The New York Shakespeare Festival Othello that opened earlier this month at the New York Shakespeare Festival with Keith David in the title role is Public Theater Shakespeare neither at its best nor its worst. As productions in the Anspacher space go (that’s the thrust stage on the second floor, the one with the columns), it’s probably about a 7 on a 1-to-10 scale—not thrilling and inventive, like Karin Coonrod’s Henry VI cycle a few years back, but not as irritating and benighted as Steven Berkoff’s one-man show either. It has a minimal, no-nonsense set by Neil Patel, purposely vague and asynchronic period costumes by Catherine Zuber, and was staged by Doug Hughes. It also has a company of actors who understand their lines if, with one notable exception, they don’t manage to seem like real people delivering them. The exception—and it’s a big one—is Liev Schreiber, who plays Iago, and whose performance in the role is reason enough to see the play.
I missed Schreiber’s Hamlet a year or two ago, but I saw his Banquo—in fact, I went to see the Alec Baldwin Macbeth because I wanted to see Schreiber’s Banquo, just as I rented the Ethan Hawke film version of Hamlet because I wanted to see Schreiber’s Laertes. Schreiber in Shakespeare interests me: he’s so contemporary and American, and yet, in his low-key, laconic way, he’s so highly attuned to the moral content of any situation. One wants to see him play certain scenes and characters just to see what he’ll make of them, knowing that whatever it is will be sound and may also reaveal soemthing about what that particular scene or character means for us here and now.
It’s easy to project onto an actor like Schreiber the burden of inventing a new native, contemporary style of classical acting. If he doesn’t come anywhere near doing that here, it’s because he’s chosen to act in another tradition—that of contemporary British classical acting. This wasn’t what I was looking for or expected, but I have to admit he gets away with it. He sounds, in places, almost like Ian McKellen, plummy accent and all.
Someone asked me, the other day, what one looks for in a production of Othello. I said you were looking for two things, mainly. From the actor playing the villain you hoped to get some understanding of why Iago does what he does, and from the actor playing the hero some glimmer of what it is in Othello’s personality or his relationship with the world that allows him to be so crassly and easily duped. Of all Shakespeare’s tragedies, Othello is probably the one that plays least well on the page. Because almost nothing in it makes sense on its face, we need actors to make the story plausible, and we approach it hoping to be shown how such a drama could play itself out. Othello is not a crass or unsophisticated man. He commands armies, charms ladies, sways senators. Indeed, he persuades foreign leaders to put him in command of their troops, despite being an outsider and a Moor. Yet he allows himself to be duped by a series of stage tricks that wouldn’t fool a child.
Iago’s destruction of Othello (and everyone else in the play, including himself) is one of Western literature’s great insufficiently explained crimes. It’s often been pointed out that the two reasons he gives (to Roderigo: that he feels passed over for the lieutenancy; to the audience: that he suspects Othello of cuckolding him) are inconsistent with each other and with his actions in the play. (One would expect a man who thought his superior had slept with his wife and promoted someone over his head to link the two events, discuss them together—insult to injury, not only this but that.) Coleridge characterized Iago’s villainy as “motiveless malignancy.” W.H. Auden went further. In a famous essay in The Dyer’s Hand, he identified Iago as belonging to a particularly lethal species of “practical joker,” the sort who, because of something lacking in himself, never feels truly alive or real except when he’s fooling people.
Auden distinguishes between two types of “joker.” There is the “moral” sort, whose prank seems antisocial but really isn’t, because ultimately it “exposes some flaw in society.” This type must “not only deceive but also, when he has succeeded, unmask and reveal the truth to his victims.” But there is another sort “behind whose contempt for others lies something else, a feeling of self-insufficiency, of a self lacking in authentic feelings and desires of its own.”
It’s a type we encounter frequently in the lesser orders of drama, movies on the Lifetime channel, for instance: the secretly philandering husband, the sexual harasser, the serial rapist or killer. Though not “criminals” on an equal plain, all these have in common a need to deceive both individuals and the world. Their motive is to be found less in the commission of the act itself than in the deception that makes it inconsistent with known or manifest behavior. The crime itself isn’t the point, it’s the getting away with it. The thrill lies in the hypocrisy, in showing one face to one’s victims and another to the world.
If you agree with Auden, and I do, Othello is at its most interesting as an adult and tragic expression of the sociopathic personality
who despises his victims, but at the same time…envies them because their desires, however childish and mistaken, are real to them, whereas he has no desire which he can call his own. His goal, to make game of others, makes his existence absolutely dependent upon theirs; when he is alone, he is a nullity.
It’s a wonderful description, and I’d wager that it’s not too shabby from a clinical perspective either. For such people, Auden suggests, the motive is the act of deception itself, for without it existence seem impossible.
Auden also puts forward one or two propositions less sound, but he is certainly on the money when he says that you need a truly mercurial Iago, someone who can be a different person with everyone he comes in contact with. That is essentially what Schreiber is giving us: someone who can be plausible and compelling in such a variety of ways that no one can resist him. He understands perfectly how important an audience is to Iago, touching base with members of the real audience during soliloquies, and once even playing to his own shadow. He is majestic in a theatrical yet utterly nonactorly way. Curiously, Schreiber is electrifying alone onstage, or conversing à deux, but utterly unmemorable in a crowd. In the company of more than two or three people, he is almost impossible to find.
Schreiber doesn’t telegraph the idea of “villainy,” which is what most Iagos do. He doesn’t telegraph “sincerity” either, just manages to seem sincere.
This ability to animate or embody an idea, as opposed to emblematizing it, is precisely what Keith David lacks in the title role. He’s too busy acting the idea of being commanding to actually be commanding. He has bearing of a sort; anyway, he’s dignified (though he seems to be imitating the famous rolling gait that Olivier affected when he played Othello), but he’s not quite interesting enough in his own right (or morally curious enough, as an actor, about the character) to make Othello and what happens to him matter.
It’s great if Iago seems like the most sincere character onstage, not so great if he’s the only one who doesn’t seem phony. What you have in the production at the Public is a collection of actors who are all being actorly—whose behavior is dictated by their consciousness of being in a Shakespeare play. It’s not the worst sort of fustian, but it’s tiresome and exhausting to watch. There are gradations, of course, from something as arch as Kate Forbes’ Desdemona (which has you wondering why it takes so long for somebody to get around to slapping her) to bewildering miscastings about which the less said the better.
Mostly, it’s a question of actors being made to seem inept by ill-conceived staging. Forcing Cassio (Jay Goede) to listen to a tirade from Bianca (Natacha Roi) while holding her in his arms has him doing fishbowl-gaping to signify his desire to interrupt. With Desdemona’s bed placed down center, only inches away from the audience, her death sequence is a travesty. It can’t be anything but comic. (She’s down! She’s up! She’s down again!) As Emilia, poor Becky Ann Baker, dying, has to plunge onto the mattress beside Desdemona virtually from a standing position, while in the final sequence, Lodovico (Dan Snook) stands frozen while Othello, within easy reach of him, lurches clumsily about doing this and that, making speeches, committing suicide.
I can’t help wondering whether Schreiber’s English accent was something put on at the behest of a director whose idea of classical acting consisted of this verily-forsooth kind of thing, or if all the verily-forsooth stuff came first and the accent was something Schrieber slipped into. Of course he may just have wanted to see if he could do it, in which case he has, and it rocks, and now he won’t have to do it again.