Othello

The ambition of the Harvard Dramatic Club production of Othello is conspicuous; and if there's always a long distance between ambition and success, this production covers the better part of it. With unusual diligence, the Loeb Othello treats the more far-ranging demands of Shakespeare with the kind of unhesitating ambition amateurs ordinarily concede to the professionals. It hasn't paid off quite so consistently. But it succeeds, more than enough to make amateur Shakespeare a very worthwhile proposition.

Without departing too much from convention, the production shifts some of its attention from Othello to the man who drives the tragedy: Iago. Plotting on the edge of Thomas Parry's ingenious set (a terraced and tiered battlement of slabs that interlock in five different "scenes,") Ralph Pochoda (as Iago) beguiles the audience only a little less than he does his victims onstage. In the process of driving Othello to Desdemona's murder, he fleeces Roderigo with confidence-inspiring volubility. The objections of Desdemona's wishful suitor (played aptly by Rick Carey as a puppyish windvane to Iago's rhetorical blasts) become thinly veiled pleas for a few more flattering promises.

Othello too hangs helplessly on the overpowering false persuasions of Pachoda's Iago. Curt Anderson is an Othello of imposing appearance but with a somewhat lesser capacity for tortured response to Iago's calculated hints. But if it weren't that Othello's peculiar virtue is trust in other men--and his peculiar vice to distrust his own feelings in the unfamiliar pursuit of love--the battle wouldn't be worth the fighting. Iago so overpowers the Moor that pity keeps us on Othello's side much longer than hope. Though he plays with just enough confidence and grace in the Venetian scenes. Anderson breaks too quickly under Iago's pressures in Cyprus: calling forth his full range of emotions too early, he's forced to reiterate them with increasing intensity in the last three acts. But the worst that can be said of his first-night performance is that his smiles were more convincing than his groans.

Darcy Pulliam (as Emilia) has an especially well-reigned sense of the power of servants in Shakespearean plays. With much of Iago's ability for skillful management of others (but with none of his strange twist of heart) she soothes Desdemona and chaperones her to bed with the kind of understated stage-presence that suggests a well-concealed understanding of how her mistress is to be handled. And Marie Kohler's Desdemona is more dutifully opposed than passively resigned to Othello's creeping suspicion--a refreshing variation on the usually-wilting Desdemona.

Only one example of Director George Hamlin's all-inclusive application of energy and finesse is the night-time revel following Othello's arrival at Cyprus. A party of drunken soldiers and whores idle and sprawl with calculated precision to Iago's song-leading, and when Roderigo pursues an intoxicated Cassio (Michael Gurdy) onstage for some extravagant swordplay, the scene bursts into a Shakespearean streetfight. Hamlin's careful blocking makes every drunken soldier's drunken move part of one grand theatrical effect--and everything meshes neatly behind Cassio's supremely pathetic disclaimers of intoxication. Half the tension of the scene is in the swish of swords and the calculated pounding of boots. Shakespeare played to the limit.

Shakespeare probably intended Iago to be a kind of human devil in this play, but Ralph Pachoda's Iago, at times running away with the show, stretches his role almost into that of a Miltonic Satan, a villain so persistent in his rebellion, so singleminded in his misconceived passion for revenge, that he steals part of our sympathy almost against our will. He is so capable a man that we sympathize with him over his lack of promotion--and wonder why he isn't able to engineer his own advancement, rather than others deaths. If he hadn't managed to survive Othello's unsuccessful vengeance, he might in death have looked like a twisted tragic hero. As it is, even after his last speech has sealed his lips and ended any chance that he will explain his evil motives to the audience. Pachoda's Iago can divert attention from center-stage with a defiant tilt of his head.

A friend of mine (who loves plays) (and Shakespeare) says he has mental reservations about seeing Shakespeare acted by students. He has very good reasons for those reservations--Shakespearean drama is always complex and demanding, and amateur productions are all too frequently disappointing. I'm going to tell him to see Othello.