Performance Details From left, Pamela Roza, Lisa Minett and Samara Siskind star in Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief. 'Desdemona' yet another mark of company's aim for greatness Christine Dolen Miami Herald The Promethean Theatre, a troupe new to South Florida this season, wants nothing less than to become one of the region's top not-for-profit theater companies. Producer-founders Deborah L. Sherman and Beth McIntosh have the experience and connections, if not yet the money, to have a real shot at that dream. Their March debut of Craig Wright's Orange Flower Water got strong reviews and managed to beat the New York production onto the stage. And now their second production -- Paula Vogel's Desdemona, a Play About a Handkerchief -- suggests the quality of the first was no fluke, and that this company is already one decidedly worth watching. Vogel, who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for How I Learned To Drive, here turns her feminist sensibilities to the women of William Shakespeare's Othello. First produced in New York 20 years ago, Desdemona follows Othello's doomed wife, Iago's spouse Emilia and Cassio's strumpet-lover, Bianca, into a ''back room'' of the palace in Cyprus. It's a place where laundry gets done, clothing gets mended, potatoes get peeled; a place where the men do not go and the women speak freely -- very freely, as Vogel imagines it. Writing in a faux-Shakespearean but easy-to-get style, Vogel offers a bawdily amusing feminist deconstruction of a classic tragedy. If Othello is all about the male drive for power and possession, Desdemona is about the women's manipulative struggle to control their own destinies. In truth, Vogel's Desdemona is decidedly less sympathetic than Shakespeare's. No longer an innocent victim of circumstance, this Desdemona is a spoiled, self-centered, cunning rich girl who's plotting to leave her jealous husband and bolt back to Venice. Nor is she an innocent: Not only did she trick Othello into thinking he had taken her already long-lost virginity on their wedding night, but she has just spent a happy evening turning tricks in a darkened room so that working girl Bianca could have a night off. It's not what Shakespeare had in mind, obviously. But Vogel, director Margaret M. Ledford, a wonderful design team and a top notch cast make it work. Though she looks every inch the pale, delicate Desdemona, Lisa Minett finds all the contradictory complexities in Vogel's title character -- the utter fear when she cannot find the strawberry-embroidered handkerchief her husband has demanded she produce (the fatal consequences are spelled out in Othello), her not-terribly-wise tendency toward making empty promises to Emilia, her lusty desire to ''walk'' on the wild side by literally lying in Bianca's bed. Carbonell Award winner Pamela Roza has come back from an acting hiatus to give a powerful, smart performance as the devout -- but no less manipulative -- Emilia. Clearly both exasperated by yet fond of Desdemona, she subtly telegraphs the tragedy that will come once the women retreat to the palace's splendid bed chambers. As Bianca, Samara Siskind is a bit too much like Nancy in Oliver! (Cockney-accented prostitute with the requisite heart of gold, dreaming of a better life), but her frankness and self-confident strength make her appeal to Desdemona quite credible. Despite an odd sound choice from Nathan Rausch (every so often, a thundering noise washes over the play, indicating either ominous things to come, time passing or both), the design choices -- from Morgan L. Little's rustic set to M. Tate Tenorio's muted lighting to Ananda Keator's stylish costumes -- serve the play well. And the play itself serves Promethean's quest to become a company that matters and endures. |
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