Othello
Which makes the production’s failure all the more disappointing. Though it boasts evocative visual images achieved through gorgeous costumes (by Nan Cibula-Jenkins), highly theatrical lighting (by Frances Aronson), and spare but striking sets (by Donald Eastman), Gaines’s Othello is hollow, gimmicky, and unmoving. It falls down exactly where it aims to soar: in establishing Othello as a rich, complex personality, not just a noble foil to the treacherous Iago, whose crafty manipulations drive the plot.
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Given Butler’s shallow, uninteresting portrayal, the music and dance sequences intended to evoke Othello’s African roots seem merely desperate attempts to shake some life into the show. Meanwhile, usually reliable supporting actors go over the top in a vain effort to stoke the energy. Lisa Dodson as Iago’s ill-used wife Emilia does have some powerful moments; her speech to the doomed Desdemona, meditating on the plight of women whose husbands turn dangerously jealous, not only chillingly foreshadows the action but makes a moral statement of considerable force. Dodson’s death scene, however, is an absurd display of blood-spattered scenery chewing. And Pickering, his shaved head suggesting a Prussian ruthlessness, pushes Iago into horror-film hamminess, signaling his character’s psychosexual torments with studiously obvious body language and capping his monologues with a fiendish laugh better suited to a Svengoolie send-up than to serious Shakespeare.
