James A. Williams

Review: 'Othello' is an acting tour de force | StarTribune.com

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well we open tonight this has been a long journey and i've learned quite a bit. i've been living othello through the process. as an artist i've found there is a huge difference in how african americans and whites approach the work. in the middle of all of this i often found myself struggling to keep the project on a course to find a more othello-centric approach to our production. while at every junction the traditional iago centric view of the play. yesterday during a talk back after 2 years of discussion. our director stated that he feels iago is the driving engine of the play. no wonder i'm exhausted. i understand how the show ends up as it does. when you start outlooking to protect ancillary relationships you lose the story. class, race, age and sex play huge roles in disintegration on this star-crossed couple. if you've ever been the "other" it's nearly impossible to understand the effect it plays on your thought process and what battles you choose to fight. i've never had that manifest itself as strongly as in this process.

it was an exciting week of previews, the show has been well received for the most part and now we start school matinees. last night we did an event for the inner sanctum of park square patrons. each of us spoke of our reflections of the play and gave personal insights of our journey. it's obvious that my take is the most visceral of our group. as frustrating as this has been, the opportunity to interact with the patrons here reminds me of centerstages strategy of a solid invested community of subscribers that have a sense of ownership with out attempting to steer the artistic direction of the theatre. and building a expectation of relationship between the jobbed in artists and the supporters. i see it takes the pressure off the AD being the only voice from the artist's end of the process. i enjoyed being a part of it.

Well we're into week 3 and I hate mr. Shakespeare this language is kicking my but. It's been a few years and getting my diction up to speed has been the second biggest challenge. The biggest is memorization, I was crazy to give mysel 4 weeks to learn it but I don't know how else to do it. Learning lines I vacuum has never been my strong suit. The cast is great and i think the show will be hot. For details go to parksquaretheatre.org