Like any good Shakespeare tragedy, Othello ends in death. Eventually, Morrison and Sellars collaborated on an entirely new theatrical work that explored Othello’s characters in a manner they found lacking in the original. Morrison defended Othello, and said it only seemed shallow because stagings of it frequently oversimplified its characters. She was moved to write Desdemona after an argument with theater director Peter Sellars about the artistic merit of Othello. The Desdemona part of the production comes from the mind of Morrison, who spent half a lifetime writing sharp, brilliant novels about the Black experience. These are amazing pieces, but there’s no way to escape that it is two White men, however brilliant, talking about the Black experience.” “This project came a bit out of a desire to explore whether there’s a way to perform a Verdi Shakespeare, to perform Otello, that embraces its insufficiency as well as its brilliance. “Nowhere more than opera- maybe ballet, also-do we deal with such a small canon of work that is so problematic,” Nelson says. OTHELLO/DESDEMONA’s return on investment should be a valuable rethinking and reframing of the White, western canon that dominates theater and opera spaces.
And because of that investment, you get paid back in catharsis. I think theater is a place you go to invest time, and emotion, and mental energy. Theater shouldn’t be a place you go to relax after a day’s work. “I don’t believe in theater as entertainment. “Epic theater is really my dream,” he says. He calls this sort of event “epic theater,” likening it to Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s two-part play that explores being gay and the AIDS crisis in 1980s America, or Peter Brook’s nine-hour play The Mahabharata. It’s certainly a first for Timothy Nelson, INSeries’ artistic director and the director of OTHELLO/DESDEMONA. Later this month, the production travels to the Baltimore Theatre Project.Ī multi-night theater production will probably be a first for many audience members. Following two nights of previews at Source Theater, the show is slated to open on June 4 and 5. This month, the INSeries brings Verdi’s Otello and Morrison’s Desdemona together in one theatrical experience, OTHELLO/DESDEMONA, which takes place over the course of two evenings- Otello on the first, Desdemona on the second. Then in 2011, the late novelist Toni Morrison decided to put her own twist on the tragedy with Desdemona, a response to Shakespeare’s story that takes place in the afterlives of Othello’s protagonists. Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi came along in 1887 with Otello, his operatic interpretation of Shakespeare’s play. Around 1603, William Shakespeare interpreted that story into The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. It began in 1565, when Italian writer Cinthio penned the short story “Un Capitano Moro” (“A Moorish Captain”). OTHELLO/DESDEMONA, the latest INSeries production, is the result of something resembling a game of telephone.
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