Overview

Italian actor Luigi Lo Cascio is best known for his remarkable career in film, which began in 2000 with Marco Tullio Giordana's biopic of Peppino Impastato, a lone mafia fighter in the small town of Cinisi, in The Hundred Steps. However, Lo Cascio's passion for acting began in the theatre, a medium that pushes actors to find their own physical and verbal language. In several interviews, he has commented on how, per force, film flattens expression and uses a more quotidian language that takes poetry away from actors in order to leave it to directors and cinematographers. After having played several Shakespearean characters on stage, in 2014 he decided to adapt Shakespeare's Othello in Sicilian dialect, writing an original play, which he also directed and acted in as Iago. The adaptation is motivated by an understandable desire to make the classic text speak to a twenty-first-century audience, while the choice of a language that few understand is determined by its rawness and implicit poetry. Sicilian is immediate, expressive, and apt to convey emotions that standard Italian turns into literary language. Lo Cascio's Othello creates an original mixture of contemporary and timeless concerns in an original play about the impossibility of men and women to understand each other. --from ""Crimes of Passion: Lo Cascio's Otello, a Sicilian Shakespearean Moor,"" by Gloria Pastorino

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9781599541587

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Luigi Lo Cascio is a theatre and film actor, director, and writer. He was awarded the David di Donatello as Best Actor for his first film role in I cento passi (2000, directed by Marco Tullio Giordana, with whom he also worked in La meglio gioventu, Sanguepazzo, and Romanzo di una strage). Among other films, he starred in Luce dei miei occhi and La vita che vorrei (Giuseppe Piccioni), Il piu bel giorno della mia vita and La bestia nel cuore (Cristina Comencini), Buongiorno notte (Marco Bellocchio), Mare nero (Roberta Torre), Miracle at St. Anna (Spike Lee), Baaria (Giuseppe Tornatore), Noi credevamo (Mario Martone), and Il capitale umano (Paolo Virzi). His directorial film debut, La citta ideale, which he also wrote and starred in, won the Best Italian Film award at the 69th Venice Film Festival. He wrote and directed several works for the theatre. OTHELLO debuted in February 2014. Gloria Pastorino is Full Professor of Italian and French at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she also teaches English and World literature, drama, and film. Her publications include articles on Italian theatre, cinema and migration; Italian cinema, mafia and masculinity; Beyond the Grave: Zombies and the Romero Legacy (with Bruce Peabody; McFarland), and translations for American productions of plays by Dario Fo, Luigi Pirandello, Mariangela Gualtieri, Romeo Castellucci, Lella Costa, and Juan Mayorga.

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