Feel like some intellectual fun? You don’t have to be a Shakespearean scholar, I promise.
Constance Ledbelly has been stuck for years writing her doctoral dissertation. She is convinced but can’t prove “Othello” and “Romeo and Juliet” are comedies written by an unknown author and rewritten as cheap-imitation tragedies by Shakespeare. The obsession is fragmenting her consciousness. Her life is falling apart.
Until like Alice in “Alice in Wonderland,” Walter Mitty in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and Dorothy in “Wizard of Oz,” Ledbelly slips into deep sleep and there, encounters and interacts with the expressions of her obsession. Which is to say, Ledbelly meets, affects and is affected by Iago, Desdamona and Othello in Act One and Romeo, Juliet and Tybalt in Act Two.
By the way, lest you rush to your copy of Shakespeare and start boning up on “Othello” and “Romeo and Juliet,” be assured. The key scenes that Ledbelly is talking about, are spelled out straight before she enters in and changes the action. All you need to know is in the script by Ann-Marie MacDonald.
Anyway, Corina Sugarman as Constance Ledbelly, by herself, is enough to justify whatever fraction of our tax dollars went into this production by Shoreline CC’s Drama Department.
Once into the thick of things, Sugarman’s mousy, bookish Ph. D. candidate from Queens, is spouting Elizabethan conceits in iambic pentameter, fencing like a cavalier and brandishing her crotch just like others of Romeo’s ribald buddies. Sugarman is wry, witty, funny.
Dominique Miciano forges Desdemona’s passion into the strident, uncompromising, audacious drive of a Titan-Amazon; and of Desdemona’s gullibility, an infantile willingness to change her mind at the drop of a hat. Miciano’s sense of hyperbole carried to ridiculous extremes is ludicrous, infectious, realized.
Lindsay Christianson complicates Juliet’s sexual curiosity, radiant sensuality and willingness to die for romantic love with ingenuousness, solid humor, tenderness. Alex M. Lyley Jr.’s Romeo is lusty, robust, heat-seeking even if it means an adolescent boy’s willingness to sample same-sex sex.
Mike Tilton in dual roles, plays an Iago that snivels and a Tybalt that swaggers. E.J. Brewer’s Othello lacks some passion but comes across. Douglas Oaksford provides explication and mood as Chorus and Ghost.
This cast under direction of Shelley Douma prepared themselves taking fencing and elocution lessons. Screaming sirens and flashing lights signify changes in Ledbelly’s state of mind. Action’s got pace and punch. Surprises abound.
This is clever, funny, easy-to-follow theater molded within an intellectual framework. It is engrossing. Recommended if you feel like something different, daring.
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