Othello, Directed by Peter Sellars (Part 1)
I went to see the Peter Sellars production of Othello Friday night at the Skirball Center. I figured since it hadn’t been reviewed in the Times yet that I might be able to get a seat in that bloated, relatively new theater on NYU’s campus. I got there an hour before and was the second person in line. A nice Jewish couple came by a half hour before curtain, trying to sell an extra seat for $90. At first I and the visiting Danish theater students I had been talking to in line rejected the seats, but when the couple returned and asked to name our price, I took the seat for what I could afford for rush tickets, $20. It am glad that’s all I paid.
I was seated with the couple and their friends in the back row of the orchestra—those were $90 seats for a show listed as Off-Broadway. They supposedly were suspending their $20 rush tickets (so much for the public option), although after the production gets reviewed I suspect they may have to give seats away for free.
I came to see Phillip Seymour Hoffman because I was blown away by his performance in Long Days Journey Into Night a few years back, which I had seen twice from the second row center. I had forgotten that Peter Sellers was the director, but now I was very curious to see how his work played in a post-postmodern theater world. Today, the high concept aesthetic Sellers made famous in the late 70s has become so ubiquitous, that recently The Onion ran a satirical story about an avant-garde director whose concept it was to do a Shakespeare production in the actual period it was set. This, of course, was my favorite joke I used to make in the 90s while at Washington Shakespeare Company.
Actually, I had seen one workshop performance of an opera called Kafka Fragments, directed by Sellars a few years ago, where, if I remember it right, Donna Upshaw stood in street clothes under what appeared to be theater work lights, ironing clothes. After the show as the audience cleared, I was introduced by someone to the actor Fiona Shaw, who was in town for her critically acclaimed Medea, when all of a sudden a little elf-dwarf man whose literal shock of hair spiked up like he had put his hand in a light socket appeared a few rows in front of us. “Oh, Petah,” she said as she turned around, and we all waved and were vaguely introduced. I assumed that Kafka Fragments was so lackluster because it was a workshop.
Although I am not at all averse to setting classic plays in different contexts, I strongly believe in my own work that the purpose and the passion is entirely to illuminate what the author wrote. Everyone is aware that in Shakespeare, there are problem scenes and problem plays, although not all directors completely understand what the problems are and which are the plays that have been designated “problem plays.” (For example, Cymbeline is a problem play. Much Ado about Nothing has some problems, but is not a “problem play,” Joe Banno’s notes to his production notwithstanding.) As a native of Washington, DC, I was somewhat sympathetic to the notrious history and struggle Peter Sellars. I had remembered the typical, unimaginative and conservative reaction the city had to his brief artistic directorship of the Kennedy Center from 1984-86 (starting when he was 26!), but I never saw his work. Also, I was appalled by the lack of scholarship and basic understanding of theater by the DC critics when they reviewed my production of Much Ado About Nothing, and that was in 2002 after DC had long blossomed or metastasized into a full blown theater town.
I’ll say more about Peter Sellars concept for Othello later, but more important to me here is the actual mechanics of what people in the theater still pretentiously call the director’s “craft.” (It’s a hold over from the HUAC 50s.) I am not sure whether Ivo van Hove was influenced by Sellers or vice versa, but instead of the high concept but brilliantly lavish and well staged production I expected, what I saw was a hybrid of what we used to call readers theater with nods to Brecht only in the sense that the show was alienating. I started to wonder whether the Dawn Upshaw workshop I had seen was not much different from the final production.
As we all know, Shakespeare often works best with no set at all, because everything is given to you in the dialogue. So I don’t have a problem with a blank stage. Yet, in Sellers’ Othello, the actors are dressed in what look like street clothes, and to make it less appealing, the costume “designer” makes sure that there is no color palette and thus no relationship between any of the characters, which I am assuming is done on purpose, but I am not sure. Phillip Seymour Hoffman wears an unflattering bright green izod shirt the entire play, so that when he talks about envy being a green eyed monster, I guess we are to assume that he is that monster on a crass symbolic level, even though this style eschews overt symbolism. With the exception of a brief onstage change from Desdemona into a nightgown, all the actors where the same boring “costume” throughout.
It is clear from this production the old issue I have had for years, which is that the concept of the play does not seem to be driven by the director at all. He may throw out a basic concept, but he is not a visual or aural artist in any way, but the designers take full control, and often they work against each other. This is not done on purpose, but since the director has no visual or musical talent, he doesn’t have a clue how to integrate the different design contributions. Like the actors, the designers are functioning in their own orbit. Here, the set designer came up with one giant, clunky piece, which he placed just stage left of center, a “bed” that consisted of about 24 monitor screens in a grid pattern, with a bed post of more computer screens that start to fall out of pattern and angle hither and thither toward the top, which is I guess supposed to symbolize that the marriage bed was deconstructing. Of course, Othello is not primarily about a marriage falling apart, or about a bed.
Other than this giant piece of contemporary art sculpture, in contrast, the rest of the stage was littered with blasé, contemporary metal chairs, and a few microphones on sticks, which could be adjusted up or down, and which blocked the actors often when they were sitting in a “bar” just to make sure you knew that actors were doing a scene so you would not be emotionally pulled into the action. Although you could see to the back wall of the cavernous stage, most of the action was played on a flat plane, except for a scene here or there on the back wall up center left, but of course if you sat in the wrong place you could not see any of these scenes because the giant computer screens cum bed blocked your view. Sellars either doesn’t seem to care about this or he doesn’t move around enough while directing to check sight lines. And, more importantly, the lighting designer chose to use the standard alienating bright strip lights whose purpose it seems is to annoy the audience more than help the actors.
These effects work incredibly well when employed by Richard Foreman, but let’s remember that Foreman is not only the writer and director of his work, his greatest genius lies in his brilliantly theatrical sets, sound, and lighting. He knows what he is doing, and he doesn’t slough it off on a designer to figure out. Foreman would never accidentally obstruct even a small portion of the audience from seeing a signifant scene, because he knows the entire audience is part of the show, the show is done for them, and if he lights the audience it is for a theatrically inclusive effect, not to completely alienate them from the material.
In this production of Othello, the lights would hit the bed computer screens at an angle that reflected the bulb of an instrument directly in your face as you sat in the audience, but not all audience members at the same time—it all depended on where you were sitting. In the intermission I overheard many conversations where people were saying they had to shield their eyes or move their head so that glare would be blocked by the head of an audience member in front of them. It definitely took you out of the play, and in Shakespeare you need to be completely attentive or you start to lose interest with the sometimes challenging language. Was this really done on purpose? Probably not.
In the intermission, the Jewish couple and their friends asked me what I thought of the production, and as I stood in the last row with them standing behind the last row against the wall, I went into these and other concerns. They started to signal that someone was behind me, also against the wall on their plane, listening attentively, and as I turned I realize it was the dwarf man, Peter Sellars, and I became embarrassed and started to go over in my mind what I had just said and what would be offensive. Perhaps that I likened it to a high school production? Sellars was very kind and not defensive, which I admired because I also like to listen to negative criticism, which is easier for me to do as a director, because not everyone knows I am the director when I eaves drop. He told me that, since a lot of people were leaving in the intermission, that I must go up and sit close, because he had created this production of Othello, one of Shakespeare’s grand tragedies that has been made into grand opera, as a “chamber piece.” That in itself was ridiculous to me, because I felt it employed the typical late 20th century fashion of knocking down a great work to show how small humanity is, to make a work of art that which is great not so great.
In the lengthy program notes the dramaturg jumped through hoops to demonstrate that Sellers does not break things down, he is a builder, but I knew that whether I sat close or far, whether this was designed to be a stripped down quartet version of a Beethoven symphony, I don’t think it would have made a difference. If the Skirball center was too big for the production, as he told me, why were they doing it here, and why were these nice people paying $90 to sit in the back row, where they weren’t actually watching what the director wanted us to see? And why were all the actors wearing body mics, which also canned the intimacy he meant to achieve no matter where you sat? What did intimacy and subtlety of acting matter in this clunky, purposely presentational anti-aesthetic?
When I moved closer, it is true that I could see what actually was going on in those computer screens—strange quasi-astrological symbols that appeared to have been originally drawn with chalk, multiple Othello or Iago hands that shifted and changed—not too distracting like some video can be, but also cold and uninteresting. Actually, the only really interesting thing to see close up was Desdemona’s accidental reflection sometimes on one of the bed post screens, but that’s being kind. Close or far, most of these actors come from the “acting from the neck up” school, and I did think that Desdemona had a nice face and a nice inner dialogue and subtlety of expression suitable for film, but not at all necessary for this “style.”
Even if we accept this post-post modern anti-style, the big problem with Sellars’ “craft” is that by the time the strangulation of Desdemona half happens, so many people have sprawled across that computer bed that the murder is a complete anticlimax. Of course, I realize this may have been the point, since Sellars never really gives us the murder. Othello talks and talks, and the young woman next to me said she wanted to just scream “kill her already,” a sentiment I shared. I couldn’t help but think that there is a reason Shakespeare’s Othello does not murder Desdemona in a rage. It is completely premeditated and ritualistic, he tells her to say her prayers and prepare for her death, something I suspect can only work when Othello is cast as towering Herculean Warrior and not as a tiny runt who is shorter than Iago.
Actually, I did like how she died and came back to life like a ghost then died again, like it was all in a dream, but did this lyrical (finally a really conceptual) moment fit in with the rest of the half baked reader’s theater style? No. This inconsistent style of making some things mimed, some things real I guess is employed to make us realize we are in a theater, something we already know and was better (and consistently) done by Thornton Wilder. Here, the attitude is, “now I feel like using a real prop,” and “just fake it here, who cares?” Sellers makes characters talk to each other on real cell phones, which gets a laugh at the beginning, then into microphones, downtown avant garde 101, while still on body mics throughout. He might want to try mixing accoustic and live sounds with canned sounds, something I found dauntingly challenging yet highly appropriate when I created Darkling. (It also took about 6 months to get the right balance.)
The main prop in Othello is of course Desdemona’s strawberry embroidered handkerchief he once gave to her when they first met, and it functions as the most important device Iago employs to convince Othello that Desdemona is sleeping with Michael Cassio. Naturally, the post-postmodern aesthetic dictates that this is too obvious or gauche, so the napkin was probably nabbed just before the show at a McDonald’s and of course, does not have any strawberries, that would be too obvious and sentimental, so it’s just plain white.
Fine, we can use our imagination. But why are the cell phones so important? Why does Iago go off stage and come back after shooting Roderigo with a real gun (something that really cracked me up so I had to cover my mouth), and then all the other murders are committed in some kind of abstract “style” where they just tap the person in the back to stab them for example. No, we have been waiting the entire play for Iago to die a juicy death after killing his wife, but the director doesn’t want us to engage in any real pleasure, it now has to be suggested. And as far as remember, Othello doesn’t even die in this production, but I was distracted by some character (I had lost track of the characters in this 8 actor production) slowly traversing the stage in a wheel chair. But that was not even pretty, like virtually every scene in the production, no space was used, just clunky groupings that resembled actors stiffly and timidly clumping together during the callback auditions. I am assuming that Sellars, “the builder,” was breaking a “directing 101″ principle by often placing actors in a line, but I am not sure. Maybe he actually has no talent and this is the Emperor’s New Clothes?