Top: John Beasley as Troy Maxson and Crystal Fox as Rose Maxson in Huntington Theatre's production of Fences.
Bottom: Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago and John Ortiz as Othello in The Public Theater/ Labyrinth Theater production of Othello.
Two reviews to play catch-up on my poor neglected blog:
Othello is a difficult Shakespearean tragedy to make work. Unless you have a lead as good as James Earl Jones in the title role, it can be hard for the best of directors and acting companies to take the play to its almost unbearable climax as white actors in blackface is taboo (as it should be) today and the role is a tricky one given its to-our-eyes racist problematics. In Peter Sellars’ four hour (yes, you heard right, four long hours) production mounted for a short two week run in New York, actor John Ortiz gives an okay but not stellar Latino version of Othello, while Philip Seymour Hoffman offers a fantastic Iago.
Sellars stripped and condensed the play into a chamber-sized version with only eight actors, many of whom take on doubled roles. The ensemble is impressively culturally diverse: Desdemona and Iago are Anglos; Othello, Roderigo and Emilia are Latin; Cassius and all remaining characters are African-American. A nice post-color-blind cross-racial casting that works well for the most part, as does the blending of roles (although Shakespeare purists would think otherwise, I am sure!) Sellars has the actors play every moment with the highest emotional stakes possible…a kind of extended acting exercise that some critics suggested should have been done in the rehearsal hall, not on the stage. This emotional intensity led to the four hour playing time, as every…single…moment…was…held…for…its…own…sake. In Sellars’ contemporary staging, war is carried out via cell phone and everyone is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Reality is askew, as Iago and Roderigo can plot against Cassius while they stand together on stage, Iago and Roderigo circling Cassius like the predators they are, looking at him and sizing him up, while we understand that he is in another place, on guard to protect Othello and his bride, unaware of the hatred being projected at him from characters who are not literally with him, but actors who are. This is cool. I also liked some of the physical work Sellars injects into the show, and was impressed with the emotional depths every company member was able to plumb in this fractured and traumatized war-ridden world. Othello and Desdemona spend a lot of time in bed together (the only set piece onstage is a giant platform/bed made out of video screens that show continuous images that may or may not have had significant resonance with the play…I didn’t really notice). The couple may be intertwined in simulated foreplay or afterplay (no simulated intercourse, thank goodness) while other characters, especially Iago, are talking to each other or to us. This directorial approach makes very clear the deeply interconnected relations amongst these characters in a highly competitive masculine culture of dominance and conflict. It works.
Of course, I went to see Hoffman’s Iago and every moment he is onstage (and he is onstage for most of the time…watching from the sidelines, not missing a moment) I was with him, an overweight Iago in slacks and a green pullover, hands in pockets, even-tempered for the most part, frank and chillingly transparent in his plotting against his best friend, but also prone to fly into instant rages that cool off as quickly as they heat up, leaving both other characters and we in the seats singed from the blasts. Hoffman is a great actor and even in a failed experiment like this one, he is worth every moment.
Speaking of James Earl Jones, I saw him play the lead in August Wilson’s Fences in its original Broadway run over 20 years ago. When you have had this kind of peak prior experience with a play, sometimes you can be reluctant to revisit the play in a new incarnation. Audiences archive performances in their memories, and these memories can be precious to devoted theatregoers…one is hesitant to have them replaced by a lesser outing. Luckily, the production at Boston’s Huntington Theatre was a very fine one, reminding me yet again what an important American playwright Wilson was. Fences takes us to 1960s Philadelphia and the working class Maxson family that is preparing to fall apart with the sea changes of socio-political change coming from the civil rights movement, the feminist revolution and war in Vietnam. Wilson is an unblinking critic of the flaws he sees in his own characters and the play’s protagonist, garbageman Troy Maxson is a very flawed man. Trapped in his all-too-brief glory days of youth as a Negro league baseball player, he dwells in bitterness about the subsequent disappointments of life: poverty, crime, imprisonment, low-paid back-breaking work and endless debt. Maxson pushes his son away from him, in fear of his repeating his own mistakes, but cannot undo the damage done. He pushes his loving wife away, the best thing that has ever happened to him, by taking up with another woman whom he impregnates. When this other woman dies in childbirth, his wife takes the baby girl in and raises her as her own daughter, but forever shuts her husband out of her heart and her bed. The play is so well-written, so lyrical and powerful, so deceptively simple and so brave in addressing the African-American community with such clear-eyed complexity. The Huntington production, directed by Kenny Leon, does the play justice with terrific performances from the company, especially from the leads John Beasley as Maxson and Crystal Fox as his long-suffering wife Rose. The set design, as always at the Huntington, is lavish in its attention to detail as designed by Marjorie Bradley Kellogg.
Two reviews to play catch-up on my poor neglected blog:
Othello is a difficult Shakespearean tragedy to make work. Unless you have a lead as good as James Earl Jones in the title role, it can be hard for the best of directors and acting companies to take the play to its almost unbearable climax as white actors in blackface is taboo (as it should be) today and the role is a tricky one given its to-our-eyes racist problematics. In Peter Sellars’ four hour (yes, you heard right, four long hours) production mounted for a short two week run in New York, actor John Ortiz gives an okay but not stellar Latino version of Othello, while Philip Seymour Hoffman offers a fantastic Iago.
Sellars, often called a bad-boy director of both theatre and opera, is apparently not well-liked by New York critics, all of whom savaged this production to some degree or other. I didn’t hate the show but neither did I feel it succeeded. I like to call theatre experiences such as this one ‘failed experiments’ in that all performances are experiments…investigations of human behaviour on the social laboratory of the stage. And any scientist will tell you that as much can be learned from a failed experiment as from a successful one. So there was a definite fascination that sustained my interest over a very long show that demanded much of its actors and audience.
Sellars stripped and condensed the play into a chamber-sized version with only eight actors, many of whom take on doubled roles. The ensemble is impressively culturally diverse: Desdemona and Iago are Anglos; Othello, Roderigo and Emilia are Latin; Cassius and all remaining characters are African-American. A nice post-color-blind cross-racial casting that works well for the most part, as does the blending of roles (although Shakespeare purists would think otherwise, I am sure!) Sellars has the actors play every moment with the highest emotional stakes possible…a kind of extended acting exercise that some critics suggested should have been done in the rehearsal hall, not on the stage. This emotional intensity led to the four hour playing time, as every…single…moment…was…held…for…its…own…sake. In Sellars’ contemporary staging, war is carried out via cell phone and everyone is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Reality is askew, as Iago and Roderigo can plot against Cassius while they stand together on stage, Iago and Roderigo circling Cassius like the predators they are, looking at him and sizing him up, while we understand that he is in another place, on guard to protect Othello and his bride, unaware of the hatred being projected at him from characters who are not literally with him, but actors who are. This is cool. I also liked some of the physical work Sellars injects into the show, and was impressed with the emotional depths every company member was able to plumb in this fractured and traumatized war-ridden world. Othello and Desdemona spend a lot of time in bed together (the only set piece onstage is a giant platform/bed made out of video screens that show continuous images that may or may not have had significant resonance with the play…I didn’t really notice). The couple may be intertwined in simulated foreplay or afterplay (no simulated intercourse, thank goodness) while other characters, especially Iago, are talking to each other or to us. This directorial approach makes very clear the deeply interconnected relations amongst these characters in a highly competitive masculine culture of dominance and conflict. It works.
Of course, I went to see Hoffman’s Iago and every moment he is onstage (and he is onstage for most of the time…watching from the sidelines, not missing a moment) I was with him, an overweight Iago in slacks and a green pullover, hands in pockets, even-tempered for the most part, frank and chillingly transparent in his plotting against his best friend, but also prone to fly into instant rages that cool off as quickly as they heat up, leaving both other characters and we in the seats singed from the blasts. Hoffman is a great actor and even in a failed experiment like this one, he is worth every moment.
The mark of failure that mars this production is a simple one: When you have played every moment through the roof for 3 hours and 40 minutes, how on earth do you play the last 20 minutes? Desdemona’s preparation for death/sleep and subsequent murder by her beloved Othello, followed by the tumbling revelations of Iago’s evil, his stabbing of his wife Emilia and being stabbed in kind by Othello, who then goes on to kill himself, comes off as anti-climactic here. There is simply nowhere for these actors to go in this culminating final act, as Sellars has had them mine every moment without mercy already. Ortiz does not reach the necessary heights called for in Othello’s final moments and he and Iago go at each other with what look like Boy Scout pocket knives (ridiculous), Othello basically squeezes Desdemona to death by hugging her too hard (even more ridiculous), and Desdemona arises from death to embrace Othello one more time (ditto). If Sellars had taken less time and emotional energy he spends on the first 80 % of this show, the final 20% might have taken us where Shakespeare wants us to go. It was not to be.
Speaking of James Earl Jones, I saw him play the lead in August Wilson’s Fences in its original Broadway run over 20 years ago. When you have had this kind of peak prior experience with a play, sometimes you can be reluctant to revisit the play in a new incarnation. Audiences archive performances in their memories, and these memories can be precious to devoted theatregoers…one is hesitant to have them replaced by a lesser outing. Luckily, the production at Boston’s Huntington Theatre was a very fine one, reminding me yet again what an important American playwright Wilson was. Fences takes us to 1960s Philadelphia and the working class Maxson family that is preparing to fall apart with the sea changes of socio-political change coming from the civil rights movement, the feminist revolution and war in Vietnam. Wilson is an unblinking critic of the flaws he sees in his own characters and the play’s protagonist, garbageman Troy Maxson is a very flawed man. Trapped in his all-too-brief glory days of youth as a Negro league baseball player, he dwells in bitterness about the subsequent disappointments of life: poverty, crime, imprisonment, low-paid back-breaking work and endless debt. Maxson pushes his son away from him, in fear of his repeating his own mistakes, but cannot undo the damage done. He pushes his loving wife away, the best thing that has ever happened to him, by taking up with another woman whom he impregnates. When this other woman dies in childbirth, his wife takes the baby girl in and raises her as her own daughter, but forever shuts her husband out of her heart and her bed. The play is so well-written, so lyrical and powerful, so deceptively simple and so brave in addressing the African-American community with such clear-eyed complexity. The Huntington production, directed by Kenny Leon, does the play justice with terrific performances from the company, especially from the leads John Beasley as Maxson and Crystal Fox as his long-suffering wife Rose. The set design, as always at the Huntington, is lavish in its attention to detail as designed by Marjorie Bradley Kellogg.
I was at a Saturday matinee with a large number of students from a private secondary school, most of whom were white. I wondered before the show how they would receive Wilson’s portrait of a world that is now over 40 years past and of people who are mostly alien to their reality. Of course, great art transcends these petty things and the students were on their feet cheering in a well-deserved standing ovation for a fine production.
