Othello/Desdemona

Reviewed by Paul Birchall
City Garage Theater
Through May 28

RECOMMENDED

Playwright Charles A. Duncombe’s drama is ostensibly a riff on the play Othello. It’s not an adaptation, mind you, because the structure and plot digress wildly from the Shakespearean original — but it is a work involving some of the same themes with basically the same set of characters. Somewhat reminiscent of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and perhaps even more similar to the undercurrents in Anouilh’s Antigone, Duncombe’s work is a sort of shadow play that emphasizes different aspects of Othello that shift with the theme of the moment. 

Anouilh’s Antigone opens with a chorus that notes, “There is no help for it.  When your name is Antigone, there is only one part you can play, and (you) will have to play (yours) through to the end.” The same weary self-awareness is found in Duncombe’s Othello (R.J. Jones, in a neatly taut and almost peevish turn), who knows from the beginning that his “job” is to kill Desdemona (Kenzie Kilroy) and who really is irritated by having to do it. 

In the play’s first scene, Othello approaches a sleeping Desdemona on her bed. They make love – and then he suffocates her with a pillow. He launches, appropriately, into Shakespeare’s post-murder speech, but then breaks off mid-verse. He’s had enough of it! Iago (Andrew Loviska) appears, a video image against the back wall, and sneeringly demands that Othello to get back to it. But Othello responds by questioning Iago’s role in the story and indeed, in the culture that presents him as “the other”. 

From there, things start to fly off the handle. Desdemona wakes up and is revealed as a petulant, childish and shrill young woman, who only married Othello because she wanted a bit of a thrill, and who now resents being forced to take on the thankless role of innocent tragic beauty. Othello dons white face, refusing to be the “Moor” any longer. Iago, dressed in Joe Orton-esque leather jacket and a pointy “twink” hair style, swaggers on, taunting Othello about micro- aggressions and White arrogance.   

Director Frederique Michel’s artful staging cleverly takes the familiar characters and pushes them in unusual directions, while exploring intriguing aspects of their motivations that are not usually discussed.  The production is full of interesting images and psychological underpinnings: For instance, as Desdemona rants and rages at Othello for not being the man she thought he’d be, she’s swinging on a trapeze made from red bedsheets. When Iago menaces Othello, he’s wearing a wraparound microphone that makes him sound a little like a 1990s self-help motivation expert. And when Jones dons his white face, he takes on a completely different personality, becoming slicker and more confident in a way that suggests the creepy status quo. 

The production possesses a playfulness that’s undeniably appealing, though a good portion of Duncombe’s dialogue inevitably plays a little too much like dialectic from a master’s thesis. For instance, do we really need a long, dry digression on why the handkerchief represents the symbol of Othello’s love?  The answer is no. There’s a reason why Shakespeare himself never says this outright — because it’s quite obvious. 

Jones makes for an unexpectedly melancholy Othello – his Moor seems more Hamlet than anything else. Loviska’s Iago is so diabolical that he seems to have stepped right out of Hell itself; he seems to represent chaos and uncertainty, rather than any human trait. Ultimately, the play is much more effective as a character portrayal than it is as a drama, as the narrative itself is calculatedly disjointed and non-linear. But Michel’s trenchant sense of irony – and the intelligence of the underlying thoughts in the piece – keep us intrigued.  

City Garage, Bergamot Station, Building T1, 2525 Michigan Ave,  Santa Monica; Fri.- Sat., 8 p.m., Sun., 2 p.m.;  through May 28.  (310) 453-9939, https://citygarage.org.  Running time: One hour and fifteen minutes.