Shakespeare’s Othello as a treatise on jealousy, and devoid of its commentary on race and religion?
That’s precisely the idea behind Everyman Presents’ take on the play, abridged and helmed by company artistic director Carl Cariño, and bearing the wordier title The Tragedy of Othello.
At the Nov. 9 matinee—the only uncanceled show in Metro Manila the day of Super Typhoon Uwan’s landfall in nearby Aurora province—Cariño prefaced the first act by stating that his Othello is less interested in the ideological buttresses of the play and more concerned with the basic things that make men’s brains go haywire—to paraphrase the director, a show about boys being stupid boys. The production notes shared with the press further indicate that this Othello is mainly about “the awful and heartbreaking love story at its core,” and has been stripped of the original’s “racial and religious overtones.”
Well, then, to borrow from another Shakespearean work: Nothing will come of nothing.
Othello is about so many things that make the world an awful place—racism, prejudice, androcracy, misogyny, violence in its myriad forms. The titular character, a military commander, is manipulated by his ensign Iago into thinking his wife Desdemona is being unfaithful to him. Iago hates Othello for, among other reasons, his race (on paper, Othello is dark-skinned). The major female characters in this play, Desdemona and her maidservant (and Iago’s wife) Emilia, end up being killed by their own husbands within the larger tapestry of a toxic patriarchy.
In other words, the power of Othello as a piece of theater—as with many pieces of theater—is also a function of the complicated sociopolitical and cultural contexts fueling its story. Clearly, Shakespeare had so much to say in this play about the state of his world—things that resonate quite powerfully with ours.
Yet, Cariño’s production is rather determined to be rid of that contextual richness, that it ends up transplanting Othello to a no man’s land inhabited by dumb, jealous men.
The result is a production that strains to perform its male characters’ main, defining trait—boorishness—while struggling to animate its whats and whys. Why do these characters act the way they do? What makes them behave like animals? What’s going on in those complex human brains of theirs? Why are they dressed in gothic fashion? The best answer this Othello can come up with is “men being men,” which is to say it settles with just acting out the artifice of male idiocy.
Making theater out of men’s stupidity is never a bad idea, of course: Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth is one such paragon of success (as was Red Turnip Theater’s production of the play in Makati City in 2015). But Othello is not only so much more than just its story of stupid men; it works precisely because it situates that story within very specific contexts.
Unsurprising, then, that the entire ensemble feels unmoored. Cariño’s adaptation trims Othello to a two-hour thing but retains the original’s Early Modern English—which many among the cast are clearly not comfortable spouting. Sans ideology, the play can hardly make sense of the deafening decibel level it associates with performing savage manliness. Bereft of context, male stupidity, as it turns out, does not always make for compelling theater.
Among the main acting quartet, only Rachel Coates crafts a beguiling, commanding presence as Desdemona—miraculously giving the character a sense of agency and, more importantly, a sense of interiority. Coates feels alive as Desdemona, all flesh-and-blood in a sea of sketches.
Opposite her, Miguel Vasquez’s Othello inconsistently summons the forcefulness of a military commander, while Tarek El Tayech can be too preoccupied with trying to flesh out the slimy villainy of his Iago. Meanwhile, Issa Litton, at once so intense but also farcical as Emilia, appears to be lost in her own dramatic universe, her energies a complete mismatch from her co-stars’.
In a theater ecosystem as small as Manila’s, this Everyman Presents production also doesn’t give a satisfying answer to the question: Why Othello now?
Last year, Company of Actors in Streamlined Theatre already did this play (with a rerun earlier this year), to far more satisfying and enlightening results: an Othello that was quite a lucid exploration of gender politics.
So why do this play again? It’s a question only the makers can possibly answer. Whatever the rationale, this Everyman’s Othello does not make a more insightful experience out of the material. Instead, it dilutes it—Shakespeare made banal, enfeebled, defanged.
