Othello
By William Shakespeare. Conceived by Yuri Yeremin. Directed by David Wheeler. Set design by Riccardo Hernandez. Costumes by Catherine Zuber. Lighting by John Ambrosone. Sound by David Remedios. Original music by Samrat Chakrabarti, with additional music by Nick Niles and James Caran. With John Douglas Thompson, Mirjana Jokovic, Benjamin Evett, Amber Allison, Thomas Derrah, Karen MacDonald, Richard Snee, Will LeBow, Jon Bernthal, Ken Cheeseman, and Ian Collett-Barr. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center, in repertory through January 17.

Hamlet speaks of holding " the mirror up to Nature — to show Virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. " Othello, a play in which both virtue and scorn are grossly misperceived, is played out in the beautiful staging currently on view at the American Repertory Theatre before a curving wall of mirrors in which the stage images multiply, blur, and shimmer. Like the play’s title character, we look right at things and perceive them distortedly. Not only is the visual metaphor fascinating; in the case of Othello it’s also apt, since the hero’s mind’s eye is tricked into the torturous visions that bring him down.

Despite its mirror-mirror-as-the-wall conceit, this is not one of the ART’s wilder-eyed shots at the Bard. Its aim is true, if not every moment is compelling. The production features John Douglas Thompson, here as he was two seasons ago at Trinity Rep a heartbreaking Othello, and Thomas Derrah as a deliberately unprepossessing Iago. As the adored young wife who proves Othello’s Achilles’ heel, Yugoslavian-born Mirjana Jokovic is a lissome, playful Desdemona with just enough vixen in her to fertilize Iago’s carefully sown aspersions on her fidelity. The mirrors, however, prove distancing as well as beautiful. And, in part because the pace slows in the first scene of Shakespeare’s fifth act, when murder in the streets precedes murder in the boudoir, the production doesn’t come to full, tragic bloom until Karen MacDonald’s powerful Emilia confronts an Othello almost hypnotized by the horror of his own deed.

Shakespeare’s tragedy of the Moorish general " that loved not wisely but too well " and the crafty underling who dupes him into a lethal jealousy was to have been staged at the ART by Yuri Yeremin, the noted Russian director who helmed last season’s exquisitely choreographed Ivanov. He is now credited with the production’s conception. But Yeremin speaks very little English, he favored deep cuts in the text, and if Ivanov is any indication, he’s a more Meyerholdian than Stanislavskian director of actors. Midway through rehearsals, ART stalwart David Wheeler was called in to help with matters of text, and he’s now credited with the production’s direction. The curious if not entirely surprising result is an intelligent, straightforward, not-quite-jelled staging swimming in Yeremin’s mirrors — and sometimes making poignant use of them. In the first scene in which Iago plants the seeds of suspicion that grow into beanstalks in the noble black warrior’s imagination, Thompson’s Othello approaches a mirror, staring into it intensely. " She had eyes, and chose me, " he asserts almost questioningly, then undoes his white shirt, as if to examine his foreigner’s complexion.

Othello begins, of course, on a street in Venice, here the wide-open floor of a three-quarters arena through which dark-uniformed soldiers and flat-hatted troubadours stroll, a trio playing Turkish-tinged music redolent of a gondola tour. Summoned to a midnight session with the Duke, the small band of characters, multiplied into a battalion by the mirrors, march in circles to military drums. When the action moves to Cyprus, where Othello has been dispatched to fight off Turks who conveniently drown, leaving him lots of time to wrestle " the green-eyed monster " coined and fed by Iago, a smaller, vivid-blue platform chugs out from beneath the mirrors. The sea is " a high-wrought flood, " here a large, billowing white cloth out from under which the characters, in spats and tropical whites (or a slinky rust slip/gown for Desdemona), are burped onto shore.

All this seems part and parcel of Yeremin’s stylized vision, augmented by set designer Riccardo Hernandez’s mirrors and crannies, costume designer Catherine Zuber’s bold contrasts, John Ambrosone’s glimmery lighting, and David Remedios’s watery sound design. As things progress, one senses Wheeler taking over, but as the action grows more naturalistic, you sometimes wonder where you are. A series of scenes set " before the castle " in Cyprus unfolds with a random Oriental rug placed to one side of the stage. It’s there for no apparent reason other than to lay a foundation for the gorgeous-looking deathbed scene, with Jokovic’s Ophelia a tiny island of white lace and wedding sheet floating in a stage-wide sea of Oriental carpet.

But acting is what Othello needs to be about. As ART Institute dramaturgy student Kyle Brenton points out in a newsletter essay chronicling violent 19th-century audience reaction to the work, " Unless Othello inspires swoons, tears, or gunshots, the play is lost. " And modern Othellos must grapple not only with the heady mix of poetry and melodrama that had our forebears pulling out the smelling salts and smoking pistols, but also with the period racial stereotyping inherent in a script whose black-and-white imagery is sometimes lyrical and sometimes brute.

On a deeper level, the play can be read, as does the Polish scholar Jan Kott, as an examination of whether the world is good, as Othello perceives it, or vile, as Iago does — and it’s the latter’s correct choice that results in his own, as well as everyone else’s, undoing. But there’s still the sticky wicket of racism in Shakespeare’s noble-savage characterization of the Moor, and Thompson plays against it effectively. His Othello is more modest than stately — and less relentlessly volatile than he was at Trinity. But as Iago leads him " by the nose " to jealous madness, his own suffering is palpable — sometimes at unexpected moments, as when, thundering at Desdemona, " I took you for that cunning whore of Venice/That married with Othello, " he turns his own name into a long, tearful cry. His murder of Desdemona, carried out after tenderly crawling beneath her sheet, is as much a sacrifice as an assault. (Indeed, the pillows Othello takes to his wife seem less dreadful than the huge blade he has sequestered under one of the rugs for himself.) And though Thompson is not a bombastic Othello, he has electrifying moments, not least when, goaded to an inarticulate fury, he lurches powerfully backward into a stiff seizure (Derrah’s insidious Iago thoughtfully holding down his tongue).

As for the usually exceptional Derrah, he doesn’t command as much attention as you might expect in the role most actors would rather play than Othello. (For one thing, being poisonous from the start, Iago needn’t turn on a dime from reasoned leadership to foaming madness.) Derrah’s villain is a seemingly self-effacing nebbish; it’s easy to believe his Machiavellian machinations go undetected, but he failed to seduce me into the web of what Coleridge dubbed the character’s " motiveless malignity. " Even in his Richard III–like confidences to the audience, Derrah’s Iago is all malevolent business. Although he does occasionally surprise us with an unlooked-for pounce or gesture (say, viciously pelting his wife with grapes), and his diction gleams like Macheath’s teeth, this ensign more often fades calculatedly into the background. Only with Ken Cheeseman’s ably sad-sack Roderigo, the lovesick gentleman Iago cons into serving as both his bank and his hired knife, does he not bother to kow-tow, at one point pretending to sympathize with a wound, then giving it a smart slap.

Derrah is among ART’s best actors, and his physical ease and fluidity here, as always, impress. But he presents an Iago exuding the banality, rather than the pizzazz, of evil. Then–New York Times critic Frank Rich described the most remarkable Iago of my experience, Christopher Plummer (who in the 1980s assayed the part opposite James Earl Jones), as " a bristling hornet of a man. " Derrah is more a cold spider purposely taking a back seat to his fly.

Issue Date: December 6-13, 2001

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