Othello: Action Hero, Lover, and Moor
Balagan Theatre's Othello (Thursday-Sunday through December 13, tickets $15/$12) is a sordid plunge into an underworld of violence, jealousy, and rage. Three women sitting next to us nearly jumped out of their seats, crying out involuntarily, during fight scenes.
That's a compliment to the actors' talents, because this Othello is a spare, black-box production, mainly featuring gloomy shadows and a set of red wooden-block boxes. Iago arranges them throughout the play to slowly form a fatal bed for Desdemona. It's a sharp visual companion to Iago's remorseless, step-by-step plotting to ruin Othello. Director Ryan Higgins places the audience on either side of a long rectangular "hall," so that we see ourselves overhearing Iago's treachery and flinching at the results. Using the length, he places actors at either end for dialogue, so that you have to turn your head to catch the interplay.
As Othello, Johnny Patchamatla looks almost too good to believe; he's an eye-poppingly brawny, bullish commander with a bass voice and a musical delivery. Early on, as he explains how Desdemona fell for Othello--and in so doing illustrates how he fell for her--the emotion in his voice is palpable. Patchamatla can't quite come to terms, yet, with Othello's final self-destructive implosion, but he succeeds where it counts: turning a fierce, vulnerable tenderness into wounded savagery. When he bounds the length of the stage in attack, you instinctively draw back out of his way.
Shakespeare lets you know from the beginning that Othello is being manipulated by Iago. Since there's no drama if Othello is simply a hot-headed murderer; you have somehow to find it understandable that a good man decides to kill his wife Desdemona out of jealousy on, essentially, Iago's word. Terri Weagant's Desdemona--noble, warm, wise for her years--is an innocent but also girlishly provocative, toying with the edge of Cassio's (Nik Perleros) cloak as she listens to his plea for her intercession. She also has an intelligence and resonant, burred voice made for Shakespeare, and her scenes with Patchamatla are electric. (As, for that matter, are her heart-to-hearts with her maid Emilia, Iago's wife, played with a forthright maturity by the youthful Sarah E. Budge.)
Which leaves Mike Dooly's calculating, obsessive, charismatic Iago. Why does Iago hate Othello so much? He says at first it's because he was passed over for promotion. But later Iago lets drop that he's heard Othello slept with his wife Emilia--one of the few things Iago says that we get validation on: Emilia brings up herself, as the kind of foolishness that jealous men will believe. Iago, who shares his machinations with a morbidly appealing, look-ma-no-hands glee, never looks directly at what drives him. He says once that a man's reputation is all he really has. He means that he will destroy Othello's, but it's clear that in his own mind, he's lost his. A less-than-a-man vehicle of vengeance is all that remains.
Top right: Johnny Patchmatla and Terri Weagant as Othello and Desdemona. Bottom left: Mike Dooly as Iago. Photo by Nik Perleros.
