Play Reading of The Venetians and a Talkback with the Playwright Offered on Two Evenings at Fenimore Art Museum
The Venetians – A Play Reading and Talkback with the Playwright, Matt Barbot
Two nights: Wednesday, August 24 and Thursday, August 25 • 6:30 p.m.
Fenimore Art Museum • Lucy B. Hamilton Amphitheater
Free admission with suggested donation
Included with regular Museum admission.
Cooperstown, New York – Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown presents a play reading of The Venetians and also a talkback with the playwright, Matt Barbot, immediately following. The program is offered on two evenings: Wednesday, August 24 and again on Thursday, August 25—starting at 6:30 p.m. in the museum’s Lucy B. Hamilton Amphitheater overlooking Otsego Lake. Admission to the play reading is free with a suggested donation.
In The Venetians, Othello, the Moorish general, wants to give his beloved Desdemona the beautiful secret wedding she deserves, but that means borrowing money. Unfortunately for him, the Jewish moneylender Shylock has spent too long among the terrible people of Venice to see this marriage as anything but a death sentence for Othello. Unbeknownst to Shylock, however, his own daughter has begun an illicit romance that may bring the whole world crashing down on all their heads. A crossover between Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and The Tragedy of Othello, The Venetians uses two classical outsiders to ask questions about immigration, assimilation, national identity, and what acceptance truly means.
This project is made possible with the generous support of Art Bridges.
Fenimore Art Museum is located at 5798 State Route 80, less than one mile from the center of Cooperstown. For more information visit FenimoreArt.org.
About Fenimore Art Museum
Fenimore Art Museum, located on the shores of Otsego Lake—James Fenimore Cooper’s “Glimmerglass”—in historic Cooperstown, New York, features a wide-ranging collection of American art including folk art; important American 18th- and 19th-century landscape, genre, and portrait paintings; more than 125,000 historic photographs representing the technical developments made in photography and providing extensive visual documentation of the region’s unique history; and the renowned Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art comprised of nearly 900 art objects representative of a broad geographic range of North American Indian cultures, from the Northwest Coast, Eastern Woodlands, Plains, Southwest, Great Lakes, and Prairie regions. Visit FenimoreArt.org.
