THE FULL-LENGTH FILM VERSION NOW STREAMABLE ON TUBI tv! 

Info about the film premiere at Harvard here

Photography: 1-9 Eric Antoniou, 10-21 Öykü Canlı 

OTHELLO IN THE SERAGLIO
The Tragedy of Sümbül the Black Eunuch
a coffeehouse opera

dedicated to Tom Zajac

Conceived and composed by Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol
Storyteller script by Robert Labaree
Performed on European period instruments and traditional Turkish instruments

2o PERFORMANCES SINCE 2015

With eleven musicians and a storyteller, Othello in the Seraglio is scaled to the intimate, informal setting of a coffeehouse in seventeenth century Istanbul (Constantinople). The storyteller spins out a well-known tale, an historically-based legend of love and jealousy, intensified by the crossing of boundaries between the free and the enslaved, white and black, Muslim and non-Muslim, East and West.

Based on:
The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, by William Shakespeare (1603)
Un Capitano Moro (A Moorish Captain), by Giovanbattista Giraldi (Cinzio) (1565)
Kızlarağası’nın Piçi (The Bastard of the Chief Black Eunuch), by Reşad Ekrem Koçu (1933)

program       photos