Moor Is Less

A great general, who has lived his life among men, making war, sailing the high seas, falls totally, crazily in love with a lovely young highborn woman in Venice who falls in love with him. He’s black. She’s white. After some initial commotion, their surprising, secret marriage is accepted, and off they go, he to battle the Turks on Cypress, she to keep him company because they cannot bear to be parted.

Meanwhile, Iago, resentful he has been passed over for promotion as Othello's lieutenant, vows revenge, conning everybody, maybe even himself.

Jealousy. Passion. Exoticism. Sex. Betrayal. Planted evidence. Ambition. Slander. Men murdered. Women murdered. Suicide.

Sounds like daytime television, right? As directed by Carmen Khan, Othello has turned into a soap opera in the season-opening production at Philly Shakes--complete with cue-the-emotion music, corny spotlights, wooden acting and prefab passions. Huge, complex characters are reduced to cardboard figures, and the poetry is thrown away by a cast that often sounds like they are still amazed they've actually memorized it all.

The exception is John Lumia, whose Iago is accomplished, if odd; wearing paramilitary fatigues, Lumia plays him as one of those three-tours-of-duty-in-Nam types, whose violence always lurks just below the surface, a conscienceless sociopath, skillfully manipulative and exclusively self-interested. Lumia is most persuasive in his scenes with Othello, but the soliloquies are pretty much a washout; we never see Iago thinking up his schemes, feeling the intoxication of a new complication, savoring the triumphs, despising the decent and the gullible. He is merely delivering lines from a script. We see nothing of his attraction to Desdemona, nothing of his seductive, animal nature. In other words, he's merely a man with a mission (get promoted), rather than a portrait of the complexity of evil.

Brian Anthony Wilson's Othello lumbers around the stage (his lurching walk is exaggerated by every entrance and exit in the set involving stairs), bulky and sweating, apparently incapable of the intensity he keeps telling us he feels. In telling Brabantio how he wooed his daughter Desdemona, there is nothing in the recounting to woo us, nor is there any self-irony or sheepishness as the famous warrior finds himself besotted at this late date in his life. He should dote on her, but there is no chemistry between the two actors.

Karen Elizabeth Peakes' Desdemona becomes merely a plot device; she has no nature, no personality. Neither radically innocent nor "supersubtle," neither flirty nor pure. Mainly she seems just cheerful -- no problem about Dad, no worry about war, no thrill about marrying a man so romantically other, a man so astonishingly famous.

Khan's direction undermines the play -- and the world the play evokes -- at every moment; for example, men in business suits look weird kneeling in respect, so if you're going to update the costumes, update the gestures. In a world where women are either chaste or whores, a male envoy rubs Desdemona's bare shoulder in sympathy in two separate scenes (and why is she in a sparkly evening gown first thing in the morning?).

Emilia (J.J. Van Name), who seems to have no idea whom she's married to, apparently feels no guilt at her complicity in the plot against her mistress. And when she is worried about Desdemona, she asks how she is from across the stage, never taking a step toward her. Even when Shakespeare makes it easy by building the stage directions into the dialogue, the actors and director ignore them: Before her murder, Desdemona says, "Why gnaw you so your nether lip?/ Some bloody passion shakes your very frame," but Othello is neither gnawing nor shaking. And Othello's suicide is a choreographic shambles since you can't actually kill yourself grabbing the blade of somebody's drawn sword with your hands (ouch!) and rubbing the side of it against your stomach.

We wait, inevitably, for the famous lines -- those wondrous moments when Shakespeare reveals an immense amount in one quick stroke: "Keep up thy bright swords, for the dew will rust them," says Othello to a group of armed men who have come to arrest him. This should give us the man whole -- the power of his personality, his self-assurance and the men's response to him, awed and abashed. Here Othello just speaks the line as if it were a stage direction, and everybody puts away his sword. No problem. Brabantio (John Peakes) hurls terrible racist insults at Othello, but says them so calmly, so colorlessly, that there's clearly no reason to get upset -- never mind that they are longtime friends and that he just found out that his daughter eloped with Othello. Perhaps the richest line in the play is the most wasted here, "But yet the pity of it, Iago! O! Iago, the pity of it, Iago."

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