Greeks to Us

Preview

Oedipus the King by Sophocles is probably the most famous of the Greek classics. But if it isn’t performed (as it apparently hasn’t been for a long time on North Coast stages) it can become just a bad academic memory, or a remote and daunting rumor. We may forget it is first and foremost a play to be experienced live on stage.

 That’s one reason Michael Thomas decided to direct it at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka, along with Aristophanes’ Women in Congress, a satirical comedy with sly contemporary relevance. Each play is about an hour long, separated by an intermission. They open this week.

 Another reason is that Thomas really likes these plays. “Oedipus is one of the greatest mystery stories ever told,” he said. “We get all these pieces of the puzzle as we inch towards the horrifying truth.” He finds Women in Congress hilarious and “eerily apt for today. It’s about how women take over a ‘do-nothing’ Congress because the men have been such failures.” He selected modern translations that eliminate arcane references and concentrate on story and character.

 “There are a lot of parallels to today in the comedy, and the tragedy deals with ageless issues. I want the community to have the opportunity to see them.” This daring double bill opens at NCRT on Thursday January 23, and plays weekends through February 15.

Review: All the Stage’s A World 
Greek revival at North Coast Rep

 In ancient Greece, Athenians of all classes and in great number attended the tragedies and comedies of the spring festival. Much of what we know today as theatre began there, including a profound purpose.

 Through the vision and artistry of one playwright combined with the performances of skilled actors, society could examine itself: its rational and irrational powers, its strengths and weaknesses, good and evil in complex human combination. The plays evoked thought and debate as well as tears and laughter. In simple and mysterious ways, the theatre was essential to the health of their society.

 Now some 2500 years later, two plays from the Greek golden age are on stage at the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka: the tragedy of Oedipus the King by Sophocles and the comedy Women in Congress by Aristophanes. They are each played on a simple set, with largely the same group of actors.

 There is plague in Thebes as Oedipus the King begins, and citizens appeal to their king Oedipus to heal the city, as he has before. Oedipus is told that to do so he must find and banish the killer of his predecessor.

 Calder Johnson is a regal but impulsive Oedipus—sincere and determined but arrogant and impatient, whose good heart battles with his hot head. Shelley Stewart is an impressive queen Jocasta, Dmitry Tokarsky is her inscrutable brother Creon, and Bob Service is the blind prophet Teiresias.

 Director Michael Thomas approaches this tragedy fairly realistically, as a kind of murder mystery. Without the ritual and special effects of some productions, the emphasis is on clarity. The actors speak clearly and directly.

 This approach is also served by the modern adaptation by Stephen Berg and Diskin Clay. It lacks the poetry of some translations but preserves the important imagery of health and sickness, light and dark, sight and blindness, as well as the basic story that has reverberated through the ages.

 The opening night audience responded audibly to revelations (especially when they got the implications before the characters did.) They left the theatre with enough of what they needed to ponder and debate the questions of fate and free will, morality and destiny that this play has always inspired.

Comedy can be a funhouse mirror reflecting human weaknesses and excesses in daily life. Aristophanes is the original comedian of sex and politics, and in Women in Congress, of sexual politics.

 The women of Athens don their husbands’ cloaks to take over Congress and start a revolution. While in disguise they hear what men say to each other about them. The roots of commedia dell’arte are especially discernable in this modernized version by Jules Tasca. Playing in masks as the Greeks did, Shelley Stewart is the vibrant leader Praxagora and Arnold Waddell is her befuddled husband Blepyrus.

The comic cast includes Taylen Winters, Toodie SueAnn Boyle, Jon Edwards, Alyssa Rempel, Pam Service, and Jennifer Trustem. Scenic design is by Calder Johnson, costumes by Caroline Allendar, lighting by David Tyndall. Oedipus the King and Women in Congress (each about an hour long) play weekends at NCRT through February 15.

  Additional Notes

My NCJ Stage Matters column this week covers three plays: the Sophocles/Aristophanes double bill at North Coast Rep, and one of the two plays done this past weekend by North Coast Prep, within a theme about an important purpose of theatre.  All in 850 words, and for the same low, low price.

So there's a bunch of stuff that didn't make the cut.  The classical Greek era is always fascinating to contemplate--a mere century in human history, which seemingly invented theatre as we know it from a variety of sources, and then pretty quickly disappeared.  The roots include religious ritual and the oratory of a democracy, along with other less definable traditions--but the combination is unique.

Christopher Plummer & Irene Pappas in 1968 film Oedipus

Then there is the legacy, based on the small number of plays that survived, and essentially one source on how it was all done: from Aristotle, known chiefly as a philosopher, but we in the biz know him as the first theatre critic and journalist.

The few plays we have versus the number we know were written and performed is a daunting problem. Aeschylus is thought to have written 90 plays--there are titles of 79 preserved.  Only seven plays survived.  Euripides wrote at least 88 plays.  Eighteen survived, with another of contested authorship.  Aristophanes wrote 40; we have 11.

Then there's Sophocles, whose long life and career almost span the entire classical period.  He wrote more than 123 plays, of which we have the titles of 114.  He won at least 72 first prizes. Yet only seven of his plays survive in complete form.

I recall a teacher in college musing that we should have faith that the right plays survived, that the best always survives.  That is of course an untestable hypothesis, and I confess I felt it mysteriously apt at the time, though now I wonder if that's not just wishful thinking.  Some notable theatre experts believe Oedipus the King is the best play ever written.  But who is to say there wasn't an even better one among the lost?

The plays were performed in the annual spring festival, perhaps the first combined religious, civic and artistic event.  The audience (limited to men, but attendance was a civic and religious duty) arrived at daybreak to see a full day of theatre--usually 3 tragedies capped by a comedy. This may not have been as grim as it sounds--not all of the tragedies ended unhappily.  In Athens the government paid the production costs, and the actors were paid year round.  They underwent extensive training and were highly skilled. There were cash prizes for the top three playwrights, as awarded by a five judge panel.  However, the judges were probably strongly influenced by the audience reception.

These were plays in our sense, broadly speaking.  But they had a relationship to societal beliefs about the Greek gods that are difficult for us to fully appreciate.  From where we are we can perhaps see it as a combination of religion and archetypal psychology. But it does seem that religious ceremonies were an early model. At first the plays were done with one actor and the chorus.  Aeschylus introduced a second actor (which meant there could be dramatic dialogue between individuals), and Sophocles a third.  The actors wore masks (NCRT uses them for the Aristophanes, but not for Oedipus.  In Oedipus the chorus represents the people of Thebes, but there are speaking roles for specific members.)

 The Theban plays of Sophocles were written over several decades.  Scholarship suggests he wrote them out of order: Antigone when he was 54 and Oedipus the King maybe 15 years later.  The middle play, Oedipus at Colonus, wasn't performed until after his death at the age of 90.

Oedipus the King has been more popular on stage than it seems to be now.  In 1946 it was one of Laurence Olivier's most fabled triumphs.  When Christopher Plummer played Oedipus in the 1968 film (viewable on YouTube), it was his third performance as the character.  The filming took place in an ancient isolated amphitheatre in Greece, during the first days of a repressive military dictatorship.  All Greek artists in every field were in danger of arrest.  The great Irene Pappas was to play Jocasta, but she had to flee the country. (Lili Palmer took the role.)  The production actually harbored a number of Greek artists, poets and intellectuals who escaped Athens and were hiding out as extras.    

There are plenty of translations, adaptations and modernizations of classic Greek plays.  Most of what I can recall seeing here on the North Coast falls into that third category.  In 2011 HSU hosted the CSU East Bay production of Xtigone, a retelling of Antigone by Chicago playwright Nambi E. Kelley.  In 2008--back when Arcata Playhouse hosted adult plays--the Ghost Road Company of Los Angeles presented a modernized Elektra based on Aeschylus.  Also in 2008, HSU produced Helen, a play by Ellen McLaughlin based on Euripides, directed by Margaret Thomas Kelso.

Darcy Daughtry in Helen 

Of the translations of Oedipus the King I have at hand in my Fortress of Solitude, the one with the most poetic language is by Richard C. Jebb. Olivier performed with a translation by the great 20th century poet W.B. Yeats; Christopher Plummer's film used a translation by poet Paul Roche.

  But none I've seen is as plain and streamlined as the adaptation by Stephen Berg and Diskin Clay, the script used in the NCRT production.  This has the virtue of clarity in the basic action of the play, and it does preserve the important imagery of light and dark, sight and blindness, health and sickness that emphasize the play's profound ironies.  But a lot of Sophocles the poet is lost, and at times the plainness of the language got inadvertent laughs on opening night.  (Speaking of opening night, it almost got off to a disastrous start when after an ill-advised snatch of the Supremes and unnecessary short opening scene, the lights came up too quickly on the King struggling into his too-short costume, and we saw Oedipus in his underpants.)

As for the Aristophanes, the comedy now at NCRT is based on his play Ecclesiazuase.  Appearing as the Greek classical period was ending, it bears marked resemblances to his Lysistrata.  British translations naturally enough called it Women in Parliament.  There are however several new versions calling it Women in Congress, especially by women.  (It's a nice pun that way as well, since political and sexual congress are its topics.)  The version at North Coast Rep is by Jules Tasca, a journeyman regional playwright ( this site says he's written 102 published plays: 12 full length and 92 one acts; the math is off somewhere, but one assumes all have survived so far.)

Tasca's experience acting in a commedia dell'arte troupe shows in this version.  But it is not only a simplified version--the utopian changes wrought by the women who take over Athens are played pretty straight.  While appealing to us (especially in the nation state of Arcata), at least some commentators believe Aristophanes was satirizing Plato's utopian Republic, so his view was more jaundiced.

from a production using this translation by Amanda
Krauss and Jess Miner 

The NCRT production is pleasantly comic, with witty lines and energetic performances.  As she recites the utopian changes, Shelley Stewart makes you want to believe again. The rest of the cast performed well, savoring their comic bits. But from the beginning the show was underlit for a comedy, and though I noticed it immediately and then forgot about it, it may have had a depressing effect.  Comedies need to be bright. Seeing them shouldn't be work.  But given the lighting limitations at NCRT, and the difficulty of resetting lights from the moodier first play during the intermission , there's probably little they could have done about it.

  I guess I don't mind these tinker toy adaptations because these plays are so rarely seen, and they should be seen and experienced on stage. And as remote as they are in time, they probably do need streamlining and reorienting. On the other hand, Tasca has written new versions of Hamlet and Macbeth --and on Shakespeare I lean the other way.  You better be better than the Bard if you mess with him, and that's unlikely.

Othello in Eureka

This is a very slightly extended version of my North Coast Journal review.  There are a number of other posts on this site about Othello, especially the film versions.  They don't cover the most recent, called "O," which I haven't seen.  There's also a review of the previous David Hamilton/Jabari Morgan collaboration on this play. (Clicking this link will start you out with this review again--just move on down the page for the rest.)

For those seeing their first production of Shakespeare’s Othello, North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka provides stylish and vivid entertainment as well as impressive individual moments and plenty of food for thought. But there are reasons that people return to this play (and other classics) even when they know the story of Othello the Moor, General of the army of Venice, and his trusted aide Iago, who leads Othello relentlessly into a fatal jealous rage.

With the same Shakespeare text, a different combination of actors and other theatre artists make their production unique, providing the audience with opportunity for different impressions and insights. That’s true at NCRT even though the director (David Hamilton) and lead actor (Jabari Morgan as Othello) collaborated on the last local Othello, at the Arcata Playhouse in 2007.

For example, Iago’s unwitting co-conspirator Roderigo is sometimes portrayed as completely clueless, but Victor Howard plays him as passionate, not entirely trusting Iago but willing to believe what is to his advantage. Ethan Edmonds gives Cassio substance and a reality that justifies him as Othello’s lieutenant. As Emilia (Iago’s wife and confidant of Desdemona, Othello’s young wife,) Megan Johnson releases suppressed and imposing power.

But the most telling portrayal is by Calder Johnson in an impressive performance, who plays Iago not as a capering fiend or bitter conniver but as mostly calm and deliberate (with only a few strangled moments of self-betrayal), worriedly helping everyone get what they want, while manipulating every willing victim to serve his evil ends: pretty much the model of a modern major psychopath.  

Jabari Morgan is compelling and masterful as Othello, raising the game of everyone around him. Claudia Johani Guerrero is a lovely Desdemona, the still center of these crazed storms. JM Wilkerson gets the play off to a confident start with his authoritative Brabantio, Desdemona’s father. David Hamilton’s mostly solid and at times provocative direction, Pat Hamilton’s sumptuous costumes together with Daniel Lawrence’s somber and elegant set as well as Gabriel Groom’s sound and music and Bridget Barsotti’s lighting, all combine with these stellar performances for an accomplished production of high quality.

Audiences can also see this play differently in the changing context of the times. Racist anger directed at a black General plays differently when we have a black President. But whether on first or repeated view, theatre has been powerful for so many centuries because people learn something about themselves there, as individuals and societies. Drama and other literatures don’t always depict tragic consequences of ungoverned passions and weaknesses just to confirm they are human nature. The act of consciously portraying them suggests consciousness as itself a vital part of human nature as well.

Everyone in Othello is prey to passions, even the coldly calculating Iago. (As Robert Heilman notes, "Of the insights that create Iago, none is deeper than the recognition that a cool rationality may itself bring about or serve the irrational.") But the tragedy in this play results from the characters’ decisions. The thought may occur of applications beyond this story: becoming conscious of our powerful unconscious and how it works is essential to the human future.

Othello is at NCRT weekends through April 30.

Arcata Host Elektra

Besides showcasing local performers in the 20 months since it opened its doors at the old Creamery, the Arcata Playhouse has hosted a number of visiting productions. These not only provide opportunities for North Coast audiences, but also for local theatre artists to see interesting work developed elsewhere, especially from larger theatre centers. And thanks to the California Ensemble Touring Initiative funded by the Irvine Foundation, there may be more such opportunities coming along.

The most recent visitors were the Ghost Road Company of Los Angeles, presenting their new version of a play from the dawn of western drama: “Elektra,” the re-titled and reconceived middle play in the trilogy by Aeschylus known as the Oresteia.

“Aeschylus was the first towering figure of the theatre, the first highly individualized voice,” writes Ronald Harwood, playwright and theatre historian. Aeschylus fought in at least one of the major battles that ensured Greek independence from Persia, and he wrote as Athenian democracy was inventing itself. He competed in the contest for tragedy at the annual Dionysian festival for 15 years before he won. His innovations were remarkable. By reducing the chorus and adding a second actor who talks to the first, he invented what we think of as dialogue, or for that matter, a play. He transformed tragic poetry into tragic drama.

Aeschylus is believed to have written some 90 plays (he won that contest at least 12 times), though only seven plays survive, and scholars don’t agree that even all of these are his. But his greatest achievement—and still one of the great epics of theatre—is the Oresteia.

A 1991 production in New York is described by critic Frank Rich as meticulous, elaborate and very controlled, expressing the vision of its director, Ariane Mnouchkline. Ghost Road’s approach, as members of the company discussed it after their opening performance in Arcata, is pretty much the opposite.

Aeschylus was only the starting point. Though director Katharine Noon also adapted the text, this version was created by the ensemble. They sought to make the story accessible, stripping it down to its “nuts and bolts” and viewing it as basically the story of a family, although a very bloody one. In the first play, King Agamemnon kills his youngest daughter so the gods will grant him fair winds to make war on Troy. When he returns victorious, his wife Clytemnestra retaliates by murdering him. In the second play—the one Ghost Road brought to Arcata—their son Orestes murders his mother.

To re-imagine this in contemporary terms, the ensemble collected photographs and articles, did “free- writing” and improvised scenes, switching characters so that eventually every member of the company had played every part. These workshop sessions were videotaped and transcripts were made, that Noon would incorporate in versions of the script as it evolved.

This version centers on Elektra (played by Alina Phelan), who worships her dead father, Agamemnon, and campaigns for the return of her lost brother, Orestes. She lives in a tent festooned with hand-scrawled signs (“Have you seen Orestes?” “Where’s My Brother?”), and rants on her perpetual radio show, suggesting the hysteria of the Dionysian rites that only slightly predate Greek drama, as well as Rush Limbaugh.

The characters of Clytemnestra and Orestes are more ambiguous and familiar: the career woman mother, the assassin with doubts (Orestes may have been a prototype for Hamlet.) The gorgeous language of Aeschylus (in some English translations at least) is entirely gone, replaced by contemporary dialogue and ritual telegrams, like “Waiting—then things start happening all at once, and all the time.”

The Oresteia is famous for depicting the transition from revenge to justice, and there is a hint of it in Orestes’ brief misgivings in this play, but most of it occurs in the third play. So while the Ghost Road version of the middle play is always involving as theatre, it is incomplete: more intriguing than tragic or transcendent.

The real interest is the stagecraft and the high level of acting by everyone in the company. Phelan and Brian Weir as Hermione had the most lines and were the most memorable, but the other actors also deftly created defined characters. The traveling set emphasized a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape, although Clytemnestra and her cocktail-sipping lady friends seemed affluent enough to remain haughty. There was a generational tension that also made Elektra seem young and rebellious. It could all be taking place in a contemporary city, which is both a strength (contemporary relevance) and a weakness (contemporary cliche.)

Many of the Ghost Road ensemble studied at Cal Arts but one member with them in Arcata was Ronnie Clark, an HSU Theatre graduate, who played Orestes. Ghost Road is adapting all three plays for performance together in L.A. in the spring.

Shakespeare Two Ways

Stephen Greenblatt has a very interesting essay in the new New York Review of Books about the celebrated production of Shakespeare's Macbeth starring Patrick Stewart, and secondarily the Verdi opera based on Macbeth which was also produced recently in NYC.

What impresses me about this essay is that Greenblatt presents his reading of the play along with a description of the interpretation by director Rupert Goold in the production that began in England before moving to New York this spring. It's a twofer, basically. But it also represents two different philosophies in approaching Shakespeare: the more currently popular one, of making the plays more politically or culturally relevant, even if it means shaping the text to fit the concept, or of finding new ways to express what the director sees in the text that illuminates the play as Shakespeare wrote it. While Greenblatt is of the second school, he finds a lot to admire in the Goold production, which uses the Stalinist period to suggest current excesses.

Greenblatt's reading of Macbeth is pretty intriguing. Particularly with today's lighting capabilities, a production based on it could be fascinating.

Limitations of Tragedy Continued

The Clay Cart suggests limitations of western drama

Recently I reviewed a Dell' Arte School's MFA Ensemble production, Between Two Winters, which was the outcome of their study of classic tragedy.  I also reviewed a production currently at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, called The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler. While it isn't itself a tragedy, it had a lot to say about tragedy as a necessary reflection of the human condition. I also referred back to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of the Sanskrit play, The Clay Cart.  I ended it suggesting that tragedy might be less a category based on human nature than on the view of a particular culture in a particular time and place, though expressed so well in a form of drama.

I quoted a literary scholar on this, but I might also mention historian of religion Karen Armstrong who also suggests that this era of Greek drama came after a long period of awful times in that part of the world.

Here's a little more of what I was thinking... Tragedy is often considered the apex and greatest form of our drama, and in a sense of our culture. The idea of the hero with a tragic flaw, undone by hubris, fated to fall from the heights, does seem to express or at least fit well with many other central notions of western culture. The fatal flaw is like original sin, hubris is offending the jealous God. There's perhaps a bit of Social Darwinism--even the mighty fall because the fatal flaw makes them unfit in the continual struggle for survival.

But what if--as van Buitenen suggests--Greek tragedy is not the consummate form against which every other theatrical form from every other culture is measured? What if it really expressed a particular culture--western culture--or even more particularly, the cultural beliefs of ancient Greece? And so it may not be humanity's best expression of the universal human condition: the way things are. Maybe just the way the Greeks thought things are. Maybe just one way things can be. And maybe the ideas that seem to fit so comfortably with tragedy--like humanity as innately sinful (as some western religions say) or humanity as predominantly selfish (dominated by selfish genes) as some western science emphasizes--maybe they are culture-bound as well, and not the whole human story?

Because we do get the sense from our culture that human nature is either damned by Divine design or evolution to accentuate cruelty, ambition, selfishness and violence. Of which humankind certainly provides many examples, which our dramas emphasize in form and content.

But Sanskrit drama doesn't do Greek tragedy, nor does it emphasize the survival of the most selfish, nor does it find drama only in people being cruel to each other. As I wrote in the earlier review: "The Clay Cart is not a religious play; the OSF program describes it as a social comedy. But comparing this play to western dramas and comedies, the most revealing and ultimately inspiring difference to me was the kind of conflict that creates the dramatic action. Yes, there is a villain (though he’s played as a ridiculous figure from the start) and human foibles that lead to complications, but the overall motives are most often generosity, loyalty, empathy and love."

I am certainly no expert on Sanskrit drama, but I wrote about my experience of that play, and found scholarly support. The (Little) Clay Cart, wrote one of its translators, is about "a man of heart" representing India's "classical aesthetic culture." The essence of his character is in how he expresses "moral duty" and "sympathetic generosity." The outcome: "The righteous man may suffer, but in the end he is stronger than the wicked, who is really a fool." He represents virtue, because "he loves his friends and forgives his enemies."

In this sense, it is exemplary drama, which can be soporific, and is certainly not the whole human story. But then, neither is tragedy. Wouldn't we be better off with a little more balance in our drama-- new interpretations of what how virtue is expressed, what it means, what it costs but what its rewards can be--in our own culture?

For after all, our science is showing that altruism is just as natural as selfishness, that animals exhibit cooperation and sharing as well as competition--if we only allow ourselves to see it. And at least in practice, our religious traditions include encouraging compassion, and modelling it. So can't our theatre produce drama (and not just the bipolar of tragedy and comedy) to reflect this? Because we're going to have to achieve a balance--to face our flaws but emphasize our ability to get beyond them, to keep trying--if we're going to be up to the challenges of the future.

To be fair, this is not precisely van Buitenen's point, in his introduction to the translation that OSF uses of The Little Clay Cart. For example, he sets the Greek idea of fate against the Hindu idea of transmigration of the soul into the next generation, making "any single life an episode in a far longer chain. No single life makes ultimate sense in itself; the chain of life does."

Still, his basic point about the culture-bound concept of tragedy allows for mine. Here's more of that passage: "This 'absense of tragedy' [in Sanskrit drama] is sometimes pointed to with a mildly accusing finger, as though any theatre worth the name should have it. Apologists then point out that India was 'prevented' from developing true tragedy by the underlying climate of its thought. This argument takes for granted that tragedy is an almost natural expression of any culture. But why not argue that Greek tragedy constitutes the exception, not the rule, and that it presupposes a very specific notion of moira (fate) that was peculiarly Greek?"

I also must confess that my point was also influenced by Daniel Mendelsohn's lovely essay in the New York Review of Books on the revival of the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha, which not entirely coincidentally, is largely about the hero of 20th century India, Gandhi (although it covers mostly his earlier years in South Africa, where he developed his methods of passive resistance.) The essay begins:

Good people do not, generally speaking, make good subjects for operas. Like the Greek tragedies that the sixteenth-century Venetian inventors of opera sought to recreate, Western musical drama has tended to be preoccupied with the darker extremes of human emotions: excessive passion and wild jealousy, smoldering resentment and implacable rage. These, after all, are the emotions that spark the kinds of actions—adultery, betrayal, revenge, murder—that make for gripping drama. Unpleasant as they may be in real life, such actions are essential to the Western idea of theater itself, in which the very notion of plot is deeply connected to difficulties, problems, disasters...[So] When we go to the theater, we want to see characters doing things. Bad things, preferably."

He finds in the work of Philip Glass another approach, which is not tragedy and probably to many people isn't even drama, or opera. But it is drama of a sort, it is theatre, and Mendelsohn finds it beautiful. And in beauty, is there not something of truth? In the end, tragedy may cause pity and terror. But it doesn't exactly inspire hope. Not only do we need that, but there is plenty in the world and in human nature that's good. To show how people can accentuate that, to show those possibilities, is as human and can be as artful as pushing the easier buttons of fight-or-flight--the reactions that could well be the fatal flaw of tragedy.

Nature of Tragedy: Between Two Winters, Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler

Between Two Winters returned to the Carlo Theatre stage last weekend not as an encore so much as an iteration—a tryout of changes before its upcoming weekend at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco.

Tasked with creating and performing a Aristotelian tragedy by adapting a story from the news, the Dell’Arte School’s MFA Ensemble of second-year students continued to refine this piece beyond its April premiere. Though they did some rewriting, added a character (and their teacher, Ronlin Foreman, is now directing) the play’s basic story is the same: After the first Gulf War in 1991, the mayor of a small Montana town goes to Kuwait ostensibly to honor a soldier from her town for his heroics in saving lives during the attempts to put out the oil fires set by retreating Iraqis, but really to use the photo op with a TV crew filming it to advance her campaign for the Senate.

 It turns out that the soldier had raped her 20 years before, and her daughter—who is also there—is the child resulting from that rape. The news story that was the starting point involved a man confessing to a rape some 20 years later, and asking forgiveness of the woman he raped. But she refused, and insisted he be prosecuted.

 The situation in Between Two Winters is somewhat different: the soldier (Sergeant Mulligan) was Mayor Catherine Tuttle’s neighbor in their childhoods, and it was a “date rape,” when he returned from Vietnam. That the audience doesn’t question that an ambitious politician wouldn’t bother learning in advance the name of the soldier she was there to honor is the key to the conceit, and once past that, the confrontations take over.

 Besides Mayor Tuttle (played by Norah Sadavd), her daughter Naomi (Liza Bielby) and Sgt. Mulligan (Matt Walley), also present are the TV news team and a campaign consultant (Ida Fugli, Barney Baggett, Jamie Van Camp, Adam Curvin and Brian Moore).  The news crew is a kind of Greek chorus, at first witnessing but as the story unfolding before them trumps the fairly boring story they are there to cover, their role becomes more probing, more questioning.

 The final character is Qazi (Deepal Doshi), a kind of Kuwaiti Tiresias who also represents the war’s victims where it was fought. Stylistically, the movie-of-the-week potential of the story is deflected by some movement and singing, but mostly by this aspect of the media becoming the chorus, and the ritualistic action and language.

 The first part of the play is diffuse and confusing: overlapping dialogue may indicate the chaos of a TV shoot, but it doesn’t help define role and character, especially when the student cast is all of a similar age. But the rest is pretty powerful, as it explores the wounds of war, the chain of brutalities, the sometimes difficult line between justice and revenge. Even the oil fires are explored for metaphor, the explosive secrets surfacing from underground.

Violence and death as well as heroes, flaws and fate appear—the constituents of tragedy—and their ambiguities are offered. There’s too much asserted and suggested in an hour for this to be a fully formed play, but Between Two Winters could be described as a poetic dance of ideas that suggests contemporary tragedy with provocative depth—with more depth than some more elaborate plays with the same general intent even attempt.

 
Five years ago at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Robin Goodrin Nordi as Hedda Gabler shot herself, and the play ended. This season, Robin Goodrin Nordi as Hedda Gabler shoots herself, and the play begins.

 Though both plays were directed by OSF’s new artistic director Bill Rauch, the earlier one was the modern classic by Ibsen, and the play this year is The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, by Oregon playwright Jeff Whitty. I wonder how many times he’s been told he’s a whitty guy? (Now watch the spell-check spoil the pun.) But his play is full of wit and invention, and even if the postmodern jumble sale through time, space and pop culture technique is getting a bit familiar, this show is delightfully theatrical and surprisingly provocative in challenging the whole art-and-audience enterprise.

 Hedda revives to learn that as the heroine of a cherished tragedy, she’s required to stay in character. But in trying to escape the “cul de sac of tragic women,” she sets out on a quest with her faithful companion, Mammy (from Gone With the Wind.)

 Among the other characters she encounters are Medea from Greek mythology and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Also two versions of Jesus. But even more than Mammy (Kimberly Scott) and Hedda’s husband George (Christopher DuVal), the ones who actually become human characters are Patrick (Anthony Heald) and Steven (Jonathan Haugen), living fossils from The Boys in the Band era of flamboyant gay culture.

 Hedda’s odd hero’s journey finally takes her to the Furnace of creation, where fictional characters like her are born, either to become trapped in immortality or to die at some point from lack of popularity, victims of the “genocide of indifference.”

 It’s unusual for a new play to appear on the main stage of the Bowmer Theatre rather than the smaller New Theatre, but this show takes full advantage of the space and its facilities, including the revolving stage. It’s a delightful moment-by-moment ride, that keeps on surprising on one level or another.

 In the end, this play also seems to come down on the side of tragedy as an essential expression and reflection of the human condition. But at other times on this same stage, The Clay Cart and the Sanskrit Theatre’s aim of dramatizing virtue offers a different reading of both art and human potential.

 As editor and scholar van Buitenen suggests, “Why not argue that Greek tragedy constitutes the exception, not the rule, and that it presupposes a very specific notion of moira (fate)…?” And perhaps our arts as well as our science and politics have ignored other possibilities, including those qualities in the world and in ourselves that contribute to more fully accurate images and assessments? Which might provide a balance, even an emphasis necessary for the future of the human enterprise, and the world we tragically threaten? Something to think about, on the way home.

We Live On a Political Stage

This is my Stage Matters column I sent in for the North Coast Journal published today. Apparently the email went awry...we're still sorting this out. Apologies are due to the folks at Dell'Arte I interviewed, and to Jeff DeMark, because their shows I write about here are this weekend.

So I'm posting the column in full here today.

The theatre of politics is pretty obvious in this presidential campaign year, but politics in theatre—that is, political and social issues of current concern as subject matter--is also especially evident on North Coast stages in 2008.

Several plays written in another time encouraged reflection on pertinent issues of today—and were likely chosen with that in mind. The year began with “Marat/Sade” at NCRT, which dealt with political violence, totalitarian repression and the gap between rich and poor. “Twelve Angry Men” at Ferndale Rep reminded us of fragile principles in our justice system, and the folly of discarding them. Dell’Arte revived “The Golden State,” which also touches upon economic disparities as well as perennial cultural issues, and North Coast Prep presented “The Crucible,” reminding us of the contagion of fear, especially when it is manipulated for political and economic gain.

Now Ferndale Rep is doing a musical that has the distinction of leading to several Supreme Court decisions concerning censorship and political speech. Today’s younger audiences for “Hair” may be a little baffled by some of the issues of central importance in the story, such as the major plot point of burning a draft card, and all the fuss about…hair. Both had immense symbolic importance in the 1960s, and caused of outrage and violence in the public sphere, and within families. Still, this play’s relevance to current issues of war, protest and repression are obvious, unfortunately.

Other current social and political issues seem clearly on the minds of second year students of the Dell’Arte International School’s MFA Ensemble in the piece they’re creating and presenting for the first time this coming weekend.

Between Two Winters on the Carlo Theatre stage Thursday through Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 2, is the result of an eight week process that began with students studying the nature of tragedy (Aristotle’s “Poetics” applied to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”) But when it came time to create a theatre piece, students were directed to find a subject in the newspaper.

According to Brian Moore, the student directing the piece, the story they selected was about a woman who was approached by the man who had raped her 20 years before. He asked her forgiveness, and she refused. Instead she initiated a prosecution, which caused controversy and criticism.

But in the process of writing the script, “it’s taken on a much different life of its own,” Moore said. “From that starting point, we’ve ended up in a much different place.”

Now the story takes place in Kuwait in the early 1990s, where the mayor of a city in Montana goes to honor the hero who saved lives during the oil field fires set by the retreating Iraqi forces in Gulf War I. The mayor is the woman who was raped 20 years before, the hero was her rapist, who has been in hiding ever since.

There are more moral and plot complications. The mayor is “a pretty notorious figure,” said Ronlin Foreman, the school’s director of pedagogical studies, who supervises the project. “She is a hyper politician with aspirations to the Senate, and has a real quality of vengeance in her life.” She also has a daughter for whom she also has political ambitions—who is the child resulting from that rape.

Where all this leads was still taking shape when I spoke with Moore and Foreman this past weekend. But for Foreman, the rationale for applying the tragic form to contemporary events is clear. “We have a surfeit of tragic occurrences,” he said “but tragedy in our day and age is a hard thing to come by. We think that we’re coming into a time when an admission of tragedy, of tragic flaw, is important.”

“Tragedy is a form that at its root pits the rational and ordered world against the world of terror and chaos,” according to a text these students use. “It deals with the human drive to step out of the chorus, to stand for and proceed into the hero’s journey…”

For this project, the chorus—which in Greek tragedy is the voice of the community that narrates and comments on the story—is represented by the media. “We’re planning to have a television camera onstage, broadcasting to monitors,” Moore said, “because we’re exploring how the media can make one of the characters the protagonist one moment, but suddenly shift to side with a different character.”

But the shifting chorus as well as the moral complexities of the situation challenges the classical definition of tragedy. “It’s hard a lot of the time to see the actions of these characters as sins, in the way that the Greeks did,” Moore explained. “We have a much different understanding of morality. We don’t bend to the will of the gods the same way the ancient Greeks did.”

So when I asked “Who is the tragic hero? What is the tragic flaw?” they both laughed a little uncomfortably. “Well, that’s what we’re working on right now,” Moore said.

Applying the tragic sense to these contemporary events remains an essential part of this exploration. “It’s a time when we say that it is important for someone to step out of the chorus—out of the people,” Foreman said, “as leaders—as people who expect to do something to change things.”

Foreman’s goal is to get the script right, so this weekend’s performances may turn out to be more like staged readings, he said. But the exploration will continue to a scheduled mid-May run of “Between Two Winters” at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco.

There are even some contemporary issues explored in the annual HSU dance concert this weekend (“Pure Abstractions,” Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 in the Van Duzer.) Then beginning next weekend, the 10th annual HSU Ten Minute Play Festival will include an unusual number of plays on social and political themes, including terrorism and interrogation, war and genocide. (Plus the usual comedies and fantasies, of course.) The festival runs April 24-26 and May 1-3.

This Saturday at 8 PM in the Arcata Playhouse, Jeff DeMark reprises his newest show, “They Ate Everything But Their Boots,” about the trials and tribulations of finding and renovating a Humboldt home. This will be only the third time DeMark has done this show since its premiere at the Bayside Grange in late 2006, and he promises some new material as well as an expanded musical presence by the Tiny Tims. Thanks to the mortgage crisis, there’s a new topicality as well to this typically funny, smart and generous DeMark show.

Paul Robeson as Othello, with
Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona

Othello: The Pharma Interpretation

I'm way behind here. Let's see if I can catch up in the next couple of days.

First, the last bit about Othello. I ran across an intriguing theory about something that Shakespeare may have intended, and may have made sense to his first audience. We know that in addition to using old texts, Shakespeare was inspired by the latest news--the first forays of ships to America, for instance, and the science of his day. Which leads to something like a pharmacological component to Othello.

It depends in part on what kind of a Moor Othello is supposed to be. I tend to believe he's a northern African--I put more weight on the various mentions of Berbers and Barbary (real peoples and place) rather than the references to Othello being black--a relative term, since anybody not as white as a bleached Briton would be comparatively black, and the term is used metaphorically at times as well. (I even count as evidence Desdemona referring to her mother's maid "called Barbary" who sang the 'Willow' lament even as she died, which Desdemona then sings, and as Emilia does as she dies.)

The intriguing thesis is unfortunately buried in a dense feminist deconstructionist argument, but here's the gist: Othello's epilepsy may have been hereditary, and related to the fits of seers and prophets. A treatment for epilepsy was an Egyptian medicine, the kind derived from the gums of certain trees that Othello refers to in the play. And the special handkerchief that Othello reveres, as passed down to him by his father, was saturated with that medicine. Which is partly why it was so important to him.

This sense of Othello also relates to the "spells" which which Desdemona's father believed Othello charmed her. In any case, the themes of illness have fascinated a lot of scholars, who write about not only Othello but Iago, Casio and Desdemona. What interests me is what Shakespeare knew or believed, and what he knew his audience believed.

By the way, there's another production of Othello coming up this summer--starting June 3 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Othello on Film: Olivier

Frank Findlay as Iago, Laurence Olivier as Othello.
Though this is a black and white still, the 1965
film is in color.

Othello on Film: Olivier

I didn't realize until I read another review of the show that in my review I hadn't noted that Jabari Morgan, who played Othello at the Arcata Playhouse, is black. Partly that's because he gave a great performance as an actor, regardless of any additional category. But also I suppose I realized that discussing the racial politics of this role would take more words than I had in the print version of the review.

Othello is called a Moor, which could refer to a number of racial types. He is called (and calls himself) black, but that's a dodgy term historically. Even in the early 20th century America, some Italians were considered "black."

There has been a great scholarly argument especially over whether Shakespeare was referring to a North African-- a lighter-skinned Muslim Berber, or a darker skinned sub-Sahara African. In terms of Shakespeare's time in England, it could go either way. The internal evidence within the play is ambiguous, though I tend to be more persuaded by the Berber interpretation.

Nevertheless, it has become standard that actors of southern African descent have a corner on the Othello role. Now in the early 21st century it is so much so that when Patrick Stewart wanted to play the role, he did so (in Washington, D.C.) with a completely reversed cast--all the other actors, including Desdemona, were black.

But at least until the 1960s, the role was often played by white men in dark makeup. There may not have been enough black actors in England until the 20th century but the racism was overt in the U.S., where even the play itself was not allowed to be performed in some places in the South because of the interracial romance, regardless who played the parts. And even when the great African American actor Paul Robeson wanted to play the role, he had to play it in England first (opposite Peggy Ashcroft) before getting that opportunity in the U.S., more than a decade later. But Paul Robeson's performance opposite Uta Hagen in 1943 is one of the most famous American Othellos, and a tremendous hit--it played more than twice as many times on Broadway than any Shakespeare before or since.

Which brings us to the movies. The most famous filmed version of Shakespeare's Othello has to be the 1965 movie with Laurence Olivier as Othello. Olivier played Othello as a dark African, with something like a Caribbean accent. "I had rejected the modern trend towards a pale coffee-colored compromise," he wrote in his autobiography. He designed his own three layers of makeup, which took three hours to apply. He had prepared for the role by doing vocal exercises to deepen his voice. His stage performance was one of the triumphs of his career.

Though the filmed version of the stage production (with Frank Findlay as Iago and young Maggie Smith as Desdemona) was shot in just three weeks on obvious stage sets, there is enough camera movement to qualify it as a movie. Olivier often used external changes (he was famous for building new noses for himself) to get him in touch with the internal identity of the character. In this case he wanted to feel "black to my very soul."

In 1965, in the midst of the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. and more obvious racial variety in England, Olivier risked a lot, and he got a lot of criticism for--some said-- playing a stereotypical black, in an interpretation that made Othello's heritage a key to his passionate behavior. Others felt it honored the reality of a black character.

By contemporary standards, at the very least, Olivier overdoes it at times. But his portrayal is still powerful, and provides plenty of opportunity for debate, about Othello and race, separately and together. Though Olivier later wrote that the role is essentially unplayable, his acting is gripping at times.

Findlay played Iago with a working class accent, and later films would adopt and extend this approach.

Othello on Film: Hopkins, Fishburne

Laurence Fishburne as Othello, Kenneth Branagh
as Iago in the 1995 Othello.

Othello on Film: Hopkins, Fishburne

Less well known is the BBC version of Othello, directed by Jonathan Miller in 1981 with Anthony Hopkins as Othello and Bob Hoskins as Iago. The casting of Hopkins did cause controversy because of his race. The role had been offered first to James Earl Jones (who played it in the U.S. opposite Christopher Plummer as Iago) but the British unions wouldn't allow the role to be played by an American. They wanted a British actor of African heritage. What the real politics were in all this is impossible to know.

Hopkins had played the role on stage, although in recent years he's referred to it as not a success. In fact, when he auditioned as a young man for membership in Olivier's National Theatre, a speech from Othello was nearly the only Shakespeare he knew. When he offered it at his audition, Olivier--who was playing the role on stage at the time--cried "You've got a bloody nerve!" Then Olivier expressed nervousness that Hopkins might do it better. When Hopkins finished, Olivier offered him a place in the company. "I don't think I'll lose any sleep tonight," he said, "but you're awfully good." (Olivier became a mentor to Hopkins, who later became so adept at imitating Olivier's voice that he was hired to dub in some of Olivier's lines in the restored version of Spartacus.)

But in contrast to Olivier, director Miller has Hopkins play Othello as a light-skinned Moor, more Arab than African. Viewers today may well find Hopkins' wild hair a bit much, but like Olivier's very different take on the role, he is compelling to watch. More than in these other films, Hopkins' Othello seems to be rebelling against killing Desdemona until almost the end, when Iago applies his most naked pressure, attacking Othello's masculinity. And when Iago's treachery is revealed, the understanding of how he was skillfully duped that comes into Hopkins' eyes, sets up the rest of the scene: his relatively calm farewell speeches, salvaging some honor in his dishonor, and his suicide.

His Desdemona is Penelope Wilton (known these days to Doctor Who fans--such as myself--as Harriet Jones) but it is Bob Hoskins as Iago who delivers a truly great movie performance in what is even an less cinematic version than Olivier's, except for the remarkable closeups (especially of Iago as he devises how to trap Othello, and Othello as he is about to go into his fit.)

Hoskins makes his every thought eloquent by facial expression, voice and body movement. Even the way he walks tells us about the character. He plays Iago as a working class conniver, an improviser who makes mischief and manipulates his "betters," apparently for his own amusement, just to see them make fools of themselves. He's barely suppressing his laughter in the very first scene, and his scorched mirth is evident many times throughout. But as the play moves to its bloody conclusion, his laughter became almost constant and psychotic. Yet there is still the air of the trickster about him.

Since this was part of the BBC project to film complete versions of all of Shakespeare's plays, this is the most complete text available on DVD. And it does seem to me that some of the supposed mysteries of motivation etc. are cleared up by lines that are often cut.


The most recent filming of Shakespeare's actual play that I know of is the 1995 version starring Laurence Fishburne as Othello and Kenneth Branagh as Iago. Filmed on location in Italy, it is the most scenic version--beginning with a long shot of Othello and Desdemona (played by Irene Jacob) in a gondola. As it approaches, Othello puts a white mask in front of his face.

This film flirts with this very racial interpretation as well as a few others, without being very consistent about any of them. For example, the Freudian disciple Ernest Jones argued that Iago had a homosexual crush on Othello--an interpretation that Olivier tried when he first played Iago in the 1930s on an uncooperative Ralph Richardson as Othello. In this film there is one scene where Branagh makes a blatant move in this direction, but that's about it.

Laurence Fishburne has worked on stage as well as on TV and in the movies, notably in August Wilson plays. He gives Othello a dignity and authority, and, like Hopkins, is very calm at the end. He plays Othello as intelligent, sensitive and too trusting and naive. Branagh's Iago owes much to Hoskins', (as indeed does A.J. Stewart here in Arcata.) There are some nice cinematic touches by director Oliver Parker--eyes that literally glow green, Iago knocking chess pieces into the water and then the bodies of the dead dropped into the sea. It's an inconsistent but often provocative and always watchable film.

One other interesting interpretation is of the key character of Roderigo, the first of the nobles that Iago manipulates. In the Olivier version (as in the Arcata stage version), Roderigo is mostly just dim. In the BBC version, he's dim but also proud, easy to flatter. But in this version, Michael Maloney (who stars in one of my favorite unknown films--about a ragtag company playing Hamlet--directed by Branagh, also in 1995, called A Midwinter's Tale) plays Roderigo as excessively passionate and impulsive. Which he plays very well.

Othello on Film: Welles

Orson Welles as Othello in the
1952 film version he directed.

Othello on Film: Welles

The first of these Othellos to be filmed, but one of the last to be seen, was directed by Orson Welles, who also played Othello. This film's history is an epic journey. It started in the late 1940s, when Welles--a Hollywood outcast at the time--was filming his vision of Othello in bits and pieces, between paying film work and when he had the money. He filmed it in various locations throughout Europe, wherever he happened to be.

The film was finished in 1952, and released in the U.S. in 1955, to very mixed reviews. After being shown in only three theatres, the film essentially disappeared for the next three decades. Thought completely lost, a print was found in 1981, but still it was not really seen until the film was restored in 1992: exactly forty years after Welles completed it.

And "completed" is a relative word. The restoration was far from perfect, and the shoestring budget shows up in some bad dubbing and a few awkward effects. But apart from all that, it is very close to magnificent.

At least as a piece of moviemaking. This is the most cinematic of Othellos on film. The words are Shakespeare's but the editor is Welles--he tells the whole story in about 90 minutes. It begins with a montage of the funerals of Othello and Desdemona, while Iago is hoisted to his punishment. These opening scenes, the black and white cinematography, the framing, askew camera angles and silhouettes are reminiscent of Bergman, and later of Kurosawa and even Fellini.

Welles started out directing theatre, including Shakespeare--he created the famous Federal Theatre Project production of an all-black Macbeth during the Depression. He knew the plays, and by this time he knew moviemaking, too. So he could re-imagine the text as a film script--for example, by showing Othello's epileptic fit from Othello's point of view, as he wakes.

Iago is played by Micheal MacLiammoir, an accomplished Irish actor, who later wrote that Welles instructed him to play Iago as a repressed homosexual, fixated on Othello but in an impotent rage--once again, a variation of the Freudian via Ernest Jones theory. It doesn't clarify the play, nor does Welles performance, but the movie does--and it is striking, even amazing to look at.

Suzanne Cloutier played Desdemona--blond, lovely and so young she's growing up on screen, over the four years it took to make the film. She probably looks more the age imputed to Desdemona in the play, and has the beauty to bewitch Othello, but I didn't sense any sparks between them. That's something lacking, it seems to me, in all these films. Maggie Smith was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in the Olivier version (as was Olivier), and Irene Jacob and Penelope Wilton give fine performances in their films, perhaps even true to Elizabethan mores, but the central romance remains a convention and Desdemona's part in all these films is too much as a cipher to be satisfying.

David Hamilton collage of Othello at Arcata
Playhouse.

Othello in Arcata

When Venice was a great power, its most trusted military leader was Othello, a Moor. In secret, Othello wooed the daughter of a Venetian noble, Brabantio, and as the play opens their secret marriage is about to be revealed. Iago, a trusted officer who may or may not be seriously aggrieved at being passed over as Othello’s second in command, and who may or may not really believe that Othello seduced his wife, is certainly out to get Othello from the play’s first beat.

When Iago’s first attempt—turning Brabantio against Othello—isn’t enough, he devises a plan to convince Othello that his new wife, Desdemonia, has been unfaithful with Michael Cassio, who conveniently is the officer who got the job as Othello’s lieutenant that Iago covets. It works, all too well.

Much of this story was found in the Italian tale that Shakespeare adapted, but besides the histrionic themes of jealousy, envy and carnal passion, the play is riddled and beset with questions. What is Iago’s problem? Why is Othello so easily convinced and moved to violence? Some of the most famous productions in Shakespearian history have tried to address these and other vexing questions in a play that continues to fascinate audiences.

The production of Shakespeare’s Othello, Moor of Venice by Shake the Bard Theatre Company currently at the Arcata Playhouse makes good use of this intimate space to focus on the dynamics of the play itself. A traditional but minimal set (conceived, designed and created by David Hamilton, Jack Freeman and Sam Neuwirth respectively) is complemented by Pat Hamilton’s handsome and evocative costumes, and Gabe Groom’s suggestive sound design. Director David Hamilton has employed some cunning stagecraft to keep the action on track and to focus particular moments. The result is a clear and creditable production, with solid performances, including a brilliant, thrilling one—and a virtual clinic on acting Shakespeare-- by Jabari Morgan as Othello.

Morgan’s interpretation is well-considered and creative, and its skillful expression rivets your attention. From his first entrance and his first calmly, warmly resonating words, his Othello is every inch a general, until this shock unhinges him, and he struggles against a kind of madness. Morgan’s masterful physical (including vocal) effects in the second half of the play are dazzling, but I was just as impressed by his precision in the first half, when he is alive to every moment. Too many actors, especially in Shakespeare, feel the need to indicate with gestures the meaning of the words. Jabari Morgan acts the words, and every actor should watch his performance to see the difference.

Iago presents his “honest” face to others, but exposes his malevolent intentions to us in soliloquies that poet and critic W. H. Auden thought should be played “slightly mad and with terrific gaiety,” which aptly describes how a cavorting A.J. Stewart performed them. He indulged in a bit too much indicating for my taste (is it really necessary to mime heart on a sleeve?) and his lighting accented an evil brow a bit too obviously. He was most effective and disconcerting playing the calm and solicitous public Iago, and his creepy grin in the final scene chillingly illuminated both sides of the character. He also matched Morgan’s power in some key scenes together.

Erik “Rez” Peterson is efficient in the mostly functional role of Cassio, a self-consciously upright aristocrat with a weakness for arrogance and wine. Rich Chase plays the pawn Roderigo with a trusting dimness that makes him Iago’s effective tool, yet with the sense of wrong that leads to Iago’s undoing. Abe Green has one of the better voices, and as a younger than usual Brabantio, he can stand toe to toe confronting Othello. Darcy Daughtry has a small but winning role as the reputed strumpet, Bianca.

Jennifer Trustem is a fiery Emilia, Iago’s wife as well as Desdemona’s lady-in-waiting and staunchest defender. As Desdemona, Jay Shepherd emphasizes her naiveté, and together she and Trustem create a very effective (at least when audible) scene on what would soon be Desdemona’s deathbed, employing dialogue that has Shakespeare sounding like an Elizabethan feminist, with the gender equivalent of his more famous “has not a Jew eyes?” aria in The Merchant of Venice.

What past ages called passions, and attributed to temperament, culture, class and race, we may reflexively consider psychological or mental illnesses. In our culture Iago may remind us of psychopaths and sociopathic serial killers, Othello perhaps as psychotic or even schizophrenic; Desdemona as abuse victim. There is scholarly support for the idea that both Othello and Iago were victims of physical maladies known to have mental effects (Othello’s epilepsy being long associated with satanic possession, demoted in Shakespeare’s time to obsession.)

But even so, as David Hamilton claims in his program note, these characters all represent aspects of ourselves. Many will recognize some misguided Othello in authority, or the Iago of the office, complete with cascades of malignant consequences. All of the main characters—including Desdemona, Emilia and Cassio— are flawed and make small mistakes that conspire to the tragic end. As Desdemona muses, “How foolish are our minds.”

This show wasn’t an unqualified triumph the night I saw it—there were some weak moments, diction problems, and unhelpful lighting, especially in the final revelation scene. But it’s well worth seeing, and Jabari Morgan’s performance is not to be missed. This Othello plays one more weekend.