How do you like your Shakespeare? Intimate. Intelligent. Intrepid. And, I’d also add fully integrated through emotional truth and delivery of the musical richness of Shakespeare’s language. Taffety Punk has made just about all of that happen with the return of its all female “band,” Riot Grrrls, starring in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice.
Let’s start with intimate. Capitol Hill Workshop, home of Taffety Punk, offers a performing space that makes every theatrical experience immersive. This most particularly enriches the Shakespearean tragedy that is fueled by whispers and multiplying lies. The audience encircles the playing space, so we get to know all the characters intimately, feel their pain, and sit by helpless to intervene and stop the unraveling. We’re in the ring together, and we feel implicated in the tightening of Iago’s plot.
Intelligent. We watch Iago’s eyes played by the inimitable Lise Bruneau. I’ll put her up against any other Shakespearean actor in DC’s deep field of classical actors. She’s brilliant and understands not only how to build a character, she knows how to think through every moment, breathe through every iambic line, and she makes it all seem new-coined and without a shred of “actory” physical tension. She has charted how such an ensnaring villain must maintain a high alert that he/she begins to eat her own entrails. And Bruneau does it with such nuance, such “honest” directness, she stares us down as if daring us to call out her mendacity.
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Intrepid. With a cast of only seven women, director Kelsey Mesa has parceled out multiple roles and costume changes for most to keep a focused lens and an urgent pace. Mesa delivers the most spare and taut of productions. There was nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide for these actors. The gender switching that some performers had to do had to be pretty much in plain sight. Swordplay (fight choreography by Teresa Spencer) had to be believable in 3-D. Virtually none of the actors were ever entirely offstage.
The women never camped up male heartiness, but clearly they have watched the body language of males’ meet-and-greet rituals and manifested a slightly higher center of gravity. They have fearlessly thrown themselves into their roles, including telltale heightened discomfort around the racism that launches their world and the plot of the Moor’s rise to power including winning the heart of the prized daughter of a top Venetian. (These women have clearly done the work necessary.)
The performers found a strong physical shape and gestural mapping to define every character. Bruneau’s watchful stillness, a caved-in closed-off-heart and hangman’s hands hanging often lifeless at her sides, were in sharp contrast to Iago’s wife, played by another core company member Tonya Beckman, whose hands were almost always working, sometimes fluttering with a feminine coquettishness, sometimes maternal, as towards Desdemona, and then when hurt or in fear, drawing a shawl around her tightly.
Liz Daingerfield’s height and manner most closely embodies a kind of white male powerbroker and rolls his Lodovico and the Duke into twin mirrors of the noble class. Her hands with just a turn, a dismissive flick, or slight pointing jab showed someone used to commanding a universe.
The Tragedy of Othello The Moor of Venice closes October 12 2019. Details and tickets
Stephany Pesta commanded my attention with her great strength and presence as military officer Montano then strutting across the stage in stilettos and skin-tight jeans as Cassio’s girlfriend Bianca.
The young Julie Weir has the hardest and often the most sudden physical transformations to pull off as the sweet stillness of the heroine and victim of the play, Desdemona, then become Roderigo who, as bystander to most of the dealings, gets pulled into Iago’s scheme only to become a victim. It’s to be forgiven then that Weir makes a more obvious external and “clown” choice of slapping on and ripping off a moustache to aid her (and the audience) in the switch-up. It does however change the style of the production.
There is much emotional truth delivered in the production, and the performers take great pains to achieve tremendous depth to the many characters. Tanya Beckman has created an arc for her character that lifts Emilia into a central and heartbreakingly tragic character who pays the supreme price for her character flaw. (It made me recognize that Emilia — a foil to Othello who says of himself he “loves not wisely but too well” – also discovers she has loved (her husband) not wisely and perhaps like a modern “boss” wife too well in remaining silent.
Teresa Spencer as Othello’s lieutenant also excavates a depth of emotion that made Cassio revelatory for me. When Spencer collapses on the stairs holding head in hands in shame and repeats “Reputation,” I was convinced I was watching a military man, whose whole life was staked on honorable behavior and character, become unraveled. In an instant’s rash succumbing to inebriation and the character’s sudden change of personality, Spencer’s Cassio revealed his flaw: an alcoholic’s falling off the wagon with all the accompanying shame, despair and self-loathing.
There was so much good here that when there was a slight misstep to break the spell it was completely jarring. For instance, director and company might make sure actors know they are never offstage, so when someone swigs on a water bottle in plain sight (particularly during a death scene) it takes us out of the play.
Some of the music of Shakespeare hasn’t been fully incorporated throughout the cast. Cadencing and not breathing through iambic lines collapses the energy. The repetition of key words such as “jealousy,” “honest,” etc., which should play as musical motifs, sometimes got swallowed or thrown away.
Occasionally people picked up each other’s rhythm of delivery in such a way it took away from necessary contrast. In the first act Danielle A. Drakes as Othello seemed to rush things and fall into speed and vocal “bandwidth” of the others. This didn’t help serve Shakespeare’s clear intent on making part of the attraction of Desdemona for Othello be in his voice and ability as a storyteller. The chemistry of the central couple’s attraction did not convince. Drakes settled more in the second act and became more compelling, and this can surely deepen further in the run.
Audiences who seek out Shakespeare or even those who want to support strong female actors should hie themselves to the Capital Hill Arts Workshop to see this Othello.
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Othello. Written by William Shakespeare. Directed by Kelsey Mesa. Light Design by Katie McCreary. Costume Design by Elisabeth Haley Morton. Sound Design by Kristin Hamdy. Fight Choreography by Teresa Spencer. Stage Manager Haviland Atha-Simonton. With Tonya Beckman, Lise Bruneau, Liz Dangerfield, Danielle A . Drakes, Stephany Pesta, Teresa Spencer, and Julie Weir. Produced by Taffety Punk. Reviewed by Susan Galbraith
