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WINDY CITY TIMES
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Shakespeare's Othello In Mask
2006-11-22
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This article shared 2188 times since Wed Nov 22, 2006
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Playwright: William Shakespeare
At: Polarity Ensemble Theatre at the Side Project, 1437 W. Jarvis
Phone: 847-475-1139; $20
Runs through: Dec. 10
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
The goal of the Polarity Ensemble at its inception in 2004 was to explore the roots of theatre in Dionysic worship and, in this, its third full production, one can see traces of classic Greek performance as we imagine it. There's also Kabuki, Brechtian Epic Theatre and something that could be dubbed Tragedia Dell'Arte. But the chief motif is that of Antonin Artaud's bounce-off-the-walls-and-scream-in-agony Theatre of Cruelty ( a popular influence in American artistic circles during the 1960s, for those taking notes ) .
As we enter, we see the actors—uniformed in blue jeans, T-shirts, athletic shoes and tattoos later augmented by gallons of sweat—preparing for their evening's tasks, the props that they will presumably employ laid out on a table likewise in open view. But when they don Jessica Pribble's masks—meant to identify characters played by different actors in the course of the play—we discover that the Moor has been assigned a horned and hook-nosed devil's leer, while Iago wears a ram's visage ( sheep's clothing for a wolf? ) . Desdemona's face is bare, save for a coat of geisha-white, while the other personnel wear generic variations on carnival gear, the beaks on the avian models muffling the speakers' voices—except when they are declaiming at a volume better suited to an attic amphitheater on an Athenian hillside than to the tiny Side Project black box.
But the scholarly value of this sort of adrenaline-fueled exercise has diminished since the heyday of the Living Theatre—or the Wooster Group, for that matter. Producer Abigail Trabue and director Zack Brenner, in their efforts to 'incorporate a variety of international techniques' into their show—because, they claim, Othello is about 'a clash in foreign identities' as well as about 'what goes skin deep'—have instead created a hodgepodge of exotic poses grounded in a plethora of nebulous precepts no less incoherent for the intensity of their execution by a band of dedicated players. These, however intriguing academically, are not enough by themselves to guarantee the attention of audiences expected to sit for two-and-a-half hours on hard chairs in a cold room.
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This article shared 2188 times since Wed Nov 22, 2006
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