Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 22, 1993 TAG: 9301210015
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
ENTER THE MOOR
JEALOUSY, true love, hatred, faithfulness, suspicion and a touch of racism: Just another cozy domestic situation, right?Those are the ingredients of one of the greatest tragedies in English literature, Shakespeare's "Othello," which will be presented Monday night at Radford University's Preston Auditorium.
Director Rick Corey, whose National Shakespeare Company players will enact the drama, says he thinks the work is "the most domestic play" in all of the Bard's output, despite the raging passions.
"It's a pretty straightforward play about relationships," said Corey, "a very primal play, with jealousy and love and hate, all very direct human emotions.
There are no battle scenes, no pomp and circumstance. In many ways it's very close to our time in terms of the simplicity of the way it's presented."
The National Shakespeare Company, probably the nation's premiere touring Shakespeare troupe, appears at Radford as part of the university's Cultural Concert Series. The show, which Corey says has just been remounted, will be the first in the company's winter and spring tour.
Scholars consider "Othello" to be among the most tightly constructed of all of Shakespeare's plays, and the villain Iago is one of the most sought-after roles on the stage.
The nihilistic Iago is the most concentratedly wicked of all of Shakespeare's evil characters. Generations of Shakespearean heavies have reveled in the chilling lines:
"Divinity of hell!
When devils will the blackest sins put on,
They do suggest at first with heavenly shows
As I do now."
In the original staging, the noble Moor Othello, a general in the army of the Venetian republic, marries the Venetian lady Desdemona. But his jealous lieutenant, Iago, contrives to arouse his suspicions that Desdemona has been unfaithful.
Ensnared in Iago's schemes, Othello eventually murders his wife, then discovers too late that she had loved him faithfully all along.
The Radford audience won't see conventional Shakespearian daggers and doublets; Corey has chosen to move the play in time and space to the England of 1910. Though designer Sarah Edkins' sets will be "fairly abstract," Corey said, "the physical look of the show is Edwardian England.
"The reason I set it in 1910 England was that I thought it was important to keep it as clean of classical trappings as possible, so that people could respond to it in a more direct way.
"I think it's good whenever possible - if you can do it without getting in the way of the text - to bring the plays forward somewhat. It dusts them off for an American audience, anyway, who tend to think of these plays as kinds of artifacts.
"And obviously they're not - they're very entertaining and full of wonderful melodrama and tremendous scenes of excitement and joy and passion and so on. I just wanted to move a lot of doublet and hose out of the way so you can look at it straight on," he said.
Though Corey is willing to alter details of chronology and locale, he is uninterested by some recent efforts - such as that by Shakespearian scholar A.L. Rouse - to update the original Elizabethan English.
"The whole reason to do Shakespeare is that language," Corey said. "I don't have any problem with cutting and adapting it somewhat, but we live in an impoverished time, language-wise, and I think it's important for people to hear those words.
"I don't feel anybody has a problem understanding it. I've gone out on tour and I've seen audiences held by these plays over and over again."
The issue of race would have been just as significant in Edwardian England - perhaps more so - as in Renaissance Venice. Shakespeare intended for Othello to be black, but Corey has compounded matters by having Iago played by a black actor as well.
"I wanted to further complicate it in terms of not having it be, `I hate him because he's black,' but if a black man says that about another black man, it adds an interesting dynamic to their relationship," Corey said.
"I have a non-verbal scene that I've put into the play at the beginning that shows people gossiping about them [Othello and Desdemona] as they stand before the priest to get married," Corey said.
"The gossip is a kind of poison that runs through the play, the racism is a kind of poison. And eventually Othello becomes a victim of that kind of thinking himself, because he believes the reason Desdemona has betrayed him is that he is black."
In Corey's opinion, one of the important themes of the play is the question of whether we can ever really know another person.
"Not only in our racial situation, but just in our ordinary daily lives: That's what the play asks in all its aspects, between races, between husband and wife, between a man and his best friend, a general and his lieutenant . . . In all those aspects, can we really know another person and trust them?
"The answer is, to put it rather glibly, that you can't know anyone else unless you know who you are, yourself - although the play says this in a much more complex way," Corey said.
In Monday night's production, Othello will be played by Robert Anew, who has acted the role before. Chris Adams plays Iago and Jennifer Carroll is Desdemona.
This production is mounted by a young company. Corey is only 32, and most of his actors are younger still.
The director says the National Shakespeare Company is a splendid opportunity for young players to season themselves with the stage's greatest works. He says an actor's talent and maturity determine how much creative slack he or she is allowed.
"If they have good ideas, they can go far with me. I'm really an actor's director and I'm very collaborative in that way.
"But in this situation, I'm oftentimes working with very young actors who don't have a lot of experiences with these plays and I tend to be specific about what I want," Corey said.
"If I sense that somebody really knows their way, then great - but these roles are tremendously difficult and they're full of traps and you have to guide people through them or they can make real erroneous choices."
"OTHELLO": Monday at 8 p.m. in RU's Preston Auditorium. Admission is $8 for adults and $4 for children; Radford students free with ID. At 6:30 p.m. Monday, professor Charles Hayes will give a talk on the play for RU Arts Society members in Flossie Martin Gallery.