Word: othellos
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...actor after actor, the part of Othello proves more a trap than a triumph. Seemingly a model of uncomplicated clarity, the role is replete with opaque ambiguities and calcified misconceptions. Apart from strangling Desdemona and killing himself, Othello initiates less action than any other Shakespearean tragic hero. Indeed, he often seems like lago's stringed puppet. His credulity makes him appear less than normally intelligent, and the rapidity with which jealousy races through his veins suggests that he is as much passion's fool as passion's slave. At the end of Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear...
...American Shakespeare Festival production of Othello in Stratford, Conn., perpetuates a tradition in which the play and its hero shrink with each successive revival. Moses Gunn and his director Michael Kahn proceed along the familiar tack that Othello is good, loving, noble, trusting and innocent until jealousy and grief tear him asunder. Gunn conveys all of these qualities admirably. His stage presence is commanding and his line delivery persuasive, though it is somewhat mannered when he elongates single words for emphasis...
Special Vanity. The trouble lies in the fact that Gunn accepts Othello's image of himself. That image is one of soldierly simplicity and unflawed purity. On those terms, he is totally undone by lago's villainy. But in reality, he is chiefly undone by himself. A different sort of man would have been immune to lago's innuendos about Desdemona's sexual infidelity and the circumstantial evidence of the telltale handkerchief unwittingly supplied by lago's wife (Jan Miner). Othello succumbs to his panicky jealousy either because he is unsure of himself...
...Mary, Mary in 1963 sparked a small but satisfying movement in London to change the title to Maggie, Maggie. Then she moved over to the National (where her husband, Robert Stephens, is now the associate director) and stunned the highbrows playing Desdemona to Laurence Olivier's Othello. "Every time, I was greeted as if I'd never been on a stage before," Maggie says, "and always I was Cinderella when the clock struck 12 and the critics went...
...Park. Rarely, if ever, during that time has he received less than glowing notices in plays ranging from Genet's The Blacks to the gore-glutted Titus Andronicus in which Gunn played what he calls "the black Iago," Aaron the Moor. He will play the classic Moor, Othello, this summer at Stratford, Conn...