Toni Morrison said that Othello was the most American Shakespeare play because, in this country, America doesn't kill what you love, it makes you kill what you love. While that ideal reading of Shakespeare's classic tragedy of passion, race, and violence isn't exactly what's happening onstage at Broadway's Ethel Barrymore Theatre, under the direction of Kenny Leon, it's at least an aspirational interpretation of a play that can seem so utterly vital and yet simultaneously so resistant to progressive reimagining.
Any future quibbles aside, Leon's production keeps you narratively riveted, and renders the events of the story serviceably moving. The play is the saga of the noted general Othello (Denzel Washington), the so-called "Moor of Venice" (a term of no precise ethnic identity, but clearly Shakespeare imagined a Black man in this drama), who falls in love with the (white) Venetian Desdemona (Molly Osborne). Othello is then brought catastrophically low by the machinations of the wicked Iago (Jake Gyllenhaal), a soldier in Othello's army who has recently been passed-over for a promotion. The drama takes its form when Iago seeks revenge on Othello for the snub. (As John Milton with Satan so the Bard with Iago: both knew there is nothing more dangerous than a white man who feels he is acting "from sense of injured merit.")
Leon has chosen to direct the ensemble towards a manner of Shakespearean communication that has no whiff of metric verse. The entire cast is devoted to treating Shakespeare's language -- its hills, its dales, its five-feet-per-line -- as totally conversational realism. This is not necessarily a crime, as the results basically speak for themselves: many of those here to see the play likely being more engaged by Denzel than the play's author, there does seem to be a real value in presenting the words in an essentially "regular" way, as the crowd at the performance I saw often responded to the action as if they were completely unfamiliar with the source material. Such a circumstance is ideal: if you can experience one of the world's great artistic masterworks sight-unseen, can a greater pleasure be found on this earth?
However, such an approach to the language has its limitations. No character in Shakespeare has as many soaring poetic arias as Othello, and Washington really only reaches for such moments during his "O blood, blood, blood" outburst, and in his speech on if it "had pleased Heaven to try me with affliction." In the former case, he nails the shift in Othello's early stunning and grandiose imagery ("Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch Heaven") which when poisoned by Iago's lies about Desdemona's infidelity, become the bestial and grotesque imagery of the later-play ("goats and monkeys"). And the latter speech takes you, via his tortured eloquence on how he could bear every plague from the gods other than the one he's been cursed with, to a gutting conclusion.
The rest of the time? Well, you leave the theater more impressed by the fact that a Denzel Washington exists than by the uniqueness of the Othello he's created. Leon has encouraged Washington to play up certain moments of comedy in the earlier half of the play that mostly relate to his love for Desdemona, and it's tough for such moments not to ring as cheap due to the sanctioned Denzel persona. With the singular greatness of Othello as a vessel for dramatic poetry, and Washington as both a great star who is also a great actor, you wish Leon hadn't unilaterally demanded such a flippant, casual, over-the-shoulder approach to Shakespeare's rhetoric. Onstage, just being yourself isn't always enough, and it would have been nice if Washington had more chances to catch the verse and soar. In Leon's production, you will never find any actor "discovering" their words or treating Shakespeare's verse as "living thought," and you can either beat your dramaturgical head against the seat in front of you or accept the show as given.
While the streamlined approach to the language has its basic functionality, it's hard to imagine your average theatre-goer being able to appreciate the richer ironies of the text along the way. The fact that in one scene Iago tells Cassio that "reputation is an idle, false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving," and then in an about-face later tells Othello that "good name in man and woman, dear my lord, is the immediate jewel of our souls," is likely to go wildly unnoticed.
An oft-touted issue in the text of Othello is the amount of soliloquy-time given not to the title role, but to his diabolical tempter. While sheer tonnage of soliloquies is a poor metric by which to judge how well we know a character (Lear has zero), it's hard to escape the fact that Iago is given more stage-time than the people whose lives he ruins, particularly Othello. As the evil ensign, Jake Gyllenhaal dives in feet-first and creates a totally credible psychopathic grunt, the type of Marine who thought he could get ahead in the Corps but just ended up reenacting the traits that made him unimpressive as a civilian. The technical apparatus of his solo-speeches (lit by Natasha Katz), plus the raw feeling he invests the character's stated motivations (especially his curious belief that Othello has made him a cuckold), go a long way towards a vivid rendering of Shakespeare's most purely intellectual (and thus most purely terrifying) creation. You feel Gyllenhaal is building a character from the ground-up with no reliance on his screen identity, and the role feels totally credible.
The rest of the cast is largely stalwart, with Osborne never striking a wrong note as Desdemona. Andrew Burnap is a fantastic Cassio, a role that can easily feel anonymous, and his breakdown after a night of drunkenness that loses him his lieutenancy is genuinely devastating ("I have lost my reputation"). His too-forward kissing of Emilia (Kimber Elayne Sprawl) feels strong-armed by Leon into a conversation the play isn't really having (never except then does this Cassio feel so socially clueless), but Burnap excellently communicates that Cassio is not just bad at holding his liquor, but also truly does not like the experience of intoxication. Sprawl herself shines in her ultimate confrontation with Othello after his murder of Desdemona: Leon deftly understands that there is no one we'd rather see dress Othello down in that moment than a Black woman, and while the relationship between Emilia and her husband Iago feels largely unmined, Sprawl sticks Emilia's most important landing. She also gives a moving rendition of the speech about female agency in regards to marital infidelity: "Let husbands know their wives have sense like them..." Anthony Michael Lopez delivers a well-balanced Roderigo, not a total idiot but clearly dangerously gullible. However, a character-as-directorial-misstep is Bianca (played by Julee Cerda): the role of the sex-worker/girlfriend of Cassio feels like it was given short-shrift in Leon's vision, and while the moment when Emilia castigates Bianca as a "strumpet" is certainly fascinating from a literary standpoint, why we need that insult from that particular character (who is largely the play's voice of feminist agency) remains unclear, and her thread of the production arrives undercooked. (Also, Leon's decision to make Emilia a lieutenant in the army has great potential but goes unexplored.)
Leon's Othello purports to take place "in the near future" (an opening projection tells us so), but all that really does is situate the action functionally in a chronologic neverland; it might as well take place at no time at all. Othello benefits from a grounded, realistic setting as terrestrial as its military inhabitants. In Shakespeare, Venice has a tactile locality as deliberate as the way Bohemia or Illyria have an evocative surreality. Leon's production appears to be a basically contemporary military setting (program notes specifically cite the Marines), and while costume designer Dede Ayite missed an opportunity to have Cassio in his civvies after his ousting from Othello's command, everyone on the design team is speaking the same language. That being said, fight director Thomas Schall seems to have taken the path of least resistance with Othello's strangling of Desdemona, and Othello's "be sure thou prove my love a whore" outburst against Iago would have benefitted from an actual laying-on of hands.
The production stumbles with its rushed treatment of the ending. Obviously Shakespeare giving the final words to Lodovico (Rob Heaps) is deeply frustrating, but concluding the play with Othello's self-slaughter can't help but feel melodramatic. We need just a touch of falling action before the denouement. Also, the excision of Othello's speech about his "sword of Spain," while comprehensible in its desire to streamline the play's conclusion, loses a beat of decompression that it turns out the show deeply needs, otherwise everything is just too frenzied; you find yourself wondering how Iago could have been interrogated by Cassio and Lodovico when he was only offstage for like two seconds.
(Commenting on the obvious use of microphones by Broadway actors in non-musicals feels as unnecessary as it is discouraging, and we can leave that discussion at the fact that this show is no exception.)
Much scholarship (particularly by Dr. Ayanna Thompson) has been done on how the rehearsal room dynamics of producing Othello often place actors of color at a disadvantage to their white collaborators. When you (frequently) have a white director helming the process, the implicit tendency is often to favor the actor playing Iago over Othello (as Iago does textually have a higher line-count), which puts Othello at a social disadvantage in addition Shakespeare's dramaturgical one, which was the placement of his pain and trauma in the dramatic structure of a comedy. We in the audience are in on the Iago "joke" but Othello isn't, and this can take a real physical and psychic toll on the Othello performer. Such performative pitfalls feel generally avoided in Leon's production, and the performance deliberately strays away from mining the possible comedy of Iago's machinations: many of the references to Iago being "honest" -- and there are a ton -- have been cut, likely to avoid morbid laughter at sensitive moments.
However the dynamics of the rehearsal room or the play's racial representation are addressed, the event of viewing Othello, regardless of the subjective quality of the production being viewed, tends to be a totalizing experience. The tragedy has been referred to as "not [Shakespeare's] greatest work, but his best play," and the time-art of theatre makes this value-judgment tough to resist. When you hear the actor playing Othello admit that he has "loved not wisely, but too well," and hear the following passage about the tears streaming down his cheeks --
"...one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unuséd to the melting mood,
Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum."
-- it is incredibly hard not to believe that you are experiencing the best possible story, despite intellectually understanding every reason to the contrary. Such is the power of Othello. Like the poison of Iago's lies, it burrows so deep in the bloodstream that its power is ineradicable and overwhelming. Such power can be felt even in the presence of a very good if not sterling production. Apparently it's possible to experience your full love for a play even when not every single one of your individual standards for that play have been met. A tangible pleasure is felt in being in the same room as the poetry of your life. You could say Shakespeare's words and drama endure via a unique poetic half-life. They have incantatory force that, apart from performative representation, discharge their self-evident power by doing nothing more than existing.
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