one creed, Islam. Theroux finds the same dreary uniformity in other cities: "It was hard to imagine a black general named Othello living in Venice now," despite all the Senegalese selling trinkets near the Grand Canal...
...EASIEST MEANING OF THE TRIAL IS THAT WE LIVE IN A GOLDEN age of high trash, an Elizabethan epoch of lowest-common-denominator, everything-is-entertainment daytime drama that in Judge Ito's courtroom composed, day by day, its masterpiece--its soap, Santa Monica Othello...