Santiago: Making Bilingual Shakespeare Count

Abstract

ABSTRACT Santiago is a bilingual script of Othello, created jointly by Joe Falocco of Texas State University and Shakespearean scholar and translator Alfredo Michel Modenessi. Developed during spring 2023, it was performed as a staged reading at the 51st Annual Shakespeare Association of America Conference. This production directed by Maija Garcia of the Guthrie Theatre's Professional Training Program, featured a BIPOC and Latine cast. In performance, the script offered new perspectives on Othello, shifting focus away from Othello and Desdemona and highlighting Iago and Emilia instead. Santiago thus seems less concerned with issues of race and colourism than with questions of religious and cultural identity, especially as marked by linguistic power founded upon the ability to code-switch with ease between two languages, in this case, (Shakespeare's) English and (Modenessi's) Spanish. An extended interview with Falocco, Modenessi, and the two Texas State actors who voiced in Minneapolis examines these claims; a coda then places Santiago into wider conversation with prior scholarship on the nature of translation, issues of Othello and race, and the newly emergent field of Borderlands Shakespeare.