Othello at Playhouse on Park: A Review

    
     It's always a very good thing to experience talented actors plying their trade in one of Shakespeare's tragedies -- especially in an intimate space like Playhouse on Park.  There's a visceral pleasure in hearing words that, despite the distance in space and time, are so often ridiculously familiar.  And that familiarity of language, of course, only underscores the realization that human nature (its nobility, its comedy, and its baseness) has changed little from when the Bard wrote his plays.
     Thus one feels that the familiar plot, surrounding the conniving Iago (Tom Coiner) tricking Othello (RJ Foster), a veritable force-of-nature, into a raging jealousy over a perceived affair between his wife Desdemona (Celine Held) and his equally loyal lieutenant Cassio (Aidan Eastwood-Paticchio), could have happened yesterday...and, well, probably did.
     Set in contemporary times, in modern dress, this production directed by Sasha Bratt, attempts a slight reclamation of Iago with an opening scene in which the soldier, at some point in the recent past, has been captured and waterboarded by the enemy.  This, I assume, is meant to explain his own jealousy of Cassio and even of Othello himself; shouldn't he too be recognized in some way for his heroism, for his service to the state?

     But no matter the ultimate reason for his scheming, Coiner's Iago takes over the play while scaring us with the efficiency of his plot and entertaining us with the deviltry of his wit.  Yes, Othello and Desdemona love one another passionately -- even as things fall apart (the performances of both Foster and Held just get stronger and stronger as the play progresses), and Emilia (Jennifer Polansky) becomes the equal of Iago in all the best ways (in fact, the best scene in the production is the one between the two women in Desdemona's bed chamber), but scene after scene it is Iago that draws, and deserves, our attention.

     That said, I cannot help but admit that I struggled with the adaptation (a fast-paced 2+ hours) because the contemporary setting, and especially the costuming by Erin Kacmarik, resulted in a jumble of conflicting concerns that just did not work for me. 
     The setting for most of the show, as the set design by Christopher Hoyt suggests, is the battlefield lodgings (a.k.a., tents) of Othello and his army.  Now, in Elizabethan times, women, who may have been welcomed on the road with their military husbands, may not have had a lot of casual options in dress, but in the 21st century such choices abound, and I'm pretty sure that no matter how well-to-do, privileged, and/or sheltered Desdemona might be, she wouldn't be wearing the dresses that Ms. Held wears, much less the high heels.  She looks great, but she wouldn't be able to make it to the mess hall in those shoes.  (Indeed, her and Emilia's outfits make the snappy safari ensembles of Ava Gardner and Grace Kelley in Mogambo seem downright practical!) In a completely different vein, Othello wears the same khaki pants and black t-shirt whether he be fresh from a victorious battle in Cyprus or disturbed, in Venice, mid-lovemaking.
     This may seem, at first, like trifling (especially given how much period costuming can cost a company), but, as a result, the contemporary dress made me question Desdemona's willingness to let her husband boss her about, beat her, and eventually... (Yes, I'm well aware that there are women who stay in abusive relationships, but the submissive way Desdemona acts, even after Othello makes it clear of his severe displeasure with her, now rings a bit false.)  Even now, she may not leave him, but the conversation would be decidedly different.
      In the end, perhaps, this is the beauty of Shakespearean drama: making us all consider so much of our experience -- maybe even more than any of us expect.
     Othello opens the fifth main-stage season of the Playhouse and runs through October 20th.

A hit, no errors! (Playhouse on Park's "The Comedy of...")

Playhouse on Park has brought Stages on the Sound's production of The Comedy of Errors to West Hartford, and it works very very well.  The play, of course, concerns the confusion wrought by two sets of separated twins in the heart of Ephesus and is made even more manic here by all the parts being played by an ensemble of four (!?!) talented and high-energy actors, Brad DePlanche, Vanessa Morosco, Jesse Graham, and Brendan Norton.  The audience was especially endeared to Mr. DePlanche (as the two Dromios and, especially, as the Abbess Amelia), but all four displayed the kind of total commitment that a small theatre space demands and rewards -- especially with audience members seated adjacent to the stage to assist with those scenes when four bodies just were not enough.

Directed by Will Ditterline, the production is a slam-bang 100 minutes without intermission.  The action moves briskly and often hilariously...with every aspect of the performances (accents, costumes, set, and even the sound effects which are all generated by the actors themselves) aimed at making the audience laugh. 

And laugh we did.

Catch it before it closes on 17 April, and, in the meantime, if someone mistakes you for someone else, well...have fun with it (you just may have a long-lost twin)!

Shakespearean Quote of the Week

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.

Julius Caesar

Playhouse on Park is the "Cheese to My Macaroni"!

On Friday evening, the family and I attended Playhouse on Park's production of The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged), a very entertaining three-man show with Sean Harris, David Salsa, and Rich Hollman, directed by Tom Ridgely.

The packed house (BTW, erroneously called the first-ever sold-out show at POP) enjoyed the manic energy of the three actors and their remarkable ability to switch roles -- and gears -- at the drop of a hat (or of a line or of a costume or of a prop)!

Whether a devotee of the Bard or a novice, one can't help but enjoy oneself because, even in the midst of the silliest of spoofs, the actors are able to make the language and characters come alive. (Even the apparent throw-away soliloquy of Hamlet, as beautifully performed by Mr. Hollman, spoke volumes of reasons why Shakespeare will not -- indeed, cannot-- go away.)

The show is so fast-paced I really can't remember everything I found really, really funny. I know I can't recall the last Uncle Vanya joke I was exposed to, and admittedly I didn't really fully get the allusion last night, but I laughed, and laughed heartily... so it needn't matter.

As I told my daughters, the strength of a show like this is that, despite its mockery of scholarly approaches to the playwright and the plays, the authors (Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Borgeson) had to be masters of the Shakespearean corpus to create such a work. So genuinely funny a play can't be written by those who don't know and love "my Willy."

From my perspective , this is the most completely successful production that POP has yet mounted, and that's not an easy mark to hit (given what they have done even in their short existence)!

FYI: The title of this post alludes to one of the Hamlet bits that got the entire audience playing along. And, if that doesn't define good theatre, I'm not sure what does!

No Shakespeare left behind...

Measure for Measure

Assessing Student Learning Outcomes across Institutions

Connecticut State University System Assessment Conference

April 24, 2009

Eastern Connecticut State University

Willimantic, CT

The first two proposed titles for the workshop?

A Comedy of Errors and Much Ado about Nothing...