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OTHELLO
By William Shakespeare
Directed By Peter Sellars
Our
production of Othello was the first chapter of a five-year journey. The
parallel dimension will be the creation of a new play by Toni Morrison
entitled, Desdemona, which will engage, challenge, and complement
Shakespeare’s play. We will return to Othello and Desdemona across
several years developing them in tandem with a view towards ultimately
filming each play on location, creating a body of work that can go into
high schools across America, offering penetrating, poetic and
insightful language and up-to-date images that address the challenges
that lie ahead for a new generation. Toni Morrison might just propose
that the only possibilities for interracial marriage do not ineluctably
lead to strangulation. And perhaps we will be able to supply some
visions of blackness which reach beyond Shakespeare’s realms of
reference. Perhaps the 21st-century can respond to Shakespeare’s
prescient and painful allegory with new structures and new
relationships that reach towards shared understandings of simultaneous
global realities and that might reconcile the cries for justice across
the sexes, across class, among nations and across cultures.
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