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Othello Revisited
Reviewed by Bill Raden
Ghost Players at the Avery Shreiber Playhouse
Through Sept. 7
Ever since the great Paul Robeson first added Shakespeare’s storied Moor to his repertoire of stage characterizations, Othello has been bound up in a broader and distinctly modern narrative of race. The best evidence for that is in the controversy that invariably surrounds any production or actor that, like the 1965 Laurence Olivier film version, has the effrontery to offer a blackface Othello.
Performing the character, Robeson once said, was like “killing two birds with one stone. I’m acting and I’m talking for the negroes in the way only Shakespeare can.”
And while auteur-director Stephanie Alkazian Zushi (who is also this show’s one-woman production-design team) doesn’t break with the Civil Rights Era-codified practice in her multiracially cast staging (African-American actor Michael Tunstill does a muscular turn as the Moor in the production) of Othello Revisted, her ambitious adaptation of the Bard achieves something even more provocative and politically pointed.
By costuming her actors in contemporary battle fatigues, arming them to the teeth with M16s, combat knives and samurai swords (even Catherine Leong’s ball-busting Emilia packs a 9mm automatic), Zushi presents Othello as heading a military occupation in a still very hot war zone. Accented by her sound design of cannon thunder and klaxon alarms, Zushi’s graphic foregrounding of warfare cogently reframes the play from one of racial conflict to a statement about war’s tendency to unleash the id and cause even the best intentioned and noblest of warriors to commit unspeakable atrocities.
To that end, rather than the half-Christianized, half-savage African suggested by the text, the wiry Tunstill delivers a stolid portrait of a professional commander whose authority derives as much from his sound military judgment and unflappable leadership as it does from the Venetian senate.
As his flamboyant, intrigue-making ensign, Iago, Ko Zushi (husband of the director) adds karate kicks and a convincing air of furtive introspection to the Bard’s singular portrait of unalloyed, irrational malevolence. Completing the play’s schematized dialectic is Desdemona (a curiously colorless Vivi Thai), a paragon of Elizabethan womanly and uxorial virtue that is Iago’s moral antithesis.
Kevin Michael Shiley as a gullible and ineffectual Cassio, Wali Habib, in an unusually fiery and un-ironic reading of the dupe Roderigo, and Elyse Hamilton, as a cute and effectively funny Clown soldier, round out the better half of an uneven ensemble.
Unfortunately, despite demonstrating the undeniable power of a coherent staging concept while showcasing it’s director-designer’s flair for arresting imagery (like suggesting Othello’s disintegrating psyche through the haunting flickering-light effect that Stephanie Zushi achieves on her graffiti-layered backdrop), Othello Revisited is also a sobering reminder of the challenges faced by 99-seat Shakespeare in this town.
John Lithgow recently wrote of the several months of preparation that he put into the role of King Lear in order to turn up letter-perfect on the first day of rehearsal for this month’s New York Shakespeare Festival production. Judging by the linguistic opacity and line stumbling on display in the second weekend of Othello Revisited, an educated guess would be that the wobbly ensemble was barely off-book by the time of the tech rehearsal.
Ghost Players at the Avery Schreiber Playhouse, 4934 Lankershim Blvd., NoHo; Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., &:30 p.m.; through September 7. (310) 210-9143, theghostplayers.net.
