No Shakespearean drama is more suited to a chamber production than “Othello,” an essentially domestic tragedy that revolves around personal insecurity and malfeasance in a marital bedroom. And while other productions certainly have enjoyed greater visual splendor and achieved more tragic grandeur, you’d be pressed to find an “Othello” anywhere that homes in so beautifully and truthfully on personal agony than the one that opened Tuesday at Writers’ Theatre.
This is partly a matter of how deftly Michael Halberstam’s simple but deceptively sophisticated staging exploits the intimacy of his Glencoe space. There is something about being just a few feet from Desdemona’s bed, even as Suzanne Lang’s guileless yet just slightly sexualized bride figures out that her husband’s nocturnal ministrations are not so much passionate as murderous. And there is something about seeing deep inside Kevin Gudahl’s hard eyes, as the actor (playing Desdemona’s father) reveals the naked hatred that informs the racist universe in which James Vincent Meredith’s Moor of Venice has to go about his personal and professional business.
And whereas in most versions of this show, a tortured minor character such as the superb Karen Janes Woditsch’s Emilia disappears into the scenery, here the guilt-ridden purveyor of literature’s most famous stolen handkerchief bares her soul just inches away from the paying customers. It’s like watching the total unraveling of a woman who, entirely too late, comes to see the downside of living a life based entirely on expedient choices. And when she croaks, hopelessly repentant, you have the sense of feeling her final wasted breath on your face.
None of this would play, of course, without a clutch of distinguished Chicago actors. If you’ve seen the work of the gray-haired John Judd before, you’ll surely be gobsmacked here by how he seems to have shed 20 years when he picks up a sword. Shrewdly cast against type as Iago, Judd’s softer, gentler, more deadly villain dominates this production.
For once, you don’t have to swallow hard to believe that Othello would be so credulous as to believe his false friend’s claims that his wife is untrue.
Mostly because Judd is such an active and provocative listener on stage, he wraps his understated but endlessly persuasive Iago in a seductive perfume of pieties and logical illogicalities. Brilliantly, Judd gives his shrug-loving Iago the tools and humor not of the villain but of the sidekick — I kept thinking about Paulie and Sil from “The Sopranos.” With such a fast friend so false, Othello, we quickly figure, doesn’t have a chance.
In that horrendously tricky title role, the richly poetic actor Meredith gets much but not all of the way there. Late in the play, he powerfully and movingly shows us the effect of his jealousy on the ravaging of his soul. And he surely has the gravitas of the leader. But still, he has not yet figured out a way to clearly show us precisely when and why he turns on his uncertain bride — performed by Lang in a dazzlingly complex performance that’s as sensual as it is guileless.
But other than that significant lack of a clear, central, tragic journey, it’s hard to find any serious fault with a lean, compelling, powerful, 10-actor production that has clearly dissected every inch of this text and figured out an intelligent point of view on every flash point. A must-see for those who follow Shakespearean drama in Chicago and ideal for high school students, this very fine and inestimably clear “Othello” operates unstintingly within its own rules.
The level of physical intimacy — in numerous pairings — in the show is consistently fascinating. And yet Halberstam also wisely includes the oft-cut racist lines that betray the play’s palpable and pathetic fear of the black man (and myth). We might be staring at the most private and personal moments from just a few feet away. But in Glencoe, at least, Othello is merely playing out a narrative that others have already penned for him, with malevolent, injurious and entirely personal intent.
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cjones5@tribune.com
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“Othello”
When: Through July 15
Where: Writers’ Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe
Running time: 3 hours
Tickets: $45-$58 at 847-242-6000
