The rest of the title, of course, comes from Othello, The Moor of Venice, William Shakespeare's tale of an interracial marriage destroyed by jealousy and deceit. In this update of Shakespeare's almost-400-year-old drama, director Rod Carley replaces Elizabethan tights with pillbox hats. But the updated setting and costumes are not what imbue the play with a modern perspective. Altering the Bard's intent, Carley frees the main characters from personal responsibility by blaming their actions on everything from government conspiracies to voodoo.
Presented in a fluid, cinematic style, The Othello Project increases the number of scenes in Shakespeare's play while managing to trim five acts down to two for a two-and-a-half hour production with one intermission. Before the action of Shakespeare's play begins, Carley's added prologue introduces two new characters: male Mississippi Project students -- one black, the other white -- who have been bound and gagged. Nearby is Shakespeare's clown (Steven Henry), once a servant to Othello and now a voodoo practitioner, who hides beneath the Spanish moss that frames the stage and cascades into the weed-filled water at the apron's edge.
As Shakespeare's play commences, Carley's additions continue. Instead of entering alone, Iago (Jeff Miller) bursts onto the stage with Roderigo (Peter Paul De Leo), a car mechanic, and their fellow Ku Klux Klansmen to check on their captives. Iago, it seems, is no longer the lone schemer Shakespeare intended him to be. Here he's a double agent of sorts: the leader of a motley band of racists and assistant to Othello, who happens to be an FBI agent. In one of the few changes to the dialogue, Iago fumes that his valor in Dallas and Saigon has been overlooked by Othello, who promoted another, Cassio, to second-in-command instead.
To get even he urges Roderigo to call up good-ol'-boy Senator Brabantio (Dan Brady) and break the news that Othello has just eloped with the senator's lily-white daughter, Desdemona. After word gets out, an angry mob, led by the senator, goes hunting for the newlyweds. Iago follows to see what will happen, leaving Roderigo behind to kill the students and dispose of the bodies. When Othello (Anthony Hubert) is finally brought before the court, he wins the senator's favor by explaining how he and Desdemona (Margery Lowe) fell in love during his frequent visits to the senator's house.
If this sounds like a stretch, it is. As originally written, Othello, a Moor, is accepted by the Venetian government because of his worth as a military leader who protected and helped expand the government's holdings. With this update Othello the FBI agent is welcomed by a government that needs a token black agent to handle the public relations crisis caused by the students' murders.
Before the investigation begins, the senator suggests to Othello that, because Desdemona willfully defied society and fooled her own father, she may one day deceive her husband. Iago nourishes that seed of doubt after joining Othello and Cassio in the nearby town where the students' bodies have been discovered.
Also on hand are Desdemona, Iago's wife Emilia (Pamela Roza), and Bianca (Zuleyma H. Guevara), Cassio's black mistress. Lurking in the background is Roderigo, Desdemona's ex-boyfriend, who is willing to pay Iago to break up Othello's marriage. Anxious to see Cassio fired, Iago plots to convince Othello that his fellow agent is having an affair with Desdemona.
These plot points, as well as Desdemona's murder and Othello's subsequent suicide, concur with Shakespeare's original script; but along the way Carley redefines Iago's scheme by calling into question his actions against Cassio. First, it's suggested that some of Cassio's problems may be due to a voodoo doll created by Bianca's jilted lover. Later, as Cassio lies in bed with Bianca, she reads a letter revealing his part in a government conspiracy to depose Othello. The conspiracy, we learn, has ties to Iago's Klan activities. A twist like this might work on The X-Files, but Cassio's duplicity undercuts Shakespeare's primary reason for Iago's treachery and the depth of his machinations.
Cassio isn't the only character eviscerated by Carley's updated version of the script. Because the torch-wielding Roderigo is performed by De Leo as a savage redneck bumpkin, he no longer has to be corrupted and tricked into murder by Iago's treachery. And Iago, rivaled only by Richard III as the number one Shakespearean villain, has been reduced to a misfit more suited to blowing up government buildings than subtly driving a man mad. Once an outsider who personified the evils of ambition and revenge, he's now part of a Klan brotherhood seeking a new world order. Spewing histrionic racial venom, Miller captures Iago's fetid soul but never his cold brilliance.
As Desdemona, Lowe comes closest to a traditional interpretation by depicting Othello's slandered wife as a malleable woman who naively sees the best in everyone. Unfortunately Lowe's performance lacks any lingering trace of the headstrong girl who, before we are introduced to her, risked everything to marry an outsider.
Given the play's title, however, the portrayal of Othello is the key to any production's success. Relinquishing his sword in this production to become a company man who fights the system instead of foes, Othello is stripped of his one-time majesty and succumbs to common jealousy instead of falling from a noble height. Forced to wear this stylistic straitjacket, Hubert nevertheless strikes a tragic chord, as when he listens to a wiretap he assumes confirms his wife's infidelity.
That brief glimpse of human weakness makes this staging all the more frustrating. Without Scottish witches or the ghost of a dead Danish king to influence events, Shakespeare's Othello plays as a tragedy caused by the character flaws of its protagonists. The Othello Project, on the other hand, offers up as mitigating factors voodoo curses and a community more polarized than Romeo and Juliet's Verona. Most tellingly, Othello's penultimate speech, in which he famously says he "lov'd not wisely but too well," is spoken by another character. So, instead of having confessed his guilt and taken the blame, Othello lies dead at the feet of a would-be Johnny Cochran who blames the man's actions on society.
Playing the race card with Shakespeare is nothing new. Last fall Patrick Stewart (Star Trek: The Next Generation) played Othello as the only white man in an otherwise all-black city for a production in Washington, DC. And Carley, the award-winning artistic director of Toronto's Walking Shadow Theatre, has tinkered with Shakespeare in the past; he set Troilus and Cressida in Vietnam and As You Like It in Third-Reich Germany.
What's perhaps ironic is that Carley's racially dominated version harkens back to the Bard's original source material, Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi. In that version Desdemona delivers the story's moral when she admits, shortly before her murder, that perhaps she shouldn't have married into a different race.
While Shakespeare's text doesn't jibe with Carley's viewpoint, the work of his first-rate design team does. Saidah Ben Judah's costumes scream race: Emilia wears a black dress, Desdemona virginal white frocks, the FBI agents black suits and white shirts. The exception is Othello, who is dressed in gray.
Richard Bodington and Juan F. Cejas enhance Carley's fluid stage direction with an easy-to-switch set that features, among other things, a table that turns into a dock. And Bodington's atmospheric lighting evokes the mystique of a bayou swamp, while Carley's sound design, featuring snatches of "Blue Bayou" and Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," comments on the action.
In local productions of Shakespeare, actors usually play more than one character. In this case, however, only one of Florida Shakespeare Theatre's eighteen-member cast does double duty. While the majority of the supporting cast recited Shakespeare's blank verse as though it were a foreign language, Stephen G. Anthony spoke his lines as Lodovico with understanding and conviction.
But you need more than a large cast or even classically trained actors to make Othello stir your blood. It takes a heart-rending depiction of a tragedy that awaits anyone whose emotions or baser instincts go unchecked. Anything less isn't the Moor.
The Othello Project.
Written by William Shakespeare. Adapted and directed by Rod Carley. Starring Anthony Hubert, Jeff Miller, Margery Lowe, A.J. Pittis, and Peter Paul De Leo. Through February 21. Florida Shakespeare Theatre, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables, 305-445-1119.
