Othello (at the Gift Theater, Chicago -- August 1, 2014)

Theater-culture is robust in the Windy City and, indeed, there are small, but ambitious troupes of actors everywhere in Chicago.  An acknowledged species of theater in that town is the "store-front" operation.  The Gift Theater in Jefferson Park belongs to this category.  Jefferson Park is a largely Polish enclave at the western edge of Chicago, only a couple miles from Des Plaines and the airport.  (The neighborhood is so Polish that the El signs posted at the train station are written in that language.)  The Gift occupies a storefront next to a martial arts dojo on Milwaukee, a thoroughfare bustling to the point of desperation at rush hour, but, otherwise, deserted in the evening.  The renowned Chicago artist, Ed Paschke, has a gallery near the theater and there is a nice, rough chop-house that is obviously a local hang-out,The Gale Street Inn, a couple of blocks away.  At 7:15, when we queued-up for the show (entry is general admission only and there's no lobby to speak of), Milwaukee was quiet and the shadows were lengthening on the still sidewalks and a bearded gent, apparently a graduate student in art history, at Paschke's Art Center was locking the place up -- the muffler and transmission business next door to the studio was already shuttered for the evening.  In Paschke's gallery, there is a big and famous painting by the artist showing King Tut's mask and the golden glint of the bright paint on that large canvas was the brightest thing in the neighborhood.  Paschke's work is self-consciously vulgar but brilliant as well and the large, garish paintings in his storefront seemed to shine as if stained glass transfixed by the sunset.  The Gift Theater is tiny:  four rows of cheap seats, the kind of furniture you might encounter in a Holiday Inn banquet room, are arranged in front of a tiny stage.  The stage is comprised of a riser two-inches above the tile floor and about eight feet wide.  For Othello, the set consisted of four hinged metal columns that could be opened or closed by the actors in the gloom between scenes.  The metal columns were purely functional with a modest monolithic character a bit like the enigmatic upright-standing stones is 2001.  The lighting was merely functional and the play was performed without costumes in modern street dress -- in a couple of scenes the characters consulted cell-phones and while Iago is pouring his malevolent poison into Othello's ears both military men are scribbling notes on clipboards holding what seemed to be routine requisition orders.  Iago uses a wheelchair -- apparently, the actor is, in fact, paralyzed from the waist down:  his name is Michael Patrick Thornton and he is the artistic director of The Gift.  Thornton's Iago was effective, speaking his lines very quickly in an unassuming, continuous patter that could be construed as helpful, even friendly.  In one scene, when Iago wheeled himself idly around the stage, improvising malice against Othello and Cassio, his eyes had a dead quality -- it seemed to me that this Iago was contriving his plot out of sheer boredom with the day-to-day drudgery of military service.  Othello was splendidly played by Kareem Bandealy, a charismatic performance enhanced by the actor's rugged and muscular physique and his noble diction.  The theater seats only sixty spectators, fifteen per row, 61 if you allow for a bar-stool on which one of the audience members perched during the sold-out show.  The stage is no more than ten feet from the back row, only about three to four inches from where I was seated with Angelica in the front.  Shakespeare is messy business, particularly when the room is sweltering hot with no apparent air-flow -- the wooden risers forming the stage were puddled with saliva (Elizabethan English require much spitting of sibilant words) and moist with sweat spilled off the actors.  The play began on a swift high-note -- Shakespeare's attack in this work is very, very quick and decisive.  The plot always gets mired in Iago's morbid conniving -- there seems to be way too much scheming in the play and everything is vastly, even comically, over-determined.  Othello succumbs so swiftly to the green-eyed monster that it seems that Iago's carefully plotted campaign of disinformation is too cunning by half.  There are always tedious moments in Shakespeare and these occur in Othello just before the intermission, taken at the end of Act Three.  The emphasis on cuckoldry is obsessive to Shakespeare, clearly some sort of personal wound that the writer probes and worries like a hollow, aching tooth and there are times when we feel that we are beholding some sort of trauma private to author and not really even accessible to the audience.  (I have always wondered how female viewers perceive Othello's insane jealousy egged on by the equally insane and misogynistic skepticism of Iago.)  The climax of this production of the play was certainly horrific enough, terrifying and monstrous, particularly when enacted only three or four feet from where you are sitting.  The show is big and tremendously ambitious and it seemed odd for so much energy and passion to be expended for a tiny audience that is, perhaps, only three times the size of the cast deployed darting on and off stage.  (Although this is a bit of a misnomer:  the theater really has no offstage -- during the intermission, Iago withdrew to a nook next to the door leading into the tiny theater and sat there brooding with his back to the audience.  We went out to the sidewalk where the air was moving, if only slightly, and watched Slavic-looking kids and beautiful blonde girls smoking cigarettes cruising by on Milwaukee.)  At the end of the play, Iago is asked why he committed the calumny that has resulted in all this mayhem:  he says:  "You know what you know" -- referring to what we have seen as being the best evidence for his motivation, surely one of the most devastating lines in all of theater.