"And you've just stabbed an audience member!"
It is the last day of rehearsal for "Othello" and director Matthew Gordon '98 is trying to keep his actors' swordfight within the proper parameters. A masking tape boundary surrounds the area below the stage where a lot of the action takes place, but the audience is only a foot away from the edge and those swords are pretty long. As David Levi '00 lunges to stab his foe, the point finds its way to the empty chair beyond the line.
Luckily, Gordon knows his way around a swordfight. He has done a lot of the choreography for the Drama Department's Mainstage Productions and has spent a solid amount of time trying to make the battles for this performance brief and effective -- "you'll be surprised," he said.
But this is Shakespeare, where actors have a bigger chance of tripping over their words as opposed to their swords. The action is usually the easy part.
"The cast is having a very, rather easy time with it," Gordon said of his 13-member cast and the very verbose text. "The text follows the situation, it's pretty easy to understand."
By cutting extraneous lines and combining some characters, Gordon trimmed the original text down to a leaner two hours and 45 minutes, but it is still a lot of lines to memorize. Stage manager Carissa Alden '00 half-jokingly said that Rashaad Green '00, who plays Othello, almost flunked out of his FSP in the spring because he was so excited about the play he tried to memorize his lines a term early.
Gordon also opted to update the play, if only in dress, to avoid lavish costumes. Actors wear shirts and ties, some wear dark suits that make them look more fit for a Martin Scorsese film than a Shakespeare production. But as Gordon points out, in Shakespeare's time his plays were done in "modern dress," so there isn't much difference here.
"This is the perfect place for tragedy," Gordon said as he looked around Collis Commonground and the black tarps draped over the windows. "It's dark and cavernous."
"Othello" is one of Shakespeare's most primal plays. It has all the back-stabbing and jealousy of Shakespeare's other tragedies, but instead of royalty fighting over a crown, it has men fighting over a woman. It touches on themes of sexuality, race and the evil we all have inside.
The story follows Othello (Green), a black man married to the white Desdemona (Louisa Gilder '00), who is sent to Cyprus with an army to defend the island from Islamic influences. Cassio (Levi) is his lieutenant and Iago (Gordon) one of his men.
"I'm a very young guy," Levi said describing his character, "the equivalent today would be top of his class at West Point." Cassio does, however, have little battle experience, which is why the very experienced Iago is upset he got passed over for lieutenant.
Iago is soon sparked toward revenge, and begins to manipulate all the characters around him, slowly driving Othello into an insane rage. Levi said his character is "a real bad drunk, so Iago gets me wasted." Then Iago proceeds to make it appear that Cassio and Desdemona are having an affair.
Joseph C. Scott '00 as Roderigo and Eddie Le '00 as Montano, the Governor of Cyprus, also get roped into Iago's plot. "I'm a good guy... with a dark side," Le said.
Also featured in the play: Morgan Faust '00, Kathryn Sullivan '00, Justin Evans '99, Micaela Diaz '00, Aaron Akamu '01, Medical School Professor Douglas Hoffman as the Duke and Assistant Dean of the College Steven Cornish as Brabantio.
As the time to start the final run through got closer, things got a little hectic. A stack of chairs almost took out the stage manager, an oversized cross couldn't fit around an actor's neck, a fake beard was interfering with a fistfight and Othello hadn't shown up yet.
They decide to start the show without him -- "Waiting for Othello?" -- but the lighting technicians are still trying to ready the "creepy Iago effect," the lone light hanging from the rafters which shines down on Iago, leaving his eyes in the shadows.
First-time-director Gordon, now dressed in his character's black pants and buttoned down black shirt, slowly lets his excitement give way to agitation.
But then the lights go down and Samuel Barber's haunting "Adagio for Strings" comes up over the speakers. A solemn silence takes over the rest of the room. The lone light from above shines down on the poised, silent Desdemona. Gordon as Iago sits behind her, brooding. At the last minute Green arrives, gets into his Othello costume and manages to hit his cue.
"Othello" opens tomorrow night at 8 p.m. in Collis Commonground, and will be shown Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m. Tickets are free.
