The chill that grips the theater is testament to the throat-clutching tension of Michael Grandage's brilliantly calibrated Donmar Warehouse production. Shakespeare's masterpiece of cunning i…
After "The Wire," Seth Gilliam turned down two TV police drama roles to avoid being typecast. This week he stars on the Boston Common in a free production.
Heads up if you're near the corner of LaGuardia Place and Washington Square South at 9:15 p.m. through Sunday. You might get trampled, or at least jostled. The 2 1/4-hour first act of the hot-ticket Othello at NYU's Skirball Center ends then, and a stampede of people flees for the exits, with no plan of returning for another hour and a half.
There is a stripped-down, stark intelligence at work in Peter Sellars' updated Washington rethinking of Othello, which boasts an unsettling, altogether captivating anti-star turn by Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago to John Ortiz's slick and confident Moor. Alas, by the time the project has rethought Shakespeare's tragedy and rethought the rethinking, four hours have passed more as a lengthy psycho-political exercise than a full-blown adventure.
Funny thing about director Peter Sellars' lengthy version of Othello, now on view at New York University's Skirball Center. His imagination outraces the ability of his actors, including the usually eminently watchable Philip Seymour Hoffman, a performer of uncommon intelligence. That means the play, clocking in at a posterior-numbing four hours, is quite an ordeal, despite occasional bursts of inventiveness. It's high-concept time with ideas rather than Shakespeare's language or character ruling the day. But clever can take you only so far.
"Adapting" Shakespeare, with cuts, additions and rearrangements, was a theatrical industry for several centuries. What can the world's greatest dramatist do that a hack playwright or megalomaniac director cannot improve upon? Some updatings may have their merits but with Peter Sellars, all debts to reason are canceled. I have long denounced his depredations on the theater, but what he has concocted in New York with Othello—as coproduced by Oskar Eustis of the Public Theater (who thinks him a genius), and the LAByrinth Theater Company (perhaps the most obnoxious in town)—offends Shakespeare, common sense and decency.
