Almost all productions of Othello end up as a wrestling match between the two lead actors, and the eye-droppingly expensive Broadway production’s dueling Hollywood stars – Denzel Washington, lauded in the Playbill as “the most lauded stage and screen actor of his generation” as the Moor, and Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago – was no exception to this rule. But I’ve seldom seen the contest be so one-sided.
His is not the title role, but Iago drives the play, especially in the opening acts that transform love’s “virtue into pitch,” to borrow one of Iago’s many soliloquies. I wasn’t sure exactly what to think when Jake Gyllenhaal received a round of applause on his first appearance in 1.1 – but I guess everyone knew what made our seats so expensive? (Denzel would get similar applause when he entered in 1.2.) Gyllenhaal’s Iago was persuasive and charismatic. He did not quite hit the character’s more devilish notes – neither “I am not that I am” (1.1.64) nor his final “From this time forth I never will speak word” (5.2.301) burned into our ears. His Iago was improviser as much as master-mind, and his repeated elaborations of the growing schemes built on the fundamental and pre-arranged compact between the star and the audience. “How am I then a villain,” he insinuates, with an innocent high-wattage smile, ” To counsel Cassio to this parallel course / Directly to his good?” (2.3.343-45). I can’t speak for everyone in the house, but I was persuaded. Iago’s words are, of course, perfectly true. But the words that follow this line snap into a different phase of meaning that Gyllenhaal only rarely touched: “Divinity of hell! / When devils will the blackest sins put on / They do suggest at first with heavenly shows / As I do now” (2.2.345-48). Gyllenhaal’s Iago is never really the devil. He lures and entices – his convincing Cassio to drink “but one cup” is a masterclass in seduction – but does not quite terrify.
In a somewhat comparable way, Washington’s Othello bathed in the audience’s love for the actor’s past achievements without showing the soldier’s fire beneath. Perhaps it was the angle provided by my nosebleed seats in the second balcony, but Denzel looked a bit frail, especially by comparison to his much younger fellow actors. It didn’t help that he sometimes mumbled through the longer speeches; the full majesty of Wilson Knight’s “Othello music” wasn’t in evidence. His body performed its familiar charisma, and especially in the opening acts he carried himself well, but I never quite felt the excess – the “more” – of his Moor. (I feel somewhat similarly about Washington’s performance as Macbeth in the 2021 Joel Coen film – maybe Denzell is too likeable to play the tyrant?) The murder scene in Othello, which I walk into any performance of this play dreading, was oddly unthreatening – he put his lovely wife Desdemona, played by Molly Osborne, in a headlock and she kicked her legs for a while, but no great struggle permeated the theater. Part of the reason everyone in the play, especially the Venetian state, loves and needs Othello is his capacity for violence, which they at least hope they can control. Washington’s version of the general hid that violence not wisely but too well.
Othello’s violance can be a tricky thing to play, since Shakespeare and Iago prime the audience to read it in racist terms, and to the extent that the play works on us, it aligns us with Iago’s anti-Blackness. The Black actress Kimber Elayne Sprawl, who played Iago’s wife Emilia, rose as a powerful counterpoint in her major parts in the Willow scene and the final scene. The force of her denunciation of Othello – “Thou hast not half that power to do me harm / As I have to be hurt. O gull, O dolt, / As ignorant as dirt!” (5.2.158-60) – made me wonder if the production feared its own capacity to make us despise Othello, who is, As Emilia’s husband reminds us, a fool who “will as tenderly be led by th’ nose / As asses are” (1.3.400-01). Or perhaps the opposite is true – everyone loves Denzel from the jump, so it’s almost impossible, even to the end, not to sympathize with the man who smothers his innocent wife. I noticed that the gift shop was selling t-shirts with Othello’s self-excusing line, “one that loved not wisely but too well” (5.2.342). Do we really believe that about Othello?
The revelatory performance of the night, however, was not from either of the stars, and not even from the strong supporting presences of Kimber Sprawl’s Emilia, Molly Osborne’s Desdemona, or Anthony Michael Lopez’s smarmy Roderigo. I’ve never seen an actor play Cassio with as much persuasive force as Andrew Burnap. A “proper man” (1.3.391) indeed! Making Cassio so much more compelling than usual had some interesting consequences, including making Bianca, who dotes on Cassio, more plausible, and also making the drunken drinking scene (2.3) – here played by men dressed as U.S. marines – into something like a compelling representation of masculine harmony. Why isn’t it OK for the soldiers, who have been delivered from war by the sea-storm, to have one other gaudy night in Cyprus?
It might also be that I enjoyed that stage moment because it showed Iago and his fellow soldiers assembling a (briefly) happy community, which of course Iago immediately tears to pieces. Or possibly I’m just sympathetic to Jake Gyllenhaal, who I coincidentally met when he was in middle school. In the early 1990s, before going back to grad school, I taught English at Harvard-Westlake high school in Los Angeles. Jake’s sister Maggie was in my Creative Writing class. I was a faculty chaperone for a ski trip one winter, and I ended up sharing a condo with a then-7th grader who his friends called “Jake the Flake.” I told him that his sister was in my class, and he looked at me suspiciously and said, “Do you know her poem, ‘Killer Soup’?” I said that I did, though I don’t now remember anything about it beyond the title. But I seem to have passed the test.
One truth of mega-stars is that their visible presences make them feel familiar, even if you didn’t have a few conversations with their pre-teen selves. Othello on Broadway, with its packed houses and extravagant prices, represents a marriage of star culture and Shakespeare. Maybe, like the marriage in the play, there are some challenges that come with that?
