A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
The character of Desdemona has a rough time of it in William Shakespeare’s "Othello." Two days after her marriage to the title character, she’s unjustly accused of infidelity and strangled by her new husband, bringing their brief honeymoon to an untimely end. She’s not the only one to die. After all, it is a tragedy.
But Desdemona, who has relatively little to say in Shakespeare’s play, finds her own voice in a theater piece written by novelist and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, in collaboration with acclaimed theater and opera director Peter Sellars and African singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré. Speaking during a rehearsal break, Sellars says the play grew out of his own production of "Othello" in 2009.
"In the course of working on the play and staging it," says Sellars, "we found this amazing line that really gave birth to the Desdemona project."
Sellars is referring to a scene late in “Othello,” when Desdemona prepares for bed, knowing she doesn’t have long to live.
"She says, 'This song keeps going through my head. That song was sung by my mother’s maid, Barbary, who died while singing it of a broken heart.'”
For Sellars and Morrison, Barbary opened a new perspective on "Othello." If Shakespeare intended the name as a reference to the Barbary pirates of North Africa, which they believe he did, it suggests that Desdemona, who was born into privilege in Venice, was raised by an African nursemaid. And if she’d grown up hearing African songs and stories, it may partly explain her scandalous attraction to Othello, the dark-skinned Moor.
"She looked around the ballroom at all these prospective suitors and said no to everyone.," Sellars says. "And then she saw this black guy and she said, 'Ask him to come over.' Because of course, for her, black culture was her birthright."
That new perspective on "Othello" is at the heart of the play, called "Desdemona," which was first staged in 2011. In it, Desdemona, played by Tina Benko, looks back at the events of Shakespeare’s play from a kind of twilight afterlife, filling in moments that are only briefly referred to in "Othello."
"Their first dance and their first night out together, what did attract them and how did that work?," Sellars says. "What was the dynamic between them? Of course, Toni’s genius is to fill in missing histories.”
A big part of that history is the character of Barbary herself, played onstage by African singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré. Traoré, who’s from Mali, wrote the songs and the music that weave through the performance. She’s accompanied by a pair of backup singers and two musicians playing African gourd instruments,
Some of the songs, sung in the Malian language of Bambara, stem from the griot storytelling tradition. Traoré says it’s not the kind of high energy music a Western audience might expect from African musicians.
"There are these traditions of music which are not made to be danced but to be listened to," Traoré says.
For Sellars, who lives in Los Angeles but whose cross-cultural collaborative works are rarely produced here, the show is a kind of homecoming. He hopes audiences will come with an open mind and a willingness to engage in an experience that he likens less to a traditional drama than to a séance or a meditation. In an age of constant stimulation and fake political theater, he says, that’s what audiences really need.
"One of the roles of theater at the moment is actually to make a place where there isn’t drama," Sellars says. "Where finally you can breathe, you can think, you can reflect and you can feel."