Post-Racial + Post-Ironic = Post-Relevant
Peter Sellar's Othello is one hot mess.There are so many problems with this thing that it's hard to know where to begin. Seriously, it's that bad.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman is such a gifted actor that the idea of him as Iago is mouth watering. But in this production which claims to eschew irony, his paunchy brand of hangdog irony is the peg he hangs his hat on. That, and bellowing.
In fact, most scenes can be measured by who's bellowing now. If Hoffman's not bellowing, then someone's bellowing at him. Part of the frustration that mounts over the 4 hours of the production is to glimpse how many different gears Hoffman's got. He can switch things up on a dime. Though he shows us how much range he's got, for most of the show he is either in neutral or 5th-FUCKING-GEAR!!
Thank God for him and John Ortiz, who plays Othello. Without the two of them, no one would make it through this thing. About a third of the audience walked out, and the applause politely lasted long enough to get the cast offstage.
I knew I was in trouble when I opened up the program notes and read this from Sellars:
Can we make a production of Othello that sheds the trappings of our forebears' racial hierarchies and assumptions and that addresses the realities and possibilities of the Obama generation in a new century?Uh-oh.
Sellars' attempt to answer his self-imposed question is so shallow and thunderously literal that it's difficult to respond to in detail without being cruel. Suffice it to say that when doing a post-whatever riff on Shakespeare, you're always best served by following the cues that the text gives you.
And the first thing that Othello tells you is that 'the trappings of...racial hierarchies' is not the point of the play. It's an epic dissection of the male psyche, and the racial trappings are just that: trappings! Sellars wastes so much effort on the superficial details that what we end up with feels like those hilariously awful stage adaptations of films that Max Fischer does in Rushmore. It's like watching a slightly more intelligent than average, exceedingly ambitious kid's take on Othello, rather than the real thing. All of Shakespeare's words are subjugated by Sellars' desire to hit his big beats:
1. The cast is post-racial: Othello's hispanic. Everyone besides Desdemona and Othello are black. "The Obama era has thrust the world into a new search for language to describe race and relationships," says Sellars. Really? Might want to turn on the TV, bud. Obama's election hasn't done squat to erase our racial hangups or make us any less lazy in the language we use to discuss them. And this trick has been tried before. When you reverse cast Othello, you draw attention to the disparity between the text and the cast. It makes the racial aspects of the play absurd, and not in a good way.
2. The roles are combined: There are 13 featured roles in Othello. There are 9 actors in Sellars' version. He contorts the text so much that Desdemona's father is played by a black man. Most painful to watch is his conflation of Bianca and Montano. Why combine a male and female role, you rightly wonder? So instead of fighting Montano, Cassio can rape Bianco/Montano. Yep, we get a full on rape scene in this crapfest. The cognitive dissonance of reversing the cast's race is nothing compared to the disconnect between Iago's description to Othello of the duel and the rape the audience has witnessed. This was an idea that was stillborn.
3. No one leaves the stage: Sellars turns Venice into the Hotel California where no one can ever leave. Throughout the entire Venetian portion, Othello and Desdemona are still in the throes of their affair; so, Sellars has them frollicking in bed the whole time. Which means that they have to get up, put their clothes on and deliver their lines when needed, then strip and go back to cavorting during the other scenes. Other characters simply move off to spotlit chairs on the periphery of the stage and busy themselves with symbolic pantomimes while the play marches on. The end result is a blocking nightmare that resembles a traffic jam, which is as dramatically interesting as watching paint dry.
The bottom line is that Sellars isn't serious about the text. It shows in Hoffman's relatively superficial reading, which is an insult to the fine work of Ortiz and Jessica Chastain as Desdemona. It shows in the woefully inept supporting cast which seems to think Shakespeare Is For Shouting. Mostly, it shows in all the effort Sellars made to rearrange the surface of the play. He's given us a window dressing and called it a house.
I want my money back, but mainly, I want to see Hoffman take another crack at it with a different director.
Labels: Othello, William Shakespeare
posted by jodru at 03:10
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