The Play's The Thing (In Ashland)

(Tuesday, September 16th). We reached our digs (The Inn at Lithia Springs) in Ashland about 4:30 in the afternoon, six and a half hours after leaving the cats in "stir" back in Marin. We were pleased that our request to have the room we stayed in last year - a quiet spot at the rear of the resort complex - was honored. We quickly unloaded our mounds of gear from the car, took a shower, and headed off to dinner at Tabu.
In the evening before the plays begin, musicians and dancers perform on the "Green" in front of the theatres. We could hear the music, but only saw other perplexed visitors gazing at the lawn and wondering where the performers had gotten to. Alas, too late (to catch the tail end of the show) we discovered that they were across the street in Carpenter Hall due to the threat of rain from the dark skies.
It had been about 95 in Ashland during the day, and it was still very warm inside the open-air Elizabethan Stage when we entered at 7:45. When I bought a pair of cushions and blankets from the Soroptimists, I asked about the odds of a rain out. They predicted dry lightning, but no rain, which proved to be an accurate forecast.
Onstage, Iago, looking more like a gang member with a crewcut and long black leather jacket, wove his intricate web of deceit deftly, but not quite deftly enough. Miffed at being passed over for selection as chief lieutenant to General Othello, his plot to kill Cassio, who held that position, and get even with Othello for not choosing him, nearly succeeded. In a fit a unjustified jealous rage induced by Iago's treachery, Othello kills his wife, the lovely and chaste Desdemona. Iago's ally in the plan, Roderigo, has his lips sealed when slain by Cassio. But the scheme unravels when Cassio is merely wounded rather than killed by Roderigo, when Iago kills his own wife in front of witnesses, and when Othello, overcome by grief and guilt, commits suicide. Instead of becoming Othello's favorite, Iago is hauled off to Venice to be tried, tortured, and executed. Like a modern day Hollywood movie, "Othello" demonstrates that crime (at least if it is murder) never pays.