January 21–28, 1999

theater

Othello's Girls

By Toby Zinman

Desdemona—A Play About A Handkerchief

Eureka Theatre Company at 2nd Stage, The Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., through Jan. 31, 215-563-4330

Where is the crappy little snot rag?" This is the question that propels Shakespeare's tragedy, Othello—although not quite in these words. Those words come from Paula Vogel's terrific feminist re-investigation of that play in which Othello's bride, Desdemona, is imagined as a spoiled brat raised in Venetian aristocratic ease. She spends her last day—the day that will end when Othello smothers her—with her maid Emilia, Iago's wife, and Bianca, Cassio's mistress and the garrison's madam. Three white chicks, sitting around, talking. Talking about race, about sex, about marriage, about fidelity and adultery. Talking about Othello's stinginess and Iago's sexual incompetence. Talking about women making money, depending on men, living in a narrow female world, talking about envy: The lower classes want to be privileged, the upper classes want to be free.

Paula Vogel's play, How I Learned to Drive, was last season's off-Broadway hit and became the most frequently produced play in the U.S. Like that play and like her earlier The Baltimore Waltz, Desdemona shares the Vogel signatures: It has many short scenes, separated by blackouts; it's funny about unfunny subjects (like AIDS—the subject of Waltz) and creates sympathy for surprising characters (like a pedophile—in Drive). Vogel's plays are political, smart and tremendously theatrical. Director Henry Gleitman gets much mileage out of this interesting, entertaining, provocative play.

There's nothing like a change of perspective, as Tom Stoppard proved in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which re-examined Hamlet from the point of view of two minor characters. Here Vogel chooses to imagine what all of Shakespeare's women were doing offstage while the men—Othello, Iago, Cassio—were delivering their tremendous lines. By doing so, she not only creates an intriguing original script, but she makes us realize more than we ever thought we could think about Othello. This is postmodernism at its best.

The three actors—Elizabeth Webster as Desdemona, Andrea Kocerha as Emilia and Catherine K. Slusar as Bianca—are remarkably good, creating a complex combination of real people and stage personae, suggesting Shakespeare's characters off duty. Joe Koroly's lighting washes the stage with warmth at just the right moments: The last scene, bringing us to the very brink of tragedy, is superb.