Word: othellos
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...brand of entertainment which--as the show gradually reveals--was virtually extinct by the time of Appomattox. In his heyday--set forth in the show's early vignettes--Rice would cavort while telling his audiences morality stories (each with a twist), browbeat them with "verbatim" scenes from Hamlet and Othello and frequently harangue them about politics. With a freewheeling didacticism few audiences today would gravitate to for entertainment, he lengthily described the benefits he had gained in youth by regularly "fertilizing" himself in a barrel of horse manure, and he generously passed on his father's Irish fables...
...Christmas bounty. Don't forget Barney Frank, whatever his district, Hit-man Hearns, Sugar Ray and "freeze-framer" Petric, John Kenneth Galbraith, George Will and John Paul Two, Carl Yasztremski, Mark Ptashne and good Brother Blue, Fritz Mondale, Bobby Brustein, Elvis Costello, (the second will direct, the third play Othello), Michael Manley, Jodie Foster and creative Janet Cooke-- Those names will fill up our big Christmas book. To them (thanks to PATCO) we wish a holiday bright, And to them and to you and to all, a good night...
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...
...opening-night audience enjoyed the show, and why not? Plummer was dynamite, and there was lkots of sex and violence. But what of Othello? What of the raw titan who embraces ciovilization and true love only to re-discover the chaos, the jungle beneath, the pity and sadnss of human inconstancy,of vows broken because they never existed, of grief as boundless as the universe? Well.... there's enough of that in real life...