{"id":11413,"date":"2025-04-01T08:12:47","date_gmt":"2025-04-01T12:12:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11413"},"modified":"2026-01-04T13:16:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T18:16:13","slug":"theater-extravaganza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11413","title":{"rendered":"Theater Extravaganza!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Last weekend we enjoyed an unforgettable theater weekend. Thanks to gifts, we did not have to remortgage the house to snag tickets for two of the hottest, most interesting shows currently on Broadway: Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal in Othello<\/em> and George Clooney in Good Night and Good Luck<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more than 400 years, audiences have found Shakespeare\u2019s plays so perfectly capture human motives, failings, and dilemmas that they continue to offer important commentary, however far removed we are from their creation. Good Night and Good Luck<\/em>, an adaptation of the 2005 film, is set some 70 years ago\u2014an eternity in the age of texting and instant messaging\u2014but it too lent itself painful timeliness. Do such works speak to audiences today? They did last weekend. Is their message lost on today\u2019s audiences? Not for a New York minute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Othello<\/em>, you\u2019ll remember, is the story of a vaunted Venetian general whose chief aide, feigning loyalty but secretly vindictive, sows doubt about the faithfulness of Othello\u2019s wife, Desdemona. Suspicion builds, and this false story eventually so enrages Othello that he murders her and, in this version, the play ends with death upon death. What devastating power lies have. And, once accepted, how difficult they are to dislodge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A major theme of the play is reputation. Iago famously says, \u201cWho steals my purse steals trash; \u02bctis something, nothing . . . But he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed.\u201d Even in his last speech, the suicidal Othello is concerned about how he will be perceived thereafter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Shakespeare\u2019s time, although news of a person\u2019s transgressions\u2014real or imagined or maliciously crafted\u2014might eventually reach the ears of many people or the few who mattered; today, such reports are instantly accessible to a worldwide audience and wreak havoc with the ideas of privacy and safety and innocence. Whether they are true or not seems irrelevant. The point is to hurt. In the face of this onslaught, we are \u201cperplexed in the extreme,\u201d as Othello says, and damaged in some cases, beyond repair.<\/p>\n\n\n

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George Clooney has had a long interest in the topic of how fear stifles political debate. In this project, he and co-writer Grant Heslov took the Army-McCarthy hearings as their subject. Senator Joseph McCarthy was infamous for his sensational accusations that various individuals were Communists based on slender or no evidence. His particular targets were the federal government, universities, and the film industry. It was a fearful time. Tremendous pressure was brought on television journalist Edward R. Murrow and his co-producer Fred Friendly to tread lightly around McCarthy, as anyone who opposed him would very likely become his next target.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless, Murrow and Friendly produced a famous See It Now<\/em> documentary using clips of McCarthy himself and his wild accusations. Commenting on the Senator\u2019s words, Murrow said, \u201cWe must not confuse dissent with disloyalty\u201d and warning against letting fear push the country into an age of unreason. The production definitely wants to establish parallels with current-day politics, and one of its biggest laughs comes when a newsman laments that he hasn\u2019t quite understood what\u2019s been happening in the past few years and says, \u201cIt\u2019s like all the sensible people flew to Europe and left us here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both plays benefit from excellent casts, including Clooney and Gyllenhaal, who are not stage actors. Othello<\/em> has a spare stage that adapts to whatever configuration is needed, whereas Good Night and Good Luck<\/em> has a very specific set, a 1950s newsroom, with all the chaos of a production about to go on air. Both work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last weekend we enjoyed an unforgettable theater weekend. Thanks to gifts, we did not have to remortgage the house to snag tickets for two of the hottest, most interesting shows currently on Broadway: Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal in Othello … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[269,366,104,147,785],"tags":[1218,367,2146,2274,2275,2273,197],"class_list":["post-11413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-actor","category-drama","category-the-morgue","category-theater","category-tragedy","tag-broadway","tag-denzel-washington","tag-george-clooney","tag-good-night-and-good-luck","tag-jake-gyllenhaal","tag-othello","tag-shakespeare"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2Y5","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11413"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11418,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11413\/revisions\/11418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}