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Money in Its Purse, No Heart on Its Sleeve: Denzel Washington in Othello
Kenny Leon’s production, co-starring Jake Gyllenhaal, is low on ideas and lower on energy.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge scribbled a note in the margins of his copy of Othello about “the motive-hunting of Motiveless malignity” — a reference to the way in which the play’s treacherous villain, Iago, cooks up a variety of shallow rationalizations for a hatred that’s too deep and insidious to stem from any neatly explicable circumstance. Eventually, the monoliths start sliding ponderously back and forth to break up the space—as a truly bewildering melange of transition music plays—but for a long time, Leon seems unsure of what to do with his actors besides have them walk straight downstage-center and stand next to each other to conduct a scene. Leon also retains record-needle-scratch moments like the Duke of Venice (Neal Bledsoe, giving Gavin Newsom) seemingly praising Othello by telling Desdemona’s father, “Noble signior, / If virtue no delighted beauty lack, / Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.” If characters are going to talk like this, we’ve got to understand something about the world they’re inhabiting: If it’s a fundamentally, historically racist world—ours or a variant thereon—then how many of the people living in it are aware?
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