A Great Trio
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel A Great Trio Joseph Papp deserves two votes of thanks in response to the new Othello in Central Park: first, for producing it; second, for not directing it. One...
...Jones produces only sufficient voice and feeling for the successive scenes, rather as a high jumper may draw on exactly enough strength to clear each new height...
...She has red hair and exquisitely small features...
...When he has knotted Cassio into his plans and received in return a heartfelt "Good-night, honest Iago," Ryan's eyes come up from the floor as slowly as an elevator in an old building, his upper lip breaks, and his mouth splits into innumerable teeth as he inquires, "What's he then that says I play the villain . . .?" And the audience plunges right into his delight...
...Jones' madness is not a psychotic state but an inward dispute...
...Her appearance is more than enough...
...In the "willow scene" with Emilia and the murder scene, played under angry blue-white lights, as if an evil moon were glaring into the bedroom, she is an emblem of wronged truth...
...If he is so sure he has it, why does he keep harping on it...
...A man proud of his Venetian citizenship, a hardened soldier who stands up calmly to Brabantio's malign phrase, "the sooty bosom of such a thing as thou," yet inexplicably vulnerable, as Iago sees, to insinuation, Jones' Othello upholds Miss Vaughan's conception of a great trio perilously balanced...
...With the Moor James Earl Jones has the most rewarding part in his career to date, and measures out every moment of it with a control exceptional for an actor still in his early 30s...
...She wears long gowns as if they had sprung up around her...
...But Miss Marie turns out to be a formidable actress...
...One of Iago's obsessive topics of conversation, as Robert Heilman has pointed out, is wit, meaning wisdom...
...It is a "nowin" policy if there ever was one —he is as futile congratulating himself on his acumen as is Barry Goldwater prating about strength...
...Seductive and ironic...
...Some actors like to appear smarter than this part...
...Gathering each line of the poetry as if it had just come to him, he lays out the narrative structure of his speeches with simple clarity and suspense...
...If Iago's plot against the rest of the dramatis personae is a sample of this wisdom—after all, what actual good can it bring him, save the slaking of his hatred...
...Not until he has established that an essentially ridiculous figure can be dangerous does Ryan suppress Iago's good-natured fooling...
...Miss Vaughan, who fashioned The Winter's Tale last year into a horn of entertaining plenty, should answer for some casting defects in the lesser roles of this Othello and one gross error with Bianca, but let them pass...
...He plays always within the intelligence of Othello...
...Some con man —some gag...
...She has the glamorous, trim looks of a young matron fresh out of the hands of midtown cosmeticians and en route to evening classes in deportment and charm...
...Desdemona at the other as love and dependence...
...She can rest her case for the play on these three members: Iago at one extreme as hatred and self-reliance...
...One would need several hands full of fingers to count off Papp's gifts to the theater in New York, but staging is not one of them...
...let her only be there, and if she dares to trade on her visible attributes she will be forgiven...
...And relentlessly during the last two acts his dark Iago edges out the bright one...
...This is no practitioner of the black arts, but a practical joker about to put over the most ambitious wheeze of his life and to enjoy it all the way...
...Mitchell Ryan resolves the questions about Iago's motives boldly: he plays him for comedy, whenever plausible, and takes the comedy seriously...
...As Desdemona, Julienne Marie is a knock-out...
...The most judicious Shakespeare he has shown us has been under the command of Stuart Vaughan, Gerald Friedman, or Gladys Vaughan...
...His switches into piety when Othello is present seem all the more seductive because of his comic foundations...
...Her Emilia (Sada Thompson) supports splendidly and her choices for Iago, Desdemona and Othello are very nearly inspired...
...Iago has more lines than any other character and buckles the main plot to the subordinate stories of Roderigo and Cassio...
...and Othello, the intermediary, making the emotional crossings from love and self-reliance to hatred and dependence...
...Othello fights Othello, he does not rage against the rest of the world...
Vol. 47 • August 1964 • No. 15
