Word: othellos
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...wonderfully funny scene in itself, but it is also necessary to the form and the full meaning of the play. Furthermore, it is needed to build up in the minds of the audience a picture of Caesar and his legions as nothing better than the awful Anthropophagi that Othello mentions. Otherwise the ironic effect of Caesar's first entrance is nullified; and the audience, let in on a secret, cannot properly appreciate Cleopatra's experience of going through a similar anxiety and discovery in the ensuing scenes...
...doing, admittedly, he seems to have been unusually careless about small matters. There are more loose ends and unanswered questions in Lear than in Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth combined. But, except for the unsatisfying sudden disappearance of the Fool in the middle of Act III, these don't really seem to matter, so terrible and consuming is the sweep of passions that constitutes the main artery of the work...
...They did Othello together with Negro Actor Paul Robeson. Traveling from city to city, the Ferrers decided to stay in no hotel that would refuse Robeson. They were all quite close. And as Robeson veered more and more loudly to the left and Moscow, this closeness got the Ferrers into trouble. In due course they were called to Washington to explain their political beliefs. Ferrer, who had just won an Oscar for Cyrano, denied any leftist leanings and was not blacklisted. Uta was dismissed without being heard at all. She ended up on TV and Hollywood blacklists nonetheless...
...years at Baylor University. Drama Professor Paul Baker turned the Texas Baptist school into a renowned center of experimental theater. The Waco wizard's 1953 Othello split the tortured Moor into three separate characters; later he got Actor Burgess Meredith to be anchor prince in a three-faceted Hamlet. To train graduate students, in 1959 he opened a stunning repertory theater in Dallas, the only theater designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. In baffled admiration, the late Charles Laughton once called Baker "crude, irritating, arrogant, nuts and a genius...
...Charles produces mostly twentieth century works by authors such as Brecht, Shaw, and O'Neill. A production of Othello is planned for this spring...