Always Just a Little Out of Step

riff on shakespeare: desdemona: a play about a handkerchief
artword alternative theatre
the national post

Comparisons of Paula Vogel's Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief (also American, vintage 1993) to Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead seem to me inept. Stoppard played absolutely fair with his Shakespearean source, figure- skating with the plot and characters of Hamlet while keeping them scrupulously intact; Vogel takes the three female characters of Othello and changes everything except their names and elements of their dramatic situation.

Before somebody points out that Shakespeare was just as high-handed with his own sources: His plays stand up in their own right, while Vogel's absolutely depends on our knowledge of the original.

The result is tawdry and rather confusing. It also, by leaving all the men offstage, never engages with its real conflict.

The big joke is that this Desdemona seems to have slept with every man in Venice and Cyprus except Cassio. She also stands in, or lies down, for the prostitute Bianca on busy nights. Does this mean, the play indignantly asks -- or the publicity tells us that it asks - - that she therefore deserved to be murdered? (No, it doesn't. Next question.) Meanwhile, Emilia has been downgraded from Desdemona's trusty servant to her exploited laundress.

The play does make the occasional neat point about class, if not about sex, and Sue Miner's production is as good as may be, given the painful inadequacy of two-thirds of the cast. Sarah Neville's cockney Bianca, whose dialogue seems to traverse the erotic slang of three centuries, is marginally less excruciating than Anita La Selva's odious English deb of a Desdemona. (The author calls for the accents, but one hopes she didn't want them done this crudely.)

Brooke Johnson plays Emilia Irish and is far better at it -- and at everything else. But then Emilia always was the best role. Shakespeare's Desdemona, though, was a far more independent character than the one we get here, and her willow scene makes a far stronger feminist -- or just human -- statement than anything this play can come up with.

Still, Vogel went on to write the far superior How I Learned to Drive, so there can be such a thing as progress.