Tag Archives: drama

February 12, 2021 · 7:00 am

Mr. Bean Does Shakespeare

In this sketch, comedian Rowan Atkinson (better known as Mr. Bean or the voice of Zazu, the majordomo bird in The Lion King) explains Elizabethan theater, including the roles of king and messenger and the importance of having a poison checker. Enjoy!

Comments Off on Mr. Bean Does Shakespeare

Filed under AP Literature, Honors IV

Tagged as , , ,

February 11, 2021 · 7:01 am

Elizabethan Theater

globeFWDuring the Elizabethan period of English history, theaters gained prominence and a greater role within the culture. Before this time, traveling actors were considered little better than thieves and vagrants. In 1572, acting was recognized as a lawful profession. Theater companies were required to be licensed. By 1574, theaters and companies were brought under the purview of the Master of Revels, who also had to approve all plays for performance.

In order to receive a license, theater companies had to have the patronage of a nobleman. The troupe then took the name of its patron. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company associated with Shakespeare, changed its name to The King’s Men after its patron, James VI of Scotland, succeeded Elizabeth to the English throne in 1603.

Acting troupes contained between ten and twenty members, divided between shareholding main members who were paid wages and divided some profits and contracted workers who could serve as extras onstage or as skilled workmen backstage. Apprentices to the companies were boys aged 14 and older. These apprentices received training in theater craft and played the parts of children and women. Once they completed their training, they could hire on with a troupe permanently or seek other employment. The playwright, a key and usually shareholding member of a troupe, would craft parts based on the strengths and capabilities of the men in the troupe.

Playwrights were expected to produce several works during a season. They assisted during rehearsals of their plays, making them directors of a sort. Troupes had to receive permission from the Master of Revels before a play could be offered in performance. Actors received copies of their lines with cues supplied. A summary of entrances, exits, and a general plot were posted backstage for reference during the performance, while a master kept a copy of the entire play, with additional notations about props, scene changes, and cues for musicians and stagehands.

Two types of playhouses existed during the Elizabethan era. Some were small, interior stages, usually in private buildings, which could be lit by candles for evening performances. Although anyone potentially could buy a ticket to a play at one of these theaters, only privileged groups usually did, leading these theaters to be labeled “private.” The more popular and well-known theaters were the large public theaters built on the outskirts of London (and therefore not subject to the city’s stringent laws). At least nine of these playhouses were active during the Elizabethan era, including The Theater, The Curtain, Newington Butts, The Rose (made famous by the film Shakespeare in Love), The Swan, The Fortune, The Red Bull, The Hope, and of course, The Globe, the playhouse most closely associated with Shakespeare. These theaters presented a series of plays in repertory during a season, with less-popular plays being canceled and newer ones being commissioned to take their places. Performances were held often, the exceptions being special holidays, certain days within the church calendar, and at times of plague or widespread sickness. Theaters indicated a performance was being held that day by flying a flag from the roof.

Public playhouses came in varying shapes (round, oval, octagonal, square), and all were open-air, necessitating afternoon performances.  The central space, called the pit or yard, was used for general admission. Playgoers could usually get in for a penny to stand on the ground; these “groundlings” were largely uneducated, so playwrights would tailor portions of the play–usually bawdy jokes and physical slapstick–to suit them. Patrons could pay additional money to be seated in one of the galleries within the walls of the theater. Noble patrons were often granted seats in private boxes, some overlooking the stage itself. Playwrights catered to these patrons as well by inserting songs, poetry, and political and noble intrigue within the plot.

205px-The_Swan_croppedThe stage itself was a raised platform four to six feet above ground level, extending into the pit area. To its rear was a multilevel facade with doors that served for entrances and exits with a balcony above. The balcony space could be used to represent a balcony (Romeo and Juliet), castle battlements (Macbeth), or other high places. To the rear was the discovery space, also called the “inner below” for what scholars assume was its location (under the balcony). This space was used to reveal or conceal objects and characters, like Polonius hiding behind the arras in Hamlet or Puck spying on the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Because the stage lacked curtains, action was very nearly continuous. Scene and act breaks became more formalized in later years as theater spaces changed.

Shakespeare’s Globe was first built in 1599, with a reconstruction in 1614 after a fire set during a performance burned the original playhouse to the ground in a matter of hours. The rebuilt theater was closed, as all of the theaters were, by Oliver Cromwell during the English Protectorate (Puritan rule) in 1642 and torn down to accommodate more housing in 1644. In the 1980s, American actor Sam Wanamaker led an international effort to reconstruct The Globe Theatre near its original site in London, and the fully-operational theater reopened for performances in 1997, more than 350 years after the original theater was torn down. Click here for more information on the new Globe, which is pictured above. For a virtual tour of the theater space, click here.

Comments Off on Elizabethan Theater

Filed under AP Literature

Tagged as ,

December 1, 2020 · 7:00 am

The Pittsburgh Cycle

The Pittsburgh Cycle, also known as the American Century Cycle, is August Wilson’s magnum opus, a series of ten plays that charts the African American experience throughout the twentieth century. “Put them all together,” Wilson once said, “and you have a history.” All of the plays are set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District except for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which is set in Chicago. 

Wilson didn’t actually plan to write a 10-play cycle. “I didn’t start out with a grand idea. I wrote a play called Jitney set in ’77 and a[n unpublished and unperformed] play called Fullerton Street that I set in ’41,” he told author and teacher Sandra Shannon. “Then I wrote Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which I set in ’27, and it was after I did that I said, ‘I’ve written three plays in three different decades, so why don’t I just continue doing that?’”  (Fassler)

Characters in the plays often appear at different stages of their lives, with the offspring of previous characters cropping up in later plays. The figure of Aunt Ester features most often in the cycle. Other recurring elements include the use of music and the presence of an apparently mentally-impaired character; examples include Gabriel in Fences and Hedley in Seven Guitars.

Gem of the Ocean
Nominee, Tony Award, 2005

Gem of the Ocean is set in 1904 in the Pittsburgh home of Aunt Ester, a 285-year-old former slave and renowned cleanser of souls. A young man from Alabama visits her for help in absolving the guilt and shame he carries from a crime he’s committed, and she takes him on a journey of self-discovery to the City of Bones.

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
Best Play, New York Drama Critics Circle
Nominee, Tony Award, 1988

Set in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone tells the story of owners Seth and Bertha Holly and the makeshift family of migrants who pass through during the Great Migration of the 1910s.

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at Yale Repertory Theatre. William B. Carter, 1986. Courtesy of Yale Repertory Theatre.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Best Play, New York Drama Critics Circle
Nominee, Tony Award, 1985

Set in 1927. Legendary blues singer Ma Rainey and her band players convene in a Chicago studio to record a new album. As their conversation unfolds, their bantering, storytelling and arguing raise questions of race, art and the historic exploitation of black recording artists by white producers. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is being released by Netflix in December, starring Viola Davis as Ma Rainey and Chadwick Boseman, in his last performance, as the young jazz musician Levee.

The Piano Lesson
Best Play, New York Drama Critics Circle
Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 1990
Nominee, Tony Award, 1990

The Piano Lesson is set in 1936 Pittsburgh during the aftermath of the Great Depression. The play deals with themes of family legacy. Brother and sister Boy Willie and Berniece Charles clash over whether or not they should sell an ancient piano that was exchanged for their great-grandfather’s wife and son in the days of slavery. The Piano Lesson was made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie in 1995, the first of Wilson’s plays to be filmed for a large audience.

Seven Guitars
Best Play, New York Drama Critics Circle
Nominee, Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 1995
Nominee, Tony Award, 1996

A blues singer just released from prison is asked to sign a record deal after a song he recorded months before becomes an unexpected hit in 1948. He is ready to right the past year’s wrongs and return to Chicago with a new understanding of what’s important in his life. Unfortunately his means of righting wrongs are inherently flawed.

Jean Hyppolite as Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton is confronted by Stephon Duncan’s Louise in M Ensemble’s “Seven Guitars.”
A 2018 production of Seven Guitars by Miami’s M Ensemble Theatre

Fences
Best Play, New York Drama Critics Circle
Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 1987
Winner, Tony Award, 1987

Set in 1950s Pittsburgh, Fences tells the story of Troy Maxson, a restless trash-collector and former baseball athlete. Troy has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s, a spirit that is changing the world Troy has learned to deal with the only way he can, a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less.

Mary Alice, James Earl Jones and Courtney Vance in Fences at Yale Repertory Theatre. William B. Carter, 1985. Courtesy of Yale Repertory Theatre

Two Trains Running
Best Play, New York Drama Critics Circle
Nominee, Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 1992
Nominee, Tony Award, 1992

Two Trains Running is set in 1969. It tells the story of a local diner owner who fights to stay open as a municipal project encroaches on his establishment. His regulars must deal with racial inequality and the turbulent, changing times of the Civil Rights movement.

Production of Two Trains Running at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago.

Jitney
Best Play, New York Drama Critics Circle

Set in 1977 in a worn-down gypsy cab station, Jitney tells the story of men hustling to make a living driving jitneys — unofficial and unlicensed taxi cabs — because official cabs will not accept jobs in the Hill District, and what the company and its drivers must consider when the building housing the station is slated for destruction. Jitney is the only one of Wilson’s plays not to have been produced on Broadway during Wilson’s life, although it had been performed off-Broadway and overseas. It finally made its Broadway debut in 2017.


Jitney at True Colors Theatre, Atlanta 2010

King Hedley II
Nominee, Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 2000
Nominee, Tony Award, 2001

One of Wilson’s darkest plays, King Hedley II tells the story of an ex-convict trying to rebuild his life by selling stolen refrigerators so that he can save enough money to buy a video store during the trickle-down economic era of the 1980s and a decaying Hill District. Many of the characters have connections to the characters in Wilson’s 1940s-era play Seven Guitars, showing “how the shadows of the past can reach into the present.” (Samuel French playscript Overview)

Radio Golf
Best Play, New York Drama Critics Circle

Radio Golf is set in 1997 in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Aunt Ester returns in this story of a charming, powerful African-American politician who is running for the highest office of his career with the support of his savvy wife. As he steps into political prominence, his plans to redevelop the Hill District collide with his past.

Sources
https://augustwilsonblog.wordpress.com/tag/the-greene-space
http://www.august-wilson-theatre.com/plays.php
https://www.thegreenespace.org/watch/11-things-you-should-know-about-august-wilson
https://ronfassler.medium.com/the-magic-of-august-wilson-d6da37dbcfec

 

Comments Off on The Pittsburgh Cycle

Filed under AP Literature

Tagged as , , , , ,

November 30, 2020 · 1:56 pm

August Wilson Introduction

Perhaps the most successful African-American playwright in American history, August Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His parents were Daisy Wilson, who cared for August and his four siblings alongside her work as a cleaning woman, and Frederick Kittel, a German immigrant and baker.

Young August Kittel went to parochial school near his Hill District home on Bedford Avenue until his parents’ divorce. He, his mother, and his siblings moved from their historically black community to the Oakland neighborhood, which was primarily white. The constant bigotry of classmates led him to change high schools three times by the time he was fifteen, when he withdrew from formal school and began educating himself independently at Pittsburgh’s famed Carnegie Library. In 1962, at age 17, he enlisted in the Army but left after a year of service. After his father’s death in 1965, he took the name August Wilson to honor his mother.

Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library c. 1935

The 60s launched Wilson’s writing career. Although he originally planned to work as a poet, by the late 1960s he had formed, with a group of friends, the Centre Avenue Poets Theater Workshop. In 1968, he met collaborator Rob Penny through the CAPTW, and they co-founded the Black Horizon Theater in the Hill District, a community-based Black Nationalist theater company. Penny worked as the playwright while Wilson directed the productions, which were designed to raise awareness of the African-American experience.

Wilson relocated to Minneapolis in 1978, where he began serious work on his own plays. His first play, Jitney, was completed in 1979. Over the next few years, Wilson submitted both Jitney and his second play Fullerton Street to the renowned Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwright’s Conference without success, but his third attempt, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, was selected in 1982. Through the Conference, Wilson was introduced to the artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre, Lloyd Richards, who nurtured trailblazing playwright Lorraine Hansberry, the author of A Raisin in the Sun and the first African-American to have a play produced on Broadway. Richards helped shepherd the development of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and ended up directing Wilson’s first six plays on Broadway, including the 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences. Wilson earned his second Pulitzer in 1990 for The Piano Lesson.

From a piano hand-carved by slaves to prison work songs to blues anthems, music sings throughout Wilson’s plays. He said hearing Bessie Smith’s “Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine” the first time “was a defining moment: it made him recognize the poetry in the everyday language of black America and gave him the inspiration and freedom to use that language in his own writing.” (Greene Space) He often explained that he got his education from the four B’s: the blues, the art of painter Romare Bearden and the writing of poet Amiri Baraka and writer/poet Jorge Luis Borges. “The foundation of my playwriting is poetry,” he once said, and that influence is obvious from the cadence and power of his dialogue. (Greene Space)

After a decade in Minneapolis, Wilson moved to Seattle in 1990 and continued work on the ten-play series that would become known as The American Century Cycle or The Pittsburgh Cycle. The plays explore the challenges faced by African-Americans in each decade of the 20th century, “beginning with the complex narrative of freedom at the turn of the century and ending with the assimilation and sense of alienation of the 1990s.” (The Greene Space)

A passionate advocate for black representation in the theatre, Wilson explained, “I think my plays offer [white Americans] a different way to look at Black Americans. For instance, in Fences they see a garbageman, a person they don’t really look at, although they see a garbageman every day. By looking at Troy’s life, white people find out that the content of this Black garbageman’s life is affected by the same things—love, honor, beauty, betrayal, duty. Recognizing that these things are as much part of his life as theirs can affect how they think about and deal with Black people in their lives.” He stated that he didn’t write for black or white audiences, but about the black experience, because “…contained within that experience, because it is a human experience,” he said, “are all universalities.” This 1998 interview with Charlie Rose preceded a five-day symposium at Dartmouth University and reveals much of Wilson’s thinking on the topics of race and culture.

The day after Wilson’s 60th birthday in April of 2005, the last play of the Pittsburgh Cycle, Radio Golf, made its debut at the Yale Repertory Theatre. In August of that same year, Wilson revealed his diagnosis of terminal liver cancer. Wilson died October 2, 2005. Peter Marks of The Washington Post wrote that Wilson did not “simply leave a hole in the American theater, but a huge yawning wound, one that will have to wait to be stitched closed by some expansive, poetic dramatist yet to emerge.” (Greene Space)

Actor-director Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who performed in many Wilson plays and won a 1996 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performance as Canewell in Seven Guitars, said, “August Wilson left such a tremendous body of work for us. He wanted to make sure that our culture did not become history without some life and love and breath in it. He wanted a heartbeat in the stories that we told.” (Fassler)

On October 16, two weeks after Wilson’s death, the owners of the Virginia Theatre on East 52nd street renamed the theatre after him. The August Wilson Theatre is the first Broadway venue to be named for an African-American. In 2006, the African American Cultural Center of Greater Pittsburgh officially became the August Wilson Center for African American Culture.

Sources
https://augustwilsonblog.wordpress.com/tag/the-greene-space/
https://www.biography.com/writer/august-wilson
http://www.august-wilson-theatre.com/plays.php
https://www.centertheatregroup.org/programs/students/learn-about-theatre/august-wilson-monologue-competition/august-wilson-biography
https://www.thegreenespace.org/watch/11-things-you-should-know-about-august-wilson/
https://ronfassler.medium.com/the-magic-of-august-wilson-d6da37dbcfec

Comments Off on August Wilson Introduction

Filed under AP Literature

Tagged as , , , ,

September 25, 2020 · 3:05 pm

Esperanza Onstage

In 2009, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago produced a stage version of The House on Mango Street as part of its Steppenwolf for Young Adults series. Written by Tanya Saracho, the play dramatizes many of the vignettes of the novel, with music and performances bringing the characters and neighborhood to life. The production was directed by Hallie Gordon and featured Belinda Cervantes, Gina Cornejo, Sandra Delgado, Liza Fernandez, Ricardo Gutierrez, Christina Nieves, Tony Sancho and Mari Stratton. Here are three scenes from the production, taken from “Our Good Day,” “The Family of Little Feet,” and “My Name.”

Comments Off on Esperanza Onstage

Filed under AP Literature

Tagged as , , , , , ,

March 14, 2019 · 12:37 pm

Shakespeare’s Tragedies

Everybody dies.

shakespeare

P.S. They forgot one. In Act V, Scene 2 of Othello, Gratiano says about Desdemona, “I am glad thy father’s dead/Thy match was mortal to him, and pure grief/Shore his old thread in twain,” which suggests that, like Lady Montague, Brabantio died of a broken heart. This brings the death toll of Othello to five.

Concept by Cam Magee, design by Caitlin S. Griffin (who might possibly be this Caitlin Griffin, who is Education Programs Assistant for the Folger Shakespeare Library).

Comments Off on Shakespeare’s Tragedies

Filed under AP Literature

Tagged as , , , , ,

March 12, 2019 · 7:00 am

Thug Notes: Othello

Sex, booze, lies, and revenge–just another day on Cyprus! Salty language and adult themes ahead. Proceed with caution.

Comments Off on Thug Notes: Othello

Filed under AP Literature

Tagged as , , , ,

February 19, 2019 · 9:09 am

Many Faces of Othello

Othello_Relating_His_Adventures_to_Desdemona

On November 1, 1604, Master of Revels Edmund Tilney notes that a play titled The Moor of Venice was performed at Whitehall Palace for King James I. In the four hundred-plus years since, Othello has become one of the best-known and regarded of Shakespeare’s plays. It has also presented a number of questions regarding its central character, Othello the Moor.

During the Elizabethan era, the word “Moor” could have meant several things. Scholar Ben Arogundade notes that “[‘Moor’] was first used to describe the natives of Mauretania — the region of North Africa which today corresponds to Morocco and Algeria. It was later applied to people of Berber and Arab origin, who conquered and ruled the Iberian Peninsula — the area now known as Spain and Portugal — for nearly eight centuries. From the Middle Ages onwards the Moors were commonly regarded as black Africans, and the word was used alongside the terms ‘negro,’ ‘Ethiopian’ and ‘Blackamoor’ as a racial identifier.

othello arabAt the time of performance, London audiences would have been familiar with a man named Abd al-Wahid bin Masoud bin Muhammad al-Annuri, who arrived in 1600 as an ambassador of the Sa’adian ruler of Morocco, Mulay Ahmed al-Mansur. England’s various alliances with the countries of North Africa familiarized the Elizabethan world with their traditions. Islamic and Muslim characters appeared in plays as early as Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great in 1587, and in more than sixty plays from the next ten years, characters described with words like “Moors,” “Saracens,” “Turks,” and “Persians” appeared, including several of Shakespeare’s own. So it is not without historical or literary precedent that some critics believe that the character of Othello is intended to be a North African man of Arab descent.

The far more common interpretation, however, is for Othello to be viewed as a sub-Saharan African with black features. It is this portrayal that is most commonly found in modern productions of the play. From Shakespeare’s time until the early 1800s, this meant that the actor tackling the role would have played it in blackface makeup.
aldridge

It wasn’t until 1826 that Othello was finally played by a black performer: American actor Ira Aldridge. Aldridge emigrated to London at age 17 to pursue his acting career. But his groundbreaking performance wasn’t without criticism. The 1933 performance in Covent Garden was criticized by the paper The Anthenaeum because of the startling new reality of Ellen Tree, the white actress playing Desdemona, being manhandled by Aldridge. And although Aldridge became quite famous in London and abroad, it took nearly a hundred years before another black actor became attached to the role. According to writer Samantha Ellis, “In 1825, the pro-slavery lobby had closed [Aldridge’s] production and the Times‘s critic had written: ‘Owing to the shape of his lips it is utterly impossible for him to pronounce English.’ No wonder it took almost a century for another black actor to brave the part.”


robesonPerhaps the best-known Othello in the United States is the renowned actor Paul Robeson. The son of an escaped slave, Robeson had built an international reputation not only from his role in the musical Show Boat, but as an athlete and an attorney. Robeson had a commanding physical presence that suited the role perfectly, but his casting against the young British actress Peggy Ashcroft in 1930 was not without controversy. Technical issues like poor staging and difficult acoustics made performing difficult. But no one argued with the power of Robeson’s performance. Ivor Brown, the critic for The Observer, described Robeson as “… an oak…a superb giant of the woods for the great hurricane of tragedy to whisper through, then rage upon, then break.” Audiences at the premiere gave Robeson twenty curtain calls. But, given the societal segregation of the time, Robeson had detractors as well who criticized everything from his interpretation of the role to how he pronounced the words of Shakespeare’s text. Samantha Ellis writes:

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, WA Darlington felt that Robeson was a “really memorable” Othello precisely because he was black: “By reason of his race Mr Robeson is able to surmount the difficulties which English actors generally find in the part.” While other Othellos had seemed illogically jealous, Robeson’s jealousy seemed real, because: “Mr Robeson…comes of a race whose characteristic is to keep control of its passions only to a point, and after that point to throw control to the winds.” It was a “fine” performance and “the much-debated question whether Shakespeare meant Othello to be a negro or an Arab can be left to the professors.” Baughan, in contrast, stated baldly: “I agree with Coleridge that Othello must not be conceived as a negro, but as a high and chivalrous Moorish chief.”

Only the Express‘s critic seemed to think the casting of a black actor was a historic event. He reported overhearing people saying “Why should a black actor be allowed to kiss a white actress?” and his review, subtitled “Coloured Audience in the Stalls,” concluded that Robeson had “triumphed as a negro Moor, black, swarthy, muscular, a real man of deep colour.”

Robeson himself enjoyed playing Othello, and it became his signature role for the remainder of his career. As Ellis notes, “For Robeson, it was more than just a part: it was, as he once said, ‘killing two birds with one stone. I’m acting and I’m talking for the negroes in the way only Shakespeare can.'”

olivier smithDespite the positive reception of an African-American actor in the role, the Oscar-nominated 1965 production (the highest number for a Shakespeare film in history) starring Sir Laurence Olivier and a very young Dame Maggie Smith as Desdemona reverted to type: The famous English actor played the role in makeup. This was the first cinematic Othello to be shot using color film, and Oliver was as meticulous about that as he was about developing the physical character through a deep voice and a special walk. He stated in an interview with Life magazine in 1964 that, “The whole [makeup] will be in the lips and the colour. I’ve been looking at Negroes lips every time I see them on the train or anywhere, and actually, their lips seems black or blueberry-coloured, really, rather than red. But of course the variations are enormous. I’ll just use a little tiny touch of lake and a lot more brown and a little mauve.”

But as well-received as the production was by the Oscar crowd, its release during the height of the Civil Rights Movement dampened its reception with audiences. Arongundade remarks that “…[Olivier’s] blackface portrayal troubled American critics when the film opened there in 1966…sensitivities about black identity were at their height, and many saw Olivier’s chosen aesthetic as outdated.”

othello-james-earl-jonesPerhaps the pushback against the Olivier production opened the door for the now generally-accepted casting of an African-American actor in the role. Famous Othellos of the last several decades include theater luminaries like James Earl Jones, Oscar-nominated actor Laurence Fishburne in a stellar 1995 production starring Kenneth Branagh as Iago and French actress Irene Jacob as Desdemona, and young actor Mekhi Phifer in “O,” a contemporary version that transforms the military conflict into a basketball rivalry set in a high school. Other famous actors who have played Othello include Orson Welles, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Eamonn Walker in a 2001 TV movie co-starring Christopher Eccleston (best known as the ninth Doctor Who) as Iago, which transplants the action from Venice and Cyprus to a London police station.
othello reverse

Modern theater companies wishing to explore the themes of Othello in new ways have explored variant casting. A 1997 production of the play in Baltimore starred Patrick Stewart as Othello, the lone white actor in a racially-flipped cast in which every other actor was African-American. Stewart, pictured here with Patrice Johnson as Desdemona, explained, “One of my hopes for this production is that it will continue to say what a conventional production of Othello would say about racism and prejudice… To replace the black outsider with a white man in a black society will, I hope, encourage a much broader view of the fundamentals of racism.” A review in the Baltimore Sun said, “It is a tribute to the concept as well as Stewart’s performance that the initial awkwardness falls away as early as his second scene…Stewart, who possesses a calm assuredness at the start of the play, lets the theater’s predominantly white audience experience how completely foreign Othello must have felt in a society where he was viewed as the outsider.”

wolff othelloSpeaking of foreign: A German production at the Deutsches Theatre in 2001 pushed the boundaries of the character by not only casting a white actor as Othello, but a female one. This more avant-garde production starring actress Susanne Wolff sees Wolff utter her lines in varying costumes progressing from a simple black-and-white shirt and pants ensemble to—believe it or not—a gorilla suit intended to show Othello’s shift from loving partner to a more animalistic creature bent on vengeance. Blogger/reviewer Andrew Haydon says about the production, “Okay, there are two headlines to choose from here: 1) I’ve just seen the best production of Othello I’ve ever seen. 2) I’ve just seen a production of Othello in which Othello is played by a white woman in a gorilla costume. My job, then, is to explain how (2) manages to be (1).”

Sources:
Ben Arungodade, “What Was Othello’s Race?” and “The 18 Most Memorable Othello Actors Performances”
Baltimore Sun review of Sir Patrick Stewart Othello
Jerry Brotton, “Is This the Real Model for Othello?”
Samantha Ellis, “Paul Robeson in Othello, Savoy Theatre, 1930”
Emily Anne Gibson, “The Face of Othello”
Andrew Haydon, “Othello – Deutsches Theatre”

Othello Relating His Adventures to Desdemona by Carl Ludwig Friedrich Becker, 1880.

Comments Off on Many Faces of Othello

Filed under AP Literature

Tagged as , , , , , ,

February 14, 2019 · 7:05 am

Othello – Text Sources

Othello CoverTo access a copy of Othello on your device, try the links provided on Canvas.

Download or listen to a streaming audio version of the play at Librivox.

A PDF of the play from the Folger Library may be found here.

The full text of the play may be read online here.

Scenes plus notes may be found here.

If you get truly stuck, the “No Fear Shakespeare” version from SparkNotes, with side-by-side modern English translation, is available here. Use this only if you’re completely lost. Trust yourself first!

The Orange County Library System has tons of Shakespeare resources, including the 1995 Fishburne/Branagh version in both DVD and online streaming formats, the 1965 Olivier on DVD, and the 2001 BBC TV production on DVD.

Use video resources to enhance your reading through YouTube. Shakespeare in performance is very different from tackling the text alone.

Comments Off on Othello – Text Sources

Filed under AP Literature

Tagged as , , , ,

February 13, 2019 · 7:19 am

Othello Anticipation Guide

othello_1_lgCopy each statement and indicate whether you agree or disagree.

It can sometimes be difficult to determine the honesty of a friend.

When a person’s reputation has been tainted, it can never be restored.

Parents know what is best for their children.

A person’s love can be gained through material wealth.

Racial and age differences in a marriage are easily overcome.

Secondhand information is reliable.

Military heroes shouldn’t get distracted with things like love. It makes them weak.

Reputation is the most important thing in the world.

Imagination can be worse than reality.

Physical violence is the best kind of revenge.

If someone deceives me, it’s all his fault.

Best friends make the worst enemies.

No person can avoid being intensely jealous at some point.

Once you have established trust with someone, you can trust their counsel.

Of the emotions of anger, resentment, jealousy, or loneliness, jealousy hurts the most.

After you have made your selections, choose three of the statements and explain briefly what made you choose whether you agreed or disagreed with the statement. (You may do this on the back of the paper.)

Comments Off on Othello Anticipation Guide

Filed under AP Literature

Tagged as , ,