Each year Jean Adamak of the Footsteps Theatre Company directs a Shakespearian production with a difference: All the roles are played by women.
Traditionalists may balk at such shameless revisionism, but this is a laudable endeavor. Aside from giving women a rare chance to play the juiciest of classical roles, audiences benefit from seeing oft-revived male characters from an inevitably different perspective.
As any student of Shakespeare knows, the Bard loved to subvert expectations of gender. And if Elizabethan groundlings once enjoyed sexual double-entendres derived from all-male casts, there’s no reason why theatergoers today can’t learn from and take pleasure in the reverse.
Having said all that, this current Footsteps production of “Othello” is a real disappointment. It’s not the gender reversals that are disappointing, but limitations that have nothing to with sex. That’s perhaps a paradoxical measure of Adamak’s overall achievement in her series.
This version of the tragedy of the Moor of Venice is beset by the kinds of problems encountered all the time in off-Loop Shakespeare. Too many of the actors do not make human sense of the verse they are speaking. The minor comic scenes are given more attention than major moments of tragedy, such as Othello’s killing of innocent Desdemona or the famous handkerchief scene. And the motivations and inner workings of the central characters are simply unclear.
Anastasia Basil’s ultracasual and overly ironic Iago makes little sense in this play. Antoinette Broderick finds the officer’s stiffness in Othello but that’s about all. We see far too little of the needed agony, or the hubris-filled fit of emotion that motivates his/her horribly murderous deeds.
There are some truthful performances in the minor roles — especially Melissa Van Kersen’s delightfully insecure Emilia and Michele DiMaso’s energetic Cassio. But whereas that might save a comedy, it does little to ameliorate the big holes here in the tragic center.
With a running time of well over three hours, Adamak is asking a lot of an audience seated on movable chairs in a small theater with a minimal and not terribly interesting setting. A few more judicious cuts would have better focused the evening.
As the much bigger Shakespeare Repertory also found to its cost not so long ago, “Othello” asks an awful lot of anybody, man or woman. Interesting though Adamak’s choices may be, the complexities of the text here win over the night.
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“Othello”
When: Through Oct. 26
Where: Footsteps Theatre, 5230 N. Clark St.
Phone: 773-878-4040
