“…in spite of nature,
Of years, of country, credit, every thing,
To fall in love with what she fear’d to look on!
It is a judgment maim’d and most imperfect
That will confess perfection so could err
Against all rules of nature, and must be driven
To find out practises of cunning hell,
Why this should be.”
— Brabantio I.iii
Iago is the villain in Shakespeare’s works that most gets under my skin. The only thing that is clear about him is that he does “so hate the Moor.” He gives us upwards of four possible motives for infecting his general with jealousy—that he had been passed over for promotion, that she may have slept with his wife, anxiety about miscegenation, and that she is in general a poor leader—that it is unclear if any of these are at the core of his ire. He offers then a good definition of evil: that for which no motive for hate can be found, a hate that operates without perceived cause. Making the Moor a lesbian woman in the play, as the What You Will Shakespeare Company did this weekend, anchors Iago’s hate even if he cannot articulate it to us: that a Black female is above his station threatens both his military and sexual identities.
This casting choice, aside from anchoring Othello in a cultural moment, makes a number of other aspects about this play ring differently as well. Consider also that Desdemona’s (Megan Scharlau) father, Brabantio (Samantha Fuchs), and the Duke (Madeline Whitesell) are also coded female. The accusations of “witchcraft” that the Moor is accused sits very differently in the play, more overtly associated with medieval female mysticism like that of King Edward II’s wife than the photo-Orientalism of the Ottoman Turks. The play’s emphasis on what is “natural” gets more directly linked with religion rather than race in light of the Supreme Court ruling Friday that same-sex marriage is a Constitutional right. In the wake of the SCOTUS rulings hotly behind the racially-motivated shooting in Charleston, the line “if she be blessed, she would never have loved the Moor” clanged in my ear. Never have loved the Moor because she was black? Because she was a woman? Both are viable answers to what it means to not be blessed in the eyes of God, putting these two major recent events in conversation with one another in a way that the media has yet to do.

Beyond the surface casting choices, I found this production to be one of the most balanced in terms of actorly skill and attention to text of WYW’s spring season. Iago (Luis Alcantara) came out at the top of his pith, and I was concerned he would have nowhere else to go emotionally. In fact, he grew on me, moving from a guns-blazing stir-the-pot fellow to a considered sociopath by developing an unsettling and pointed quietness by the end of the production. He never lost his like of pointing and directing in his gestures, signaling the militarism and hierarchization that importantly frames the action of the play. His foil, Cassio (Orion Lovell), the overt and conscientious playboy to all women regardless of their orientation, could easily be confused as an inconsiderate lush. I think this production nails his characterization: in a world in which we are taught to be suspect first, as audiences we quickly misdiagnose Cassio’s virtues of sincerity and earnestness as symptoms of a larger, unscrupulous agenda. Lovell’s ability to give Cassio both charm and utter, world-altering dismay to first his removal from command and then to Iago’s attack on him (not to mention the spiking of his drink) by play’s end gives us some ease that Cassio is the one left to rule in Cyprus.
There were a number of other small and smart moments in the production that suggest a careful and detail-oriented approach by co-directors Jaclyn Marta and Matthew James Marquez:
- Memory: The troupe is beginning to play with the space of the University Place Christian Church more overtly, such as in their recent Macbeth. Here they did a tight theatre-in-the-round set-up that afforded experimentation with their increasingly sophisticated lighting options. Both the courtship scene as described by Othello (Laura Robertson) and Cassio’s temptation of Desdemona as described by Iago are bathed in a blue light to signal the extent of what is being imagined inside Othello’s head. It is a powerful device to lend the character greater interiority that is still informed by the text.
- Militarism: While watching I was looking for more overt signals to the military context of the play. It wasn’t until this morning that I realized the degree to which gesture was freighting the influence of militarism on the individual characters. Perhaps one of my favorite moments was the interpretation of the lover’s quarrel over Cassio in III.iii: distracted by the business of running a war campaign through her cellphone, Othello is pestered by Desdemona to hear out Cassio. Rather than sycophancy, Robertson found space to use the responses to Desdemona’s admittedly inappropriate influences over military structure as sarcasm. Eye-rolling, frustration, and mock-force play up the irony of “I will deny thee nothing” and “I am obedient,” economically giving us a realistic moment of spousal friction necessary to make these characters human, make us side with and root for them, before they begin to undo one another. It is an important playful set-up to the extent of Othello’s strength when the mock-force becomes real force, full face slaps, and aggressive shoving about when Othello first confronts Desdemona about infidelity in IV.i: “I would make her turn: / Sir, she can turn, and turn, and yet go on, / And turn again; and she can weep, sir, weep; / And she’s obedient, as you say, obedient, / Very obedient.” It is a creative approach to these imbedded stage directions to physically turn Desdemona, alongside the echoes of earlier “obedience,” that lends their relationship and the play coherence.
- Willows: Desdemona’s willow song is a signal moment in this play, not unlike the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet or the madness scene in Macbeth. Played as if in shock or lost in memory, the song can easily evacuate the tenuous agency that Desdemona has developed in the course of the play. Without that agency, Othello is made simply a brute killing an unknowing innocent and these characters lose the complex richness that made them relatable in the first place. Scharlau gives us a doe-eyed Desdemona for most of the production: aware, playful, but smacking of nothing serious. Here she creates a very calm moment with a thoughtful interpretation of the willow song, sung confidently and only occasionally incorporating a minor key without exoticizing Barbary’s song too much. Suffering from allergies, it was calm and lovely enough that I found myself working hard to keep from sniffling and disturbing the moment. Her abrupt turn in the song to say “what’s that‽” made the whole audience gasp and several of us jump up in our seats. I had never envisioned this moment in this way, but we were in fact taken in by a North African song and story, entranced as Desdemona must have first been by Othello, and perhaps experiencing what entrances them about one another.
Often you don’t necessarily get as thoughtful a production when the exigency, the timeliness of its subject matter, is so immediate. The context for me as I meditate this morning is the recent SCOTUS ruling and Charleston. That we need to talk about racialized privilege and the policing of bodies in this country has never been more present and more difficult, and yet again Shakespeare gave me a way to link these together and space to meditate on those links. If we can make any claims to how theatre is political, it is in the way it gives us imaginative room to contemplate frictions in our realities. In skimming through the program, I was struck that not only were the actors playing Desdemona and Cassio in a relationship, but that the actors playing Iago and Othello are getting married in a month’s time. No doubt the struggles they have and will face as an interracial couple may’ve informed their performances (speaking of motive), but certainly it brings home again that these dramas have direct bearings on our reality. I can say that I needed this play, in this way, right now. As a summer production the audience was scanter than it might have been; I hope the What You Will Shakespeare Company considers re-mounting it for the fall, as I think others need this play, in this way, too.
- The What You Will Shakespeare Company‘s production of The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice plays at the University Place Christian Church 26-27 June 2015. Tickets are $7. Doors are at 7:30pm and the show starts at 8:00pm.
- This was a special summer production by the company, whose next season will not start until the fall semester. To keep up with their productions, follow them on Facebook and WordPress.
- And for you lovers and dreamers dismayed, click here for some of that rainbow connection.