NOVEMBER 25, 1994 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 25

ENTERTAINMENT

adical view of Shakespeare's Othello loses its bite

Desdemona

by Paula Vogel

The Working Theatre

Reviewed by Barry Daniels Paula Vogel's Desdemona, currently at Cleveland's Working Theatre, is a radical feminist study of the female characters in

CURBSIDE To The Test

HEY GEORGE?

HMM?

Shakespeare's classic-and from this perspective sexist-drama, Othello. Vogel, author of the much-produced Baltimore Waltz, uses a knife-like wit to dissect the traditional male construction of female gender. As a radical lesbian she also launches a fullblooded attack on heterosexuality.

Vogel's play is set in a back room of Othello's palace in Cyprus. Her characters

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TRIBE 8

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reverse Shakespeare's conception of the women. Desdemona is an upper class nymphomaniac. No virgin at her wedding, she now spends Tuesday nights in Bianca's brothel where she indulges in what she calls "that desire to know the world." Underneath her hard-as-nails surface, Bianca holds a very traditional view that all women desire is a husband and babies. "We may pretend

IT ON MY

I GUESS I JUST WANTED TO DO OWN....EVERYONE'S MAKING TOO MUCH FUSS OVER THIS ANYWAY, DRIVES ME NUTS.

MM. SO WHEN DO YOU GET THE RESULTS?

TRIB

1-M

HEY-I FIGURE WHEN YOUR NUMBER COMES UP THAT'S

LIKE ROB UP. I'M PROBABLY GONNA THAT, Y'KNOW? I HOPE MY

TEST NEGATIVE ANYWAY.

WELL LET'S JUST SUPPOSE YOU GET A POSITIVE READING BACK. THEN WHAT WILL YOU DO?

LUCK HAS HELD OUT, BUT IF THE RESULTS ARE POSITIVE THEN I GUESS I'LL JUST DEAL WITH IT!

MMN, I CAN SEE HOW WELL YOU DEAL WITH THINGS, UH-HUH...

YEAH, I THINK THAT

I HEY WAIT A SEC-WAS THAT A SHOT?!

TRIBE

differnt," she says, "but inside every born one o' us wants smugs an' babies, smugs wot are man enow t' keep us in our place."

For Desdemona, marriage is a mannered and elegant facade. For Bianca it is a romantic fantasy. The third character in the play, Emilia, Desdemona's servant, views marriage as a living hell. Her description of her loveless union with lago is both hilarious and harrowing. Her sexuality is repressed to the point of denial. She survives on her hatred of men, knowing that for her class of women, if you want "to rise a bit in the world, women can only do that through their mates."

In Desdemona Vogel is clearly both mocking Shakespeare's traditional view of women and questioning a revisionist but heterosexual feminist reading of the characters. Each of the women in the play defines herself in terms of men and plays a traditional role.

Unfortunately the Working Theatre production of the play fails, or refuses, to understand Vogel's radical point. Because of this the actors never succeed in finding the comedy and the play's doubleness is lost. Natalie Colabianchi never quite achieves the necessary hauteur of the Venetian aristocrat, Desdemona. She is simply playing at being aristocratic. Shanna Beth McGhee is a cute and plucky Bianca who is only playing at being a whore. Joan Fuglewicz is badly miscast as Emilia. She fails to find the intensity of Emilia's repression. All three actors have worked hard at their different accents. The acoustics of the theatre are so poor that this good work is garbled and the resulting noise gives the audience a headache.

By making the characters in Desdemona one-dimensional, director Craig Rich and his cast rob the play of its bite. And by failing to grasp the playwright's meaning, they erase her radical lesbian voice.

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