Desdemona (review)

If Othello is about sight, Desdemona is about sound. Toni Morrison, Peter Sellars, and Rokia Traoré’s collaborative venture is not a play, in Sellars’s words, but rather an evening of music and story, of “deep listening created by women.” Inspired by Desdemona’s memory of the “maid called Barbary” who died for love, the novelist, the director, and the Malian singer-songwriter have created new stories and new sounds that present the Africa Shakespeare could only imagine.

The stage was bare, save nine dangling light bulbs, a few chairs, and clusters of microphones and speakers. The blonde Benko stepped up to a mic and began: “My name is Desdemona.” Morrison’s words were projected onto an upstage screen throughout the production, literally illuminating this new text. Desdemona’s parents never knew her, we learn; she is “not the meaning of a name [she] did not choose.” After Desdemona’s introductory monologue, Traoré, her three swaying back-up singers, and the two men playing the kora and n’goni (Malian instruments) filled the space with Traoré’s first musical composition, overlapping with Desdemona’s monologue before continuing uninterrupted. Voices that seemed to come from deep within sang Traoré’s haunting Malian words and melodies; this production was also about words we do not understand. Hearing Traoré’s music—particularly Barbary’s song of loss over the lover that forsook her—reminded me that, like Shakespeare’s Desdemona, we may “understand a fury in [one’s] words, but not the words.”

Throughout the two-hour performance, musicians and actor continued to weave sounds of Africa with Morrison’s stories, moving back and forth in time, to and from worldly pasts and spiritual presents. The texts were all spoken by the dead Desdemona, until the singing Barbary finally spoke at the very end.

Desdemona explained that her African maid was her sole companion as a child, the one who “alone conspired [to let her] imagination run free.” She recreated the first time she met Othello, at a party. She noted that the man had a glint in his eye “identical to Barbary’s”; we noted her naiveté about Africans. Becoming Othello, she retold the adventure stories that he had used to woo his bride (in a clever twist, the anthropophagi lacked throats; they could not sing). Laying on the ground, Desdemona recreated the pillow talk preceding and following their consummation. So she remembered the past, but she also parroted the voices of the dead. When Othello’s and Desdemona’s bereaved and dead mothers met, their initial antagonism led to a realization that they “have much to share”: their different gods had forsaken them, had not protected their children. Benko’s acting skills were considerable; each character sounded different, and her varied vocal registers and accents only enhanced the exhaustingly intense stories.

Fig. 19.

Rokia Traoré as Barbary, singers Fatim Kouyaté, Bintou Soumbounou, and Kadiatou Sangaré, and Tina Benko as Desdemona in Cal Preformances’ 2011 production of Desdemona, directed by Peter Sellars. Photo courtesy of Peter DaSilva.

In Desdemona’s exchanges with (ventriloquized) Emilia and Barbary (voiced by Traoré), we saw the resentment others bore to this wealthy white woman. Her literal post-mortem with Emilia revealed that Desdemona blamed Emilia for her fatal silence. We also saw Emilia’s bitterness, from being forced to serve a demanding narcissist (“prithee unpin me here,” she recalled mockingly). Desdemona’s innocent eagerness to see her “best friend” Barbary yielded the play’s most poignant exchange. “We shared so much,” squealed the white woman, and Barbary responded, “We shared nothing. You don’t even know my name. Barbary . . . .is the geography of the foreigner.” But at last they recalled the “Willow Song,” and why they had both sung...