Othello and desdemona5/21/2023 ![]() Morrison and Traoré spent nine months corresponding via Internet between the United States and Bamako, creating new material.Ħ Desdemona is the fruit of these efforts. For this idea, Sellars also brought in Rokia Traoré, an innovative Malian musician who had worked with him on his New Crowned Hope project. Intriguingly, they had also agreed that Morrison would collaborate with him and pursue the subject for an entirely new show of their own. According to Sellars, in his pre-show introduction of Desdemona, the atmosphere at the time was charged by the recent election of Barack Obama, with its endless discussions about whether the new president was “black” or “post-racial.”ĥAfter Sellars’ Othello closed, it was not the end his conversation with Toni Morrison. ![]() (Regrettably, I didn’t see the production, which would’ve been interesting in regard to Sellars’ latest effort.) Much of the comment about his Othello concerned the deliberate blurring of the racial parameters set out in Shakespeare’s text, and the fact that the show ran almost four hours. Reviews were generally unfriendly, sometimes hostile. The result was the 2009 New York show with high profile stars like Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago, and John Ortiz in the lead. 2ĤMorrison, to his surprise, disagreed, and challenged Sellars to direct a production of Othello that would explore such questions. In Sellars’ terms, the play was like a supermarket product that had been on the shelf too long: it had passed its “use by” date. In a brief introduction provided by Sellars before the performance, he described having a lunch one day with Toni Morrison and speaking frankly of Othello as a play he’d always disliked, because Desdemona was too simplistically good, and the racial politics were hopelessly archaic. 1 The BackstoryģThe genesis of this project is interesting, even peculiar. It appropriates the voices of Shakespeare’s characters and recasts the story for a 21 st century audience. Neither play nor concert, in the usual sense, it is a “literary and musical collaboration” which is informed by the traditional African notion of the ongoing presence of the dead. ![]() Directed by the indefatigable Peter Sellars, with a script by Toni Morrison and music by Rokia Traoré, this world premiere offers both a revision and extension of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Much is unknown about the female characters, just as much is unknown about the Moor.Ģ Desdemona tries to fill in the gaps. How does Desdemona know this? What kind of relationship did they share? Shakespeare doesn’t tell us the answers to such questions. How does she view her marriage now? And how does Emilia, who participated in the deception of her mistress, feel about her actions? And who, really, was Barbary, the maid mentioned fleetingly in Othello as the source of Desdemona’s “Willow Song”? We are told that she died of a broken heart while singing it. 1 The premise is excellent: a chance to hear Desdemona’s side of the story from beyond the grave.
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