SILENT OTHELLO
It is a curious choice, and it isn’t satisfying. For one thing, if you don’t know the original you’re utterly lost. For another, Melcori never provides a reason for the absence of words. The live, original music by Michael Zerang, Don Meckley, and Kent Kessler is often provocative, but it simply can’t carry the show. It is, after all, played like a sound track–incidental music and sounds that suggest a moment rather than tell a story.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A wordless production necessarily flattens the characters and deals only in broad strokes. It shares more with a game of charades than the producers may care to confess. A complicated plot must be simplified. A mass of emotion and poetry that relies on nuance and projection for its power is lost. A different approach (a Kabuki production, or one on roller skates, for instance) must add something–a twist, a new view, another layer–otherwise why do it?
Melcori does suggest a new direction by casting a woman, Kaja Overstreet, as the crafty and evil Iago, but he stops short of letting her go. Overstreet, whose background includes performance art and the Japanese art of the butoh (a haunting, deathlike dance theater that originated after Nagasaki and Hiroshima were bombed), seemed the most at ease and was the most accomplished at conveying the three-dimensional personality intended by the writer. She was fluid and muscular in turn, using her eyes, her lips even the direction of her toes, to tell us something about what was going on. She moved; everyone else simply followed blocking directions.
