3 April 2004: Shakespeare, Othello
Fine Arts Center Concert Hall, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, on tour, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts “Shakespeare in American Communities” program. Directed by Joe Dowling, Artistic Director of the Guthrie.
The FAC auditorium is a cavernous space holding some 1,900 persons, and in a sense it proved to be the villain, or meta-villain, of the Guthrie’s colorful and strong but somewhat flawed production of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Shakespeare could have packed another thousand or so persons into the Globe, but the length of the average sight line would have been much shorter. The Guthrie actors were clearly having to project their voices more than they are used to doing at home, and this had an unfortunate effect on the believability of their acting; it was too declamatory and insufficiently centered in characterization, almost as if a group of talented actors had been handed a new script and told to read it at full voice and find what characterizations they could along the way. That comparison is unfair, of course, to actors who have rehearsed long and hard and are performing this production in all sorts of venues large and otherwise, including this one, notorious for its ability to eat consonants alive. To their credit, the words were for the most part clear and well articulated. And Dowling had anticipated the need to make this play accessible to a great range of general audiences. I mean nothing derogatory in saying that it was pitched perfectly at the average intelligent senior high school student. The actors had been told to slow down the rate of delivery in large auditoriums, presumably; or else, like seasoned actors, in the first minute of performance they could gauge what was happening to their voices in this big monster of a hall and give their lines time to resonate back and up to the far reaches of rear orchestra and multiple shallow mezzanine seats.
The problem with such slow delivery, despite the benefits that confers on understanding, is that the pace of the action sometimes suffers noticeably. In the case of Othello, from the point when Iago launches his final strategy, intending that Cassio kill Roderigo or Roderigo, Cassio, or each the other — and neither is killed (Iago has to finish off Roderigo himself) — the action has to go like a pistol shot all the way through to Othello’s suicide. We have to be shown the catastrophic consequences of both the misfiring of Iago’s plan (so that he ends up being exposed as the perpetrator of the scheme) and Othello’s sadly misguided attempt to restore honor to his life by killing Desdemona. There can be no room in the dramaturgical scheme of things for there to be any pause or slowing down in the action. The tension must be absolutely terrific, taut as a steel band stretched to the breaking point, because any lessening of the tension opens the possibility that discovery of Othello and Iago’s nefarious pact w