E-Mail This Article to a Friend Ancient’s glory David Patrick Kelly’s Iago rules Hartford’s Othello BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Othello, The Moor of Venice By William Shakespeare. Directed by Karin Coonrod. Set by Efren Delgadillo Jr. Costumes by Ellen McCartney. Lighting by Justin Townsend. Sound by Annalise Albright. Composer Tony Geballe. Fight director J. David Brimmer. With Simeon Moore, David Patrick Kelly, Nafe Katter, Firdous Bamji, Molly Ward, Christopher Michael Rivera, Michael Rogers, Danielle Skraastad, Gordana Rashovich, Scott Barrow, Ezra Barnes, and cellist Clarissa Howell. At Hartford Stage through May 8.

Why don’t we just change the name of the play to Iago? Calling it Othello is like making the Steinway rather than the pianist the headliner. Oh, I know, the tragedy is Othello’s, even if the play belongs to the passed-over henchman who in a display of seat-of-his-pants malignity manipulates the newlywed Moor into suspicion, jealousy, and murder. But at Hartford Stage, where one of director Karin Coonrod’s main ideas is to contemporize the Moor’s "otherness" by making him not black but a light-skinned Arab, David Patrick Kelly’s oddball Iago still steals the show, his noosed, white-lit face the last thing we see after the final body count. Skittering crablike on short legs, maniacally twirling the zippered truncheon from which Othello’s standard extrudes, tauntingly kneading Roderigo’s head or using his own hands as puppets planning "double knavery," Kelly (a memorable Enrico IV at the American Repertory Theatre, also under Coonrod’s direction) is an eccentric dervish of a villain, his mind a matrix of warped craft from which bursts the trajectory of the play.

Coonrod collaborated with Harold Bloom on The Falstaffiad (in an ART concert reading of which the scholar actually played the fat knight), and she picks up on some of Bloom’s convictions regarding "honest Iago," among them his belief that the ensign’s one true motivation is "what Milton’s Satan calls ‘a Sense of Injured Merit.’ " Kelly’s exaggerated militaristic antics suggest a one-time zealous devotee of Othello whose love and battle bravery have mutated into nihilism and hate after he was passed over for the lieutenancy conferred on Cassio. In breezily sinister soliloquies, the actor tosses off Iago’s other ostensible grievances, settling into destroying the Moor for the pure, twisted if silken artistry of it. When his plot gets away from him, he takes a particularly nasty revenge on bean-spilling wife Emilia (a gutsy Gordana Rashovich, in the production’s other standout performance) and then, roped into custody, assumes a ghostly, shrunken mien, his craggy face a quizzical mask.

Othello was the first play performed by Hartford Stage, in 1964 on a loading dock. This production is doubtless more expensive if also bold and straightforward, quickly unfolding on an island-like if concrete-colored raised stage on which banks of lights are lowered, lifted, and swiveled to create a stark contrast between purple night and blinding day, underlining the dark-and-light imagery in the play. A lone cellist opens the production and moves about it like a moon, providing dramatic, dissonant comment. And Coonrod deploys the characters in circling patterns, whether to suggest entrapment or, in the case of Othello and Desdemona’s reunion at Cypress, a formal, breathless coming together.

In keeping with the contemporary refocusing of the play’s prejudice on an Arab Muslim rather than a black African, the costumes are mostly modern albeit eclectic, with Moroccan touches for Indian-born actor Firdous Bamji’s Moor and a blue suit with open shirt for Kelly’s skittling Iago. Danielle Skraastad’s Desdemona spends much of the play wearing a coral 1950s dress over khaki pants — just the thing for a young officer’s wife at a Cypriot outpost. As if to drive home the idea that most of the play, even the romantic exchanges between Othello and Desdemona, has taken place in public, a large four-poster bed descends like a helicopter for the sacrificial murder in the marriage bed, a scene that prove predictably wrenching.

Some African-American actors (notably James Earl Jones) have found themselves floor wipes for their Iagos precisely because they eschew the racial stereotype built into the role, declining to de-dignify the noble Moor with the savage passion into which he falls once gulled by the "green-eyed monster" on Iago’s leash. The irony is that Bamji, an attractive, authoritative, explosive Othello (though too young for the role), also does this. He conveys the general’s early delight at his young wife, and he delivers a scathing, pitiable suicide speech. But in the scene where Iago’s lewd insinuations drive Othello to epilepsy (with Kelly scampering downstage to include us in "Work on, My medicine, work!" before hustling back to clap the Moor out of his infirmity), Bamji does little more than touch his heart and hint at hyperventilation.

Skraastad is elegant and direct yet girlish as Desdemona, touching in her bewilderment and in her panicked, animal plea for a little more life. But the effeminate, snit-throwing Simeon Moore makes a Sir Andrew Aguecheeky Roderigo — a silly civilian snack for Kelly’s general-gobbling Iago.