Do you think I will like to see a performance at this Shakespeare Festival?

Othello has always been one of my favorites! I have seen it done by professionals, by amateurs, outside, inside, modern day, period appropriate, you name it. It can be intense and distressing, if you want a comedy, this isn’t the one, but I love it!

Your husband might like it, too, there is action and mayhem.

Have fun! :-)

I’ve seen them both (my parents took us to a lot of plays) – I would suggest Two Gentlemen of Verona (which they are playing) over Liar (which isn’t Shakespeare anyway).

I don’t think I can make the date for Two Gentlemen, but I appreciate the suggestion. Maybe plans will switch up.

Othello is a classic. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should. Not only is it good, it gets referenced a lot.

Othello, without question. Political deception rocks.

Othello’s not so much a “date play”, though… if you and your husband have any trust issues, you might want to give it a miss and catch The Liar instead. :)

I would say that Othello is a tough play to understand, particularly if English is not your first language. It has some very ambivalent story lines, such as Iago’s motivation (central to the dramatic action). Critics are still debating that, 500 years later.

You should both read the play carefully before you go, if you decide to. That’s what I would do, and i have seen it several times. I still find listening to the language difficult in spots.

I never heard of “The Liar.” I would also vote for Two Gentlemen of Verona, fun for a hot, summer night. Asking your husband to sit through Othello is akin to you watching three hours of Lope de Vega.

@gailcalled I too worried about the language, and also thought if we do it I would review the play before going to see it. I hoped my hisband might be familar with one of the plays, he went to American High Schools (two years in America and two years in American High school in his country). More and more I think probably we won’t go, because It will be difficult to schedule as I pull all the plans together. The answers here did peak my interest about the pays though, so maybe I will look into them when I return home.

@JLeslie That’s too bad. You wouldn’t at least try The Liar, which might not have the same language constraints?

*pique my interest

Most high schools teach a Shakespearean comedy or two (As You Like It or All’s Well That End’s Well) and either _Hamlet, Macbeth or possibly Julius Caesar. I can’t imagine teaching Othello to the average 11th or 12th grader. Which plays did you read then?

( pique and not peak.)

In High School I only read Romeo and Juliet. Actually, it might have been in 8th grade. but, I don’t go by what I read usually, because there are a lot of classics I did not read in school, but friends of mine even in the same school read them. Wrinkle in Time, Catcher in the Rye, and others somehow never were part of my classwork. I was glad. Although, I did very much like Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare I enjoyed partly because the teacher takes you through step by step. Maybe some people read Hamlet and Othello in college, but I didn’t read it there either. I guess maybe it isn’t in the minimal required English classes in college. Or, at least not in either school I attended.

@dappled_leaves I’ll keep it out there as a possibility. Well see how tired we are. The Liar is on a weeknight so last minute tickets will probably be available.

There are a couple of good film productions of Othello (I enjoyed this one recently) if you are interested in familiarizing yourself with the play.

The Liar is apparently a contemporary adaptation by David Ives (in rhymed verse) of a classic French comedy by the master dramatist, Pierre Corneille, 17th century. it sounds like fun, if that’s your thing. I read a few of Corneille’s tragedies in French and they were very heavy going.

“Written in 1643, Le Menteur (The Liar) was based on a Spanish story of adventure written by Juan Ruiz de Alarcón y Mendoza that Corneille fashioned into a comedy of manners. Corneille’s The Liar depended less on thrill and more on verbal repartée, the follies of modern courtship and Parisian life than its Spanish precedent. In writing The Liar, Corneille invented the comedy of manners, which he described as “the portrayal of social intercourse among persons of good breeding.”

Source

BTW,
“The dramatic works of Pierre Corneille are typically composed of rhyming alexandrine couplets.”

I’m surprised at how little Shakespeare you got in high school! We read a play every year.

@dappled_leaves Some of my peers might have. In high school by the time I was in 11th grade they had just started a new program where we took a semester of speech, a semester of writing, a semester of something else that I don’t remember, maybe poetry and literature, etc. I did learn a lot, and I think it was effective to have such a focus for weeks. Reading and English were some of my least favorite classes throughout school, and then in the later high school years and college I began to get more interesting in the classwork. I hated reading, literally I mean reading, but I liked the English language, writing, and luckily I liked all of my English teachers, some I thought were really fantastic. If I had been stuck with a horrible English teacher it would have been really awful for me.

@JLeslie I found some of the mechanics of English classes tedious – I never did really accept that the teachers’ interpretations of themes and symbolism were inherent properties of the texts themselves, and always thought they were at least partly projection. But we did read so many great books.

I realized after posting my comment that what I consider high school (grades 7–11) might be a few different schools in some regions, so perhaps that affects the Shakespeare numbers as well!

@dappled_leaves You might have missed that I hated reading. I still don’t like it. Reading articles or texts about a specific subject can be interesting to me, but books are almost always like a chore.

@JLeslie I didn’t miss it.

It’s possible I forgot some of the books I read. A few times my mom told me about a book so I could just write a report, but that was when I was fairly young, not in high school. She didn’t do it enough times to say she damaged me in any way; just moments of desperation and procrastination. Watching the movie was like a gift in school for me, or literature that was really gone over step by step with the teacher rather than reading a book on our own and writing about it.

I’m definitely going to keep the Liar as a possibility for the trip.