Guess what! My brother wrote back to me about his experience playing Othello in the Shakespeare festival! (Just for context, when he performed it, he actually only did the very end scene of the play, where Othello does his monologue, and then kills himself.)
Here’s the part of my email where I asked him for his thoughts on it:
“I do have a kind of a random request... And if this is too like, pulls your brain out of the game, just lemme know and that's cool. But I am just about to read Othello in my Shakespeare class, and I just wondered if there was any way you could send me a little description of your experience with acting it, and playing that specific role. Like, did it change anything about how you look at life, or people, or did you feel some super intense emotion or not, and like, how much do you feel like you were able to put yourself in your characters shoes, those kinds of things... I just want to know how the story feels different from the perspective of someone who's acted it.”
And here is his reply:
"So Othello thoughts velocemente... I did feel really really enveloped in my role when I did it mostly because to perform an extreme part like that well, you have to try to feel at least a little of what they felt and put yourself in their shoes as best you can. To be honest after playing the role of Othello, I feel for the guy! like reading a story like that by itself leaves you feeling like okay that was kind of weird but playing the part helps you empathize (sypathize? hmmm) with him. Like his love for his wife really is freakishly awesome!! It's a kind of love that's strong enough to kind of steal away the common sense normal people have (like not to kill yourself and stuff). It's a deep love so completely real in the mind of Othello that life itself becomes secondary to the love he shares with his wife. So yeah obviously we would say that suicide isn't the best way to deal with tragedy but it illustrates a beautiful idea of how to live and love. (just handle bad outcomes less rashly you know?) any way those are my thoughts : )"
This was a really cool experience for me to see how acting affected my brother’s perspective on Othello. I think it’s interesting how he seems to feel more strongly about the deep love aspect of Othello himself, rather than his previous tragic downfall that lead to the tragedy in the first place. It seems to me that the scene he acted made a lot deeper impression on him than the rest of the story, which he only read or heard, because he only had to become that part of Othello. I think it makes sense, that since the deep love aspect is what the scene he played was all about, that emotion, and sympathy for Othello is what stuck. Putting ourselves in the characters shoes makes the story become about us too, and not just the characters, so it sticks.
Thinking about this whole idea has made me want to put myself in the characters’ shoes more as I read these plays. I think that if I could do that, there would be whole aspects of it, or themes embedded in it that I could never see any other way.
(Thanks to my little bro for taking the time to share some thoughts J)
