Why did you choose to do Othello?
For me, uh, you know
All the plays speak to whatever moment we happen to be living in it's it's part of the greatness of the writer
but I do think Othello is particularly resonant with this moment of
21st century United States, I feel like
the way in which otherness is
detailed in terms of racial otherness
religious otherness
Gender
everything
About the play feels like it speaks to this moment to me.
It's just felt urgent. It felt like an urgent story to tell.
I have to say that I
teach a freshman course in which I in the past. I've always taught
Hamlet as the
go to Shakespeare play at the beginning and I dropped it and substituted Othello.
When did when did you that? This year?
This year.
It just seemed to me just overwhelmingly clear that that is the play that
not only because of race and otherness also because of misogyny.
And the kind of violence murderousness that seeds just below the surface
on the subject just
It is important to use this play now.
And xenophobia too. Excuse me, but the fact that Othello is not
from the country that he's serving and the way in which that kind of immigrant bashing.
An Aryan barbarian Iago calls him. Yes, right Aryan barbarian, right?
The other thing I wanted to mention briefly
in relation to race is that our production is we do it with only twelve actors because we really wanted to focus on
the intimacy of the domestic tragedy and of those twelve actors
Four self-identify as white and eight self-identify as people of color
So in addition to an African-American actor who plays Othello, we have Latinx actors, Native American actors
Asian-american and middle-eastern actor and that felt important to me in terms of interpreting the story in a
Contemporary context. You can't just say it's a tragedy and therefore there's no humor because actually Shakespeare's sense of dramatic
irony and the characters own sense of irony about the situation that they find themselves in
does lead to humor, you know for the audience at times and you know
there's obviously laughter you can welcome as a director and laughter you want to run screaming from so it's not that the goal is to
Make a laugh riot of a production, but I but I do think a tragedy that has
No laughter ever is probably not a good interpretation of that play for me. It certainly would be alien to Shakespeare who
Against all of the
the
classical norms actually
Always managed to integrate the two of them.
Othello is a particularly disturbing case of it because in effect a fellow is about an enormous practical joke
mmm of the most ghastly
Kind imaginable. But when Amelia at the end of the play finally shouts out what the audience's wanted to shout out
for the last two hours
Dolt idiot. Yeah that bursts out finally with that's the
climax of a
hideous practical joke.
So the question is what to do? When in fact when you watch Iago say
Let me figure out how to do this now. Cassio's a
likely person for this role and so for and so on he's just making a kind of comic plot in the way that that
Shakespeare wrote elsewhere in his comedies to picture people putting together little practical jokes to trick Malvolio to do this or that and
and yet this turns out to be the most unbearable most painful as you said most intimate to
Soul-destroying
Vision and yet, it's it's built around this
Comic device, right? It's a
I'm I read the play of a thousand times. I've seen it a thousand times. I'm still astonished
Shakespeare carried this off. I mean that he succeeded in doing this is just I can't
Fathom how he succeeded in in tying these two things together
Shakespeare is the most musical of playwrights, um and that music pervades even without
The contributions of Verdi or Rossini or dozens of others?
Shakespeare actually is
Music is pervasive in
Shakespeare and
as if he were longing to write musicals and anyway a lot of the time I mean that and in the in the case
The interesting case of Othello is not so much that
Music is constantly present as it is. Let's say in Twelfth Night and in other plays
It's that the play is full of music verbally, it's as if the play were already
an extraordinary
lyric to be sung and the
that makes the
decision of Verdi or of
to write
arguably the greatest of his
literary adaptations and
Or of Rossini and others to take this play the natural because it's already singing
the there's a
famous critical phrase that Othello music and the
Othello's speech itself is charged as it were musically. It's actually
intense and in the way, he speaks since intense in the very word Othello that
That's something that pushes language out toward
the musical and in the case of of
Verdi I
mean certain way Verdi
drops lots of things from the play that I care about and that I'd be interested in he's not interested in anything to do with
with
politics as it were of the play, but the
Intense
Interest in the way in which at a certain extreme moment of human passion the voice begins to move toward
Singing
rather than speech seems to me both deep perception about
Something that Shakespeare already understood in in writing the play, you know
I want to I want to both approach the play as a brand-new play as if it was written
Today and the pages were just delivered into our rehearsal room and at the same time
I'm very aware that we are in dialogue with 400 years of production traditions, and there's certain choices that are
maybe
Caked over with kind of like an old painting there's kind of a brown glaze that can cake over the work
So how do we scrape that away and find the vibrant colors that were in the original?
Work of art that Shakespeare created, you know
So I feel that I do need to be in dialogue with
Learn as much as I can about production history and also be willing to completely throw all that out the window