HOLDING FAST: Amid the maelstrom |
The Cypress setting of Shakespeare’s Othello, classically directed by Sally Wood for the Theater at Monmouth, is a system of frequently rearranged wooden docks and walkways, designed by Dustin Tucker. They’re connected, early on, but are soon divided, first by heartbreaking inches, then by epic gaps. For the characters who walk these boards of the Moor’s tragedy, against a stark horizon of mercurial color, the infrastructure of human bonds proves just as subject to deconstruction, and to breaches.It takes only a crack to start the bridges asplitting, and Othello’s ax-man is Iago (Adam Heffernan), an underling of the Moorish Venetian general Othello (Charles Waters). Violently disgruntled over Othello’s promotion of Cassio (Jacob Troy) to the position of Lieutenant, Iago devises a scheme to ruin Cassio, ravage the emotions of Othello, and raise himself in the military ranks: Into the uncommonly strong devotion of Othello for his new bride, Desdemona (the luminous Lindsay Torrey), Iago opens a rift and jams a wedge, and with a few deft gestures, sets about making two shocked fragments of their union. Assisted by the stoogy self-interest of Roderigo, the Duke of Venice (the excellent Mike Anthony) who fancies Desdemona himself, Iago manufactures reasons to believe that Desdemona has been getting it on with Cassio.
As the author of all the intricate catastrophe that follows, Heffernan comes off as less a calculating menace than a haphazardly clever slacker type with too much time and ego on his hands. His Iago’s villainy is much stronger in his scenes with other characters, when he’s inevitably pretending to be something he’s not, than during his monologues, when his true personality seems insubstantial. This invites some interesting psychological speculation (beneath all the fakery of the master poseur, is there really not much at all?), but is theatrically unsatisfying. “I am not what I am,” Iago professes early on, and while Heffernan revels well and effortlessly in and out of everything he’s not, what’s absent in Iago is a more dramatically compelling idea of what he is.
What he distills so easily in the other characters — jealousy, lust, drunkenness, fury — is measured by some finely tuned performances. As the enamored Duke Roderigo, Anthony is a delectable virtuoso; his peevish, extremely watchable comedy is sublime in timing and gesture. Cassio’s character arc, in the hands of Troy, is a sensitive evolution from obsequious but nice-enough guy to raging brawler to sorrowful repentant.
Waters’s Othello makes a more abrupt and primal shift under Iago’s machinations; he does love and rage better than he does the more confusing gradients in between them. His best scenes, in fact, are the brief but electric idylls he shares with Torrey’s bright Desdemona. Together, these two rollick with candor and unapologetic arousal. Torrey herself has greater nuance in her range, and more affectingly spans anger, humiliation, love, and disbelief once Iago has befouled her reputation. She also has an evocative way of pressing her hands to herself — her heart, her stomach, her womb — as her affections are moved and abused, as if to reinforce the solidity of the character within her flesh.
