by Sam Juliano
After a month-long sojourn at the Duke, Arin Arbus’s critically-praised staging of Shakespeare’s Othello has been given another week of performances scheduled to commence after the company’s soon-to-begin Hamlet run at the intimate second-floor auditorium on a bustling 42nd Street in Manhattan.
Regularly one of the most produced Shakespeare productions annually in the US, Othello is arguably (as the great scholar A.C. Bradley contends) “the most painfully exciting and most terrible of the Bard’s work”, even eclipsing Lear in that department. Surely as one of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth are the other three of course) there is always a reference point envisioned by theatre goers of past productions, and invariably of what expects from its illustrious characters and staging decisions. From the latter, Arbus wisely plays the “less is more” game, allowing minimalist props and lighting to be overshadowed by those immortal words and passages that bring this defining study of sexual jealousy to unobstructed to lilting grandeur. (more…)