Frailty, Thy Name Ain't Woman

Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief

When it comes to the female gender, Shakespeare is not to be trusted. For every fully realized, three-dimensional heroine in his plays -- say, Rosalind, Beatrice, Juliet -- there are two or more women who cleave pretty closely to some medieval male ideal of the Perfect Woman, i.e., pretty, subservient, and willing to take whatever abuse her man dishes out. Think Ophelia, Hero, Desdemona.

We've already received one dramatic lesson in this subject this year, in playwright Susan Kelso's Roses and Thistles, wherein a host of Shakespearean women spoke up for themselves from the stage of the Vortex. Now comes another, in the form of iron belly muses' production of Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief. Paula Vogel's comedy takes an approach somewhat similar to the one in Kelso's play in that it shoves Othello, Iago, and all those other yammering, hotheaded guys off the stage so that the play's women can tell the story from their POV. And what they reveal is that they are not at all the "sweet and delicate creatures" portrayed in the Bard of Avon's tragedy. They are loud, lusty, not a little pissed off over their second-class status, and more than capable of holding their own against the men who try to run their lives. Deanna Shoemaker directs the production, which stars Critics Table award winner Lee Eddy, Esther's Follies alumnus Tamara Beland, and Boston University grad Holly Babbitt. November 9-December 1 at the Vortex. 699-5954.

As it turns out, this week Austin's stages are burgeoning with tales of women chafing against oppression of one kind or another, rebelling against it, or finding new roles for themselves. The UT Department of Theatre & Dance is offering two new plays in this vein: Bear Brotherhood, a culture clash drama by Michael Kranes in which a young Mormon woman moves to Alaska to serve as nanny to a cub for a tribe of bear-worshipping men, and theevolutionofwoman, six 10-minute plays by S. Lucia Del Vecchio that explore the experience of being female in modern American society. Bear Brotherhood runs November 9-11; theevolutionofwoman runs November 16-18. Both are performed in the Lab Theatre. 471-1444... Over at the Auditorium on Waller Creek, Different Stages is reviving Summer and Smoke, Tennessee Williams' drama of a repressed Southern spinster. Rebecca Robinson stars as Alma Winemiller in the production directed by Norman Blumensaadt. It runs through December 1. 454-TIXS... Meanwhile, at Bass Concert Hall, Austin Lyric Opera is singing Gounod's Faust, which might not be exclusively about the oppression of women, but you have to admit, poor Marguerite gets a pretty raw deal at the hands of her Mephistopheles-dealing man (wooed, impregnated, and abandoned, so that she goes mad, murders her own baby, and gets thrown into prison). The always enthralling soprano Ai-Lan Zhu alternates in the role with rising star Kelly Kaduce. 472-5992... The Bedlam Faction, which made its debut this year with a rousing revival of Volpone, returns with Edward Ravenscroft's The London Cuckolds, a rowdy 17th-century comedy about women who cheat on their husbands. It opens at The Off Center November 16 and runs through December 8. 963-3851... And at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre on the St. Edward's University campus is Arthur Miller's Playing for Time, a stage version of the playwright's Emmy-winning 1980 television drama about cabaret singer Fania Fenelon and her fellow women musicians in Auschwitz who were forced to provide music as their fellow inmates were marched to their deaths. Playing beside the St. Edward's student actors are accomplished artists Babs George, Jill Parker-Jones, and Jenny Larson. Melba Martinez directs. It runs through November 18. 448-8484... And while her appearance might not exactly fit in this theme, we would be remiss if we didn't mention the presence of another cabaret singer, Ann Hampton Callaway, in Austin this weekend. The Tony-nominated cast member of Swing! inaugurates the new Austin Cabaret Theater with a two-night stand at Scottish Rite Theatre. Her smooth and luscious renditions of the great standards are like sweet cream poured in your ear. 462-2220.