22 April 2005: Shakespeare, Othello, The Moor of Venice
22 April 2005: Shakespeare, Othello, The Moor of Venice
Hartford Stage. Directed by Karin Coonrod
Over the last couple of decades I have been forced to come to terms with the postmodern theatre, while never really liking it. All my suppressed animosities have surfaced again as a result of seeing the first half of this dreadful production. It fairly screams ”diversity” at its audience (a house only two-thirds full; the news must have gotten around since it opened, on April 7). In theory it is a fine idea to cast someone named Firdous Bamji as Othello; but before you do, you need to make sure he is up to the role. Bamji is not; he is too young, to begin with, and vocally he is not up to the requirements of the part. He is a good-looking, well coordinated man who speaks English with a slight near-Eastern accent (appropriate, to be sure), but he lacks substance, lacks pith; he is a lightweight, and he cannot handle the verse. Bamji was far too low key, almost conversational. The Iago, David Patrick Kelly, a man of remarkable energies and aesthetic and histrionic gifts, played the role in a kind of rude, Midwestern, rural idiom, with a pronounced angularity that had, finally, little to do with the character; and besides Kelly is far too old for the part of Othello’s twenty-eight-year-old “ancient.” He is sixty-five if he is a day. So both Othello and Iago are cast against age type. Cassio, cast as a departure from the usual aristocratic Italian, is Christopher Michael Rivera, a handsome bearded man with olive skin and thick, black, glossy hair; if he could act he would be worth watching, but he has no clear line on the character and doesn’t project enough. In fact, he makes a poor target for Iago’s envy and retributive instincts. The Duke of Venice was played by a black actor, Michael Rogers; this was intended to be color-blind casting, but it came a cropper when he said to Brabantio, near the end of the scene, to judge Othello fairly, he seemed “far more fair than black” (Bamji seems as Caucasian as the next person).
Costumes: perhaps it took a lot of money to achieve such consistent, concentrated shabbiness, but anyhow they managed to pull it off: old US Army uniforms on the soldiers; Othello likewise in an army uniform, in one scene with vibrant red epaulets; but Iago, despite his soldierly status, wears no uniform at all, unaccountably, but an ill-fitting blue suit and a red silk shirt open at the collar (what was that all about?). In the first act the Venetian dignitaries, except for the Doge, wore tall caps like dunces; Desdemona’s hair was done in modified corn-rows. In other words, trendy political statements galore all over the stage, except where they just exemplified resolute shabbiness. The scenery, likewise. The stage a steeply raked platform that pointed toward the audience in a kind of V-shape; it reminded me of old newsreels where the thrust of an army moving across Europe was represented as a moving, thick arrow, a wedge. Light batte