OTHELLO
Poor Iago. Here he is, a white racist in a once-all-white society that now accepts blacks–indeed, gives them special privileges. A society that upholds a black man’s claim to a white wife over her father’s protest that interracial marriage is “against all rules of nature.” A society that not only allows a black man to rise to military leadership but keeps a good white man like Iago lower on the ladder–and gives a helping hand to other blacks.
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Just another case of color-blind casting? Not at all. Simonson’s strategy is partly pragmatic: Ramon Melindez Moses, the fine young actor who played Gethin Price in Court’s Comedians last season, makes a reliable understudy for Harry J. Lennix’s Othello. But of primary importance, an African Cassio underscores the sensitivity of Othello’s position. Almost any black who has risen to power in a white-dominated world is sensitive about the behavior of other blacks; so the disgraceful brawl into which Cassio is lured by Iago adds a layer of shame to Othello’s anger.
Having clarified Iago’s motives, Simonson and the resourceful actor Steve Pickering shape the character as both a tough old army hawk and an almost superhuman morality-play symbol of vice–a white devil in every sense. With a snap of his fingers, Pickering’s vigorously virulent Iago can change the lighting of a scene, refocusing it on himself so he can deliver his soliloquies not as internal monologues but as direct addresses to the audience. Presuming the viewers’ sympathy, he doesn’t just confide his plans to us, he crows about them. He doesn’t disguise his contempt for the “black ram” he’s set out to destroy; when he quotes Othello, he mocks the Moor by affecting a darky dialect.
Obviously respectful of his subject, Jackson nonetheless doesn’t shy away from Malcolm’s flaws: the boyish search for direction and dignity that led him to trust duplicitous leaders; the inattention to his family; the creeping paranoia and edgy abrasiveness that reflected the inevitability of his murder–and helped to ensure it. The result is a passionate, painful, yet often funny production that rings true as Malcolm’s self-portrait and as a historical piece that both evokes a turbulent era of racial politics and illuminates our own very different yet troublingly similar time.
