Theatre Gigante opens its season by reprising its 2004 theater-dance hybrid, My Dear Othello. Inspired by Noh drama and featuring painted panels by the late Schomer Lichtner, the ornately stylized production centers on the final moments of Shakespeare’s classic story of deception and jealousy played out to their tragic conclusions.
Marion Clendenen-Acosta’s costumes have roots in both ballet and the Japanese stage. All fabrics are luxurious yet also suggestive of each character’s social station. Seth Warren-Crow’s sound design is likewise effective; Japanese influence is strong, and atonal passages effectively suggest the extreme human conflict.
This telling of the story features only the four principals of Shakespeare’s tragedy: Othello (Michael Stebbins), Desdemona (Isabelle Kralj), Iago (Tom Reed) and Emilia (Janet Lilly). Character dynamics are surreal and engaging in Kralj and Mark Anderson’s script. Dialogue frequently overlaps, creating a musical effect, and monologue prevails, highlighting the fundamental separateness of minds consumed by envy and self-interest.
Stebbins’ Othello is a hero bound by formality and alienation in a society that values him for his battle prowess but doesn’t accept or trust him. In a well-chosen piece of repeated choreography he claps sardonically, first scoffing at Desdemona’s assurances of innocence and later at his own rage-driven foolishness. Kralj is sweet and pure in the role of his wife; her extensive ballet experience is evident in graceful, birdlike movement. As Emilia, Lilly also delivers a ballerina’s expertise but with a more grounded, cynical ethos. Sexism and racism are the twin evils driving the story’s conflict, and Emilia’s discourse on the former is hard hitting. Reed is masterful as the villain, Iago, catalyzed by personal rejection to frenetically manipulate everyone else.
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My Dear Othello ’s greatest strength is its ability to prompt reflection on the nature of jealousy through means stylized enough to avoid blind emotionality. The format perfectly serves objective consideration of a phenomenon that couldn’t be further from objectivity.
The show runs through Nov. 8 at UW-Milwaukee’s Kenilworth Studio 508, 1925 E. Kenilworth Place. For tickets, call 800-838-3006 or visit theatregigante.org.
