“What you know, you know,” goes one of the more famous lines spoken by the evil Iago. Yet Shakespeare’s tragedy derives much of its pathos from everything that cannot be known with certainty.
Before the Shakespeare Theater Company’s production of “Othello” begins, a wordless prologue sees Iago (Ben Turner); his wife, Emilia (Melanie Field); and his gullible friend Roderigo (Daniel Velez) drift through the outskirts of a forested encampment. Susan Hilferty’s cautiously contemporary set design, littered with lawn chairs and milk crates, has the provisional feel of a military barracks assembled in haste. From a battered old television set, Iago and company take in the news of Cassio’s promotion and exchange conspiratorial looks.
One popular, if simplistic, interpretation of Iago perceives him as an all-controlling spider positioned at the center of a web. This production, with its enticingly opaque Iago, instead emphasizes how precarious the junior officer’s schemes are — how frequently chance intervenes, as when Bianca (Giovanna Drummond) tosses a handkerchief at Cassio (Lucas Iverson) within eyeshot of Othello (Wendell Pierce), and how often Iago must improvise his wicked schemes in real time.
Over the course of nearly three hours, the audience circles the same questions the play itself raises without settling. Is Iago driven by professional humiliation after the “Moorish” general Othello promotes Cassio over him? Is Iago’s cruelty born of boredom, suspicion that Othello has cuckolded him, thwarted desire, racial animus, or simply an appetite for manipulation that feeds upon whatever circumstance presents itself? This production declines to tidy these possibilities into a single pathology even as it makes a case for its relevance to our era of insurrections.
With his neck tattoo and camo garb, Turner’s Iago could be one of the Jan. 6 rioters; he may be plotting vengeance against Othello, but Simon Godwin’s sleek production spatializes that vengeance. That point is driven home when Roderigo accusingly reminds Iago, “Thou told’st me thou didst hold him in thy hate.” Turner, though occasionally resorting to familiar villainous gestures — a contemplative stroke of the chin, a smirk held half a beat too long — nonetheless keeps the audience revising its judgment of him.
In contrast to Iago’s multifactor malice, Pierce’s ramrod Othello confines himself mostly to one register: that of an authoritative commander who chews out every syllable. Even after Desdemona’s death at his hands, Othello speaks less like a shattered husband than a general addressing subordinates. In Pierce’s rendering, Othello is undone not so much by volcanic jealousy as by the gradual corrosion of his judgment. Before arriving in Venice, he had lived a life of “disastrous chances,” “moving accidents” and “hairbreadth ’scapes.” Pierce’s Othello briefly uncovers this older self as he shifts into the role of raconteur.
But that older self stands at strange variance with the Othello who has since absorbed the habits of Venetian rationalism. He demands “ocular proof” of Desdemona’s betrayal. He weighs probabilities in the same clipped, strategic manner as the Senators and the Duke of Venice (Todd Scofield) discuss Turkish movements and the shifting odds of invasion. In a word: He calculates. Even the loss of the cherished handkerchief — bound up with memories of his mother and her faith in spells and talismans — acquires the awful weight of an evidentiary object stripped from an older, stranger cosmology. A more subtle catastrophe may have to do with the idea that the Venetian general, through Iago’s efforts, becomes trapped inside systems of inference and starts thinking about betrayal statistically, analytically, abstractly — as if love itself could be reduced to evidence chains and risk assessment.
The production reaches an eerie pitch during the exchange between Othello and Iago in Act IV. Speaking about Desdemona (Olivia Cygan) and the strawberry-spotted kerchief, the two men begin finishing each other’s verbal fragments. Their phrases overlap, echo and stack atop one another like pillows. Iago and Othello appear, if only momentarily, to mind-meld, their language no longer severable — yet another example of how this production nods to conspiracist thinking.
Among the supporting cast, Emilia emerges as the evening’s emotional anchor. Field gives Iago’s wise wife a teasing sensuality; when she discovers Desdemona’s handkerchief, she hides it first in a bra cup, then in her pants while Iago retrieves it with his teeth. It’s a moment of bawdy playfulness that earns an appreciative laugh from the audience. Later, under a single hanging bulb during her interrogation by Othello, she more than holds her own. While Othello bellows accusations of Desdemona’s adultery, Emilia cleaves with absolute certainty to the idea of her mistress’s innocence. In a play governed by ambiguity, suspicion and interpretive vertigo, Emilia’s clarity arrives like a cleansing lance.
By the final scene, this “Othello” leaves us with the same insoluble mystery with which it began. Why does Iago do what he does? Like the bobbing beam of a flashlight in a forest, our interpretations keep silhouetting some new shape, losing it, finding another, and another.
Othello Through June 28 at Shakespeare Theater Company, Washington; shakespearetheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.
The post ‘Othello’ Review: Wendell Pierce Steps Into Iago’s Twisted Web appeared first on New York Times.
