"Othello" at CalShakes

CalShakes photo by Alessandra Mello

Oh, my.

I am deeply conflicted about this production. The acting is top-notch. The staging is wonderfully minimal, which should enable the focus to be on the words and the characters. Unfortunately, director Eric Ting apparently doesn't trust us to understand the play, so he interrupts it, frequently, to have actors drop out of character and explain what's happening.

I'm not going to spend any time explaining Othello here. I had never read or seen the play, but I knew more than enough to understand how well it pertains to modern-day life. It's a great choice of plays right now. Race relations, xenophobia, domestic violence, Islamophobia, truth and trust issues--it's all there. Bring it on!

The Good

The acting ensemble is terrific. Particularly outstanding are James Carpenter as Iago, Aldo Billingslea in the title role, and Julie Eccles as Emilia. Liz Sklar is also very good as Desdemona, and Matthew Baldiga as Rodrigo manages to steal a few scenes. For the most part, they all gave consistent, nuanced, and (dare I say) dramatic performances. This is exactly what you want from Othello, an immersion into a world of high emotions and intricate plots.

The staging is quite brilliant. There are ten chairs placed in a rough square in the middle of the 3/4-thrust stage with no other set pieces. For the most part, actors "enter" and "exit" by standing up or sitting down, and it works wonderfully, with the action flowing seamlessly between scenes. The actors are all in plain, modern dress, with only an occasional scarf, hood, or hat to distinguish changes. It's all designed to not distract from the play itself, the words, the interactions, the ruminations of the characters. And in that sense, it works brilliantly.

I particularly liked the way characters were able to address characters who were not in the scene by looking at or walking around the seated, "absent" characters. There is a wonderful fullness to the performance when all the characters can be present or not, as needed. There is a little inconsistency with whether the actors stay in character when seated, but for the most part, it works great.

The Bad

I wish I could just leave it there, with a terrific cast on a simple stage that facilitates their work, bringing a brilliant piece of literature to life. Or perhaps I should say, I wish the director had left it there.

Apparently director Ting doesn't think his audience will understand how a powerful black man being manipulated and brought down by the connivance of his white subordinate applies to current affairs. Or that xenophobic fear and resentment of a Moor needs to be illustrated with the explanation that "Moor" means "Muslim" projected over the stage during intermission, and just in case that isn't clear, he adds some sound clips of Donald Trump denouncing Islamic extremism. Similarly, he seems to think we won't find a man strangling his wife in their bed horrific enough, so he provides narration of a description of the biological effects of strangulation on the body. There's more: I'll spare you.

Ultimately, Ting shows he doesn't respect his audience, his actors, or his script. I kept expecting subtitles to start flashing "AUTHOR'S MESSAGE" or something.

But no, that won't do. Let's interrupt the final, climactic scene to have a 10-minute audience talk-back session, and then finish the play, sucking virtually all of the intensity out of it.

The Talk-Back

I generally like talk-back sessions. The give and take between audience and cast/crew can be really enlightening and add to the understanding of the play, the production, and the context. But that's not what this was. This was a solicitation of audience feedback, slightly guided by questions from the stage (asked by the recently-deceased Desdemona). And a number of people said interesting and moving things. Mostly it gave an opportunity for sanctimony from the stage, and substantive questions were usually bounced back with "what did you think?" and such.

But that session could have been done after the play, and thus avoided deflating the ending. In a setting that seemed designed to let the play be the thing, the director seemed set on making sure we knew that the production was all-important, and that there were some really key points we needed to get.

It appeared to work for a number of people, but ultimately the machinations detracted from what seemed like it should have been the best play I saw in a long time, and instead turned it into a mediocrity. Instead of coming home enraptured by the performance, I find myself pissed off by the director spoiling his actors' work.