A Side Order of Jealousy

Philip Seymour Hoffman as Jago and John Ortiz as Othello in Shakespeare’s classic tragedy - Photo: Armin Bardel

Peter Sellars, the least meretricious of master Regisseurs, offered the Wiener Festwochen public an uncut, transfixing production of Shakespeare’s Othello this June.

In spite of a star-studded U.S. cast, led by Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote, Charley Wilson’s War) as Iago and John Ortiz (American Gangster, Miami Vice) as Othello, the actors carried the Sellars stamp, appearing as unpretentious as the customers and salespeople at a Greyhound bus station. His characters seem to discover themselves in a place of waiting that is also transit, where women’s make-up always looks decrepit. Those who have followed Sellars’ work in the past would immediately recognize a director who is not only on the side of all his actors but all the playwright’s characters.

We have been taught that this is a play about jealousy, but in fact, Othello feels little of this until Act 3, Scene 3 (“‘tis something foul in the golden section”). Seamlessly roused to a rage by Iago, Othello is then so horrified at its urgency (“Exchange me for a goat,/When I shall turn the business of my soul/To such exsufflicate and blown surmises”) that he makes the snappiest of snap judgements, taking Iago’s version of reality over his wife Desdemona’s (Jessica Chastain).

But, if anything, this play is about avoiding jealousy, what Iago calls “the green-headed monster that doth mock/The meat it feeds on.” For a heart-stopping day, Othello is a jealous babe. But jealousy is Iago’s bread and butter, and Othello is putty in his hands; Othello is so hell-bent on rescuing himself from jealousy’s paralysis that he accepts the most trivial of proofs, his wife’s handkerchief. As Iago points out, flimsy evidence is more comforting than fact, to those fast in the morass.

John Ortiz starts Act I on a bed made of 35 video screens (mise-en-scène: Gregor Holzinger) with Desdemona, serene and small-eyed. When Iago launches his avalanche of insinuation, Othello pretends to think of other things; then the buttons on his uniform start getting tighter and tighter. “My heart is turn’d to stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand.” The closer Ortiz comes to murder, the more resolute and exultant his Adam’s apple looks. But his passion is not yet that of one who has “loved too well;” it is more the nerdish satisfaction of one who believes he has hopped right over jealousy’s canyon.

Jessica Chastain as Desdemona, dying for love - Photo: Armin Bardel

In Othello, Shakespeare peerlessly shows us intelligent people who are also not intelligent at all. We may not be able to point out many tragic heroes in today’s street, but the block is teeming with people who are smart and stupid at the same time – say, the 1950s shrinks who considered homosexuality a “neurosis.” Even Iago, apparently more astute than his victims, is as shortsighted and overconfident as any Bernard Madoff. His end is ignominiously open: “Torture,” Gaius Charles recommends carefully into a cell phone in the play’s concluding speech.

It’s all torture, in a way, with so many false leads to clinch Othello’s conviction, right to Desdemona’s last words when she implies she deserves her own murder, championing Cassio’s cause to an extent hardly possible without some ulterior motive. But Chastain’s fine bones seem weary of prevarication. Towards the end, her stricken voice still has the shine of a mother leveling with her kids about impending divorce. To Chastain’s Desdemona, idealism makes perfect sense; her last request to Othello is one extra day, or time for a quick prayer.

Only Sellars would see that Desdemona pleads Cassio’s case because she feels guilty – she loves him not enough, less than she does Othello. But Shakespeare’s beds of corpses, his storms at sea, his villains’ machinations – they are themselves the profoundest “what ifs,” the sagest, most disastrous extensions of reality. What good are the 400 years between us if we don’t use the present to unfold the past? Bill Clinton should have invited Sellars to the White House: He knows what the word “is” means. Onstage, the word “is” means “has become.”

What is honesty for Hoffman’s Iago? The vision of what could be. “Is” means “will become.” In a vulgar sense, he is Othello’s acting coach, his prompter. Even as he traps Othello, Hoffmann spreads his palms out helplessly (“Men should be what they seem,/Or those that be not, would they might seem none!”) as if to say, “Take this as you want”. Perhaps make-believe can set you free.

It is good that Sellars’ troupe has got past the usual prurient peeks at Desdemona’s “innocence” and Iago’s “evil.” But if Othello is seduced by Iago’s brotherly advice, Hoffman and Ortiz show us that Othello’s innocence, his initial lack of interest in other people’s affairs, is as much of an evil as his subsequent fantasies of Desdemona’s strumpetry. When Hoffman exhorts Ortiz to kill Cassio but spare Desdemona, his voice almost cracks with awe. Of course, Iago’s complete absorption in other people’s affairs has a strong link to altruism – we see this repeatedly in Hoffman’s magical, sweaty hugs – and Othello’s lightning decision to strangle Desdemona is nourished in a narcissistic disregard for reality.

English-speaking actors intone the most complex, enigmatic syntax (“I was like huh?”) eloquently, immaculately, perfectly. Unfortunately, they have developed a tendency to covertly translate Shakespeare’s language into their own English, but then inflect his lines as if they were in fact some modern approximation thereof – they speak words as if they were other words. Inevitably, this results in clumped consonants, leaden schwas, aggrieved question marks. In Sellars’ cast – including American actors Julian Acosta, Gaius Charles, Liza Colón-Zayas, Saidah Arrika Ekulona, LeRoy McClain – only the invisible Brabantio (in another of Sellars’ inspired “has becomes,” Desdemona’s tetchy father is only present via cell phone) and Roderigo let fly steady arrows through Shakespeare’s pentameter.

It’s hard for an American to know what lighter-tongued Europeans make of this Iago’s drawl or Othello’s twang, but they may hear as much frustration as emotional truth. Of course, Sellars knows that frustration, in this case, can be emotional truth – an Auseinandersetzung between modern actor and literary classic. In this production, the actors seem trapped and prodded (no, not set free) by Shakespeare’s mathchless poetry. It’s as if the whole play, spoken in home-grown American accents, were a series of the most conclusive Freudian slips.

To go to another play after a Sellars production is to blink at the quaint, aesthetic magic that actors and directors normally dream up for audiences. Sellars’ actors use Shakespeare. They use him wisely, but they use him. They size up their own characters, plead with them, badger them (Iago: “And what’s he then that says I play the villain/When this advice is free I give, and honest.”) These actors preserve the salient quality of a reading, where the actor courts or is chased by a great text, or squarely faces it, and the mirror is more than a mirror. In the end, Sellars’ troupe shows more respect for Shakespeare’s text than any scholar could. They pack away all their expert aspirations, stop trying to tease quality into quantity, and put their reputations, to use Cassio’s words, on the line.