Theater rating: Denzel Washington in ‘Othello’

Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal in Othello, in the barryman.
Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Bad theater can be uniquely angry. (I am probably writing this here because I got very angry when I looked at a piece.) But it can also be simply confusing. Who allowed that? What does this thing actually want to say? Does anyone in this room, on stage or from a good time? Why do the policemen’s Av Flak jackets say “police” while the military uniforms have American flags? Does this piece take place in a future in which the USA have annexed Venice?

“This piece” is OthelloAt the moment it looks pretty lively because it breaks through Broadway cords and calculates up to 921 US dollars for tickets. “Othello Will survive you! “My English teacher screamed in my class who was not set for a day of reading. Production is as far as possible as possible to have lost the audience and the ensemble in a hinterland, so worrying and beige that it is difficult to conjure up something as visceral as anger.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge scribbled a note on the edge of his copy of Othello About “the motive hunting of the motive malignancy”-a indication of the way the traitorious villain of the piece, Iago, cooks a variety of flat rationalizations for hatred that is too deep and insidious to attribute a properly explainable circumstances. But what about the motive hunting of a motifless production? Leon’s Othello Has no opinion, no reason to be beyond the film stars at its center. It hardly has a pulse. On a number of heavy, generic columns from Derek McLane, actors in standard suits of the standard edition and the fatigue in the desert storm in desert storm in an indifferent configurations. (“The near future” reads a single projection onto these columns at the top of the piece observatory. This should teach us about the rules of this universe on stage?) After all, the monolites slide back and forth in the disgusting back and forth in order to break the room to break the room. And stand side by side to carry out a scene. Eye contact is in a bizarre low supply; A feeling of urgency or enthusiasm is even less common.

When Cassio, the good -looking lieutenant, which Othello has encouraged over Iago, Andrew Burnap tries to make a solid effort to put a little behind the words, but he is hardly the engine of the piece. This burning energy must come from the poisonous plotter Iago (Gyllenhaal) and from Othello itself, the honorable general, which Iago tortures and deceives a shocking act of violence. Gyllenhaal, although it is robust enough with the language, only reaches temporary gliding of Iago’s poisonous vitality. Back in his Jarhead* Crewcut, he is square and furrow -brown, uncomplicated and Bro. He and Washington spend long distances of the show with his hands in a combat obstruction behind the back – the kind of “realism attempt”, which is always a bad excuse not to give characters a full psychophysical life. Everything is good and good to avoid mustache as an IAGO. It is another thing to remain largely opaque to dampen the electrical current of the terrible caninity of the character. Gyllenhaals most human moments come during his monoloquia, where his face sometimes thickens in ugly injuries and his voice: he plays Iagos – Othos failure to promote him and his own vague suspicion that the general may have linked him – as a serious driver. What he does not do is to use a deeper, more scary, less decipherable devil.

Washington seems – or at least on the night when I saw the show to be kilometers away from the Barrymore Theater. He begins the role that is smiling and unshakable. And although it makes sense to give Othello a long arc – from integrity and decency to decimated, brutal heartache – what is stubborn that it is difficult to believe that he and Leon intentionally avoid the inevitable jumps of the part. Othello Is not exactly the most appealing of Shakespeare’s pieces in 2025: how The Venice dealerIt bears an angry and insoluble discourse. Is it racist or does it show Racism? (Both can be true.) Is it a great role for a black actor or is it a trap – a narrative that ultimately showed a black audience in London for all apparent nobility by Othello, in which he was expected to be awaited by him? To take over the piece today, a creative team must have a profound feeling Why – From what this thing is intensely about, what a modern context is about, how the racial dynamics of your world are in conversation with those of us and who his characters as a living, breathing person and why we should take care of it.

None of this is available on Leon’s stage. Washington may be defective, if it is understandable, if it is understandable, to avoid stereotypes of excessive passion – of a large, stormy emotional fireworks in a delicate role in color – the result cannot travel with its Othello. We listen to him that he says words; We are not, even if he enters the bedroom of his innocent wife Desdemona (Molly Osborne) to strangle her to experience his terrible interior change. Instead, a really worrying percentage of the audience still laughs when he approaches her in these fateful moments. (The age gap between the and 40 years between the actors also leads to one of the least sexy unions that I have ever seen on stage. If this Othello gives his sleeping woman a number of tortured last kisses, he turns over the waist, and gives her chaste on the forehead.) Washington seem to be doing the least. When Iago begins to crack the seals of his self-confidence, it is Schauer and Sitcom as disturbed-but this impulse slips in a speech like the one that he has to give as a prologue. “I will not shed her blood, / still nar, this white skin of her as snow, / and smooth as monumental alabaster,” he says. (Leon leaves pretty much the entire language of the piece that idealizes the white and disparages the blackness.) Then he takes a break before he continues almost nonchalant: “But it has to die.” The audience giggles. Is what production – what every production of Othello– Really wants?

Washington is not only in his drastic subjugation of the missions in history. When Desdemona and her waiting time, Emilia (Kimber Elayne Auslafe) -Iido’s wife, here as a co-soldier in a ambiguous status relationship with the wife of the Generals-AN of the second act of production, they look for a handkerchief. “Believe me, I preferred to lose my handbag / full of cruados,” she says Emilia. But Osborne and expansion enter the stage casually and take Leon’s favorite route as they meandering towards the stage. Osbornes “Where should I lose this handkerchief, Emilia?” Sounds over equivalent: “Girl, did you see my car keys?” Later, the outbreaks brooded through one of the best speeches of the play, Emilia’s sharp, short intestinal punch over the hypocrisy of men. “But I think it’s the mistakes / when women fall,” she says of The Shaken Desdemona. It is a wild eighteen lines in a piece that cannot be attributed if he has done a great job with his women as a whole – but Leon has spread behind Osborne, who sits on a bench and exposed the whole thing, which does not combine with anyone, targetless and subtreat.

These adjectives could also be used more generally for production, which often feels like it was Jason Isaacs in the theft of Parker Poseys Lorazepam. Maybe the most confusing, that Othello Seems to be determined to say almost nothing about race 400 years ago, now or in the near future. Here, Montano (Ezra Knight), the governor of Cyprus, where Othello and his troops are stationed, and Emilia are both played by black actors, but Othello is still the only character whose blackness seems to be playing, as is the only one who is the only one who is called “moor” -a word that is often with a sluck -ethnic definition in the slip -Definition is located. (Even the approach of production to this friction feels shaky: the use of the term in action does not lead to different waves among the characters, and the show program describes Othello as “moor” and a “Marine Corps General”, as if the phrases are the same. Black. “If characters want to speak like this, we have to understand something about the world in which they live: If it is a fundamentally, historically racist world or a variant -how many people who live in it are aware? How do they weigh? Who is fighting, who is hiding it? Who feels about it? Questions about another production, one with more blood in the veins.

Othello Is in the Ethel Barrymore Theater.

Correction, March 24: This indication of Jarhead was corrected.