Love and hate

Trinity Rep tackles Othello's tug of war

by Bill Rodriguez

The trouble with a tried and true play like Othello is that familiarity can breed contentment. We know where it's all leading when the Moorish general's friend and aide Iago, resentful for being passed over for a commission, gets hold of Desdemona's handkerchief. The faithful wife will be accused of adultery with Cassio, Iago's rival, and soon, like a bell tolling at midnight, it's time for the strangulation scene.

Fortunately for us, Trinity Repertory has a habit of breathing new life into old work. Project Discovery, its high school program, could very well be the name of the traditional Trinity rehearsal process. That's been so from the time of founding director Adrian Hall, for whom rehearsals were ensemble explorations, to his protégé Richard Jenkins, who kept alive to actors that scary sense of a play script packed with mysteries, to Oskar Eustis, whose world-class reputation as a dramaturge reflects his commitment to unlocking a text's intentions.

Carrying on that approach, the theater's recently named associate artistic director, 26-year-old Amanda Dehnert, newly minted from Trinity Rep Conservatory in 1996, is directing what has been described as Shakespeare's most tightly structured play (with no subplots, it's as relentless as a migraine). As she has demonstrated with plays as diverse as Saint Joan and the farce We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!, she's good at coaxing surprises out of the Trinity ensemble.

Othello is being played by John Douglas Thompson, 36, who had a lead role as Slick Rick in Trinity's recent Preface to an Alien Garden. He is a 1994 Trinity Rep Conservatory graduate and ever since has been kept busy acting, from Portland to Off-Broadway, largely in productions of Shakespeare. His first on-stage acquaintance with the Bard was playing Othello in 1992 in a solid staging by the Rhode Island Shakespeare Theatre, directed by Trinity actor Ed Shea.

Two weeks into the rehearsal process, with two more weeks before previews, the director and actor sat down during a break to discuss what they're doing with the production.

Q: What were the most overwhelming aspects of the play for you, John? And have you cracked them all by now?

John: I'm really trying to go slow with this, as slow as possible to discover these things. As opposed to thinking of what I've learned from doing the play before. One of the hardest things for me has been to stay in the moment and tell the truth. More than the play, I'm kind of learning, if you will, how to act all over again. In a different way, which I think is better because it feels better. So my only goal with this is to be as good as possible. I know this sounds over-simplified, but the only way that I can is by taking one step at a time. I have even forbidden myself from thinking about the end of the play or what I'm going to do. Because if I do do that, I'll just slip into habits and faults. So I'm really glad for this experience, because it's really redefining what I consider my art.

Q: What's different about Othello this time around for you?

John: It's different with the theme. When we did that [TRIST] production we stayed with themes that are fairly general: the race aspect of the play, the jealousy, love. And I think in this production we're going a lot deeper than what's on the surface.

Amanda: There's all this hatred and jealousy. It's sort of a big descent into hate and what happens with that. But we were talking the other day about how hate really has to come from a place of love. I mean, to hate something enough to want to destroy it you have to simultaneously love it deeper than anything else.

Q: Because it has to be so important to you.

Amanda: It has to be so Important to you. And that Iago really loves Othello and Othello loves Iago. And that Othello never stops loving Desdemona. The thing that keeps him from killing her for so long is that tug of war. It's not as simple as, "Well, I'm not gonna kill her yet." He loves her so much that the feelings get all mixed up, become this big mess, where finally he sees himself clear enough to say, "I have to kill you because I love you." And he can wrap his mind around the logic of that statement. We need the play to take us there, to see that that can really happen.

Q: It could be awfully confusing for the audience if the protagonist is confused. The final response of Othello could seem arbitrary.

Amanda: Right. Well, if it really works, we should all the time be going: "Kill her!... No, don't kill her.... Kill her!"

John: With the character, yea.

Amanda: Now, that's hard, that's really hard. But just as I've known early on that we have to sympathize with Iago, we can't just hate him, we have to see his point, we have to see that their relationship [between Iago and Othello] is a great relationship -- and yet (laughs) the awful thing happens. You're kind of left at the end of the play with one great big why. There's no answer to this play. It's not actually reducible to, Well, he thought she was having an affair, so he killed her. That makes it trite. Or that makes it tabloid. You should be just burning with, "Why did it have to happen that way?" I think it's a real psychological thriller.

John: The other thing that's really different from the other production I was in is the relationship with Iago. I feel that what we're structuring now is so much stronger. So you can get an idea of why I do what I do.

Amanda: Because Othello's not dumb. It can't just be, "Oh, can't you see what this guy is doing to you?" It can't be that simple.

Q: I'm wondering about Othello's tragic flaw. The production could stress the sexual jealousy, or it could stress the matter of his being duped, as a way of signaling to the audience that he's coming from a specific place.

Amanda: No, I disagree with that, actually. The play does it for us. In the moment that he says, "She's gone, I'm abused, and my relief must be to loath her," that's what he believes in the moment. It's just that then she walks up, and he says, "Oh, no, no, no. If she be false, heaven mocks itself. I'll not believe it." So that tug of war is actually in the text. I would say you would end up with a more generalized production if you tried to say to yourself, "He's jealous --"

John: He's jealous and that's how he's going to be for the rest of the production. I really think he goes back and forth.

Amanda: If there is any tragic flaw within Othello, it is the flaw that we all have, which is that when we're confronted with a situation almost beyond our emotional bounds, we stretch ourselves to try to fill it.

Othello will be at Trinity Rep September 3 through October 10. Call 351-4242.