Waiting for Othello: Denzel Washington Returns to Broadway
Denzel Washington as Othello and Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago. Photo credit: Julieta Cervantes
In 1977, a 20-year-old Fordham senior named Denzel Washington got cast as Othello in the spring show. He’d had one big role at Fordham, as a junior playing the title character in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. “I thought I was supposed to be mean and act serious,” he said of his performance decades later on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I would go out and peek and look at the audience, you know, count [the people], see if my mom was out there.”
To prepare for Othello, he went down the street from Fordham Lincoln Center to the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts and listened to Laurence Olivier’s performance. It was a revelation. “Oh my Lord,” he told Colbert’s audience. “I was like, ‘OK, I’ll sing it like this and make it happen.’”
Director David Davis would go on to describe working with the young Washington on Othello as his “most memorable time” at Fordham—“he was the most pure, natural acting talent.” Professor Robert Stone, who played Desdemona’s father Brabantio and had performed on Broadway in multiple shows, including Paul Robeson and Uta Hagen’s Othello, likewise said that the young Washington’s Othello actually exceeded Robeson’s: “He has something which even Robeson didn’t have…not only beauty but love, hatred, majesty, violence.”
Denzel Washington in Fordham’s 1977 production of “Emperor Jones.” Photo courtesy of Fordham University
Nearly half a century, Washington is back in New York playing Othello again, this time on Broadway, with Jake Gyllenhaal as his Iago, in a production that opened on Sunday. It’s already a smash hit, grossing a box office record-breaking $2.8 million in one week of previews alone. On the afternoon I saw it, the audience was fully in the play’s thrall. They gasped at every twist and turn in the plot like children hearing a great story around a campfire.
And yet Washington and the production, directed in a remarkably bland way by Tony winner Kenny Leon, seem likely to receive few of the 1977 production’s accolades. As Iago Jake Gyllenhaal, veins in his neck looking ready to burst out of his skin, is a furious being of compressed rage, manipulating everyone at every turn to bring down Othello while insisting to us that he’s actually not a bad guy. The part is truly one of Shakespeare’s greatest, and Gyllenhaal sinks his teeth fully into it.
But Washington’s performance as Othello has none of that love, hatred, majesty, or even violence of his youth. He plays Othello as a kind of dopey old man, Lear-like almost, but without any fire in his belly. As Iago’s treacherous implications about Desdemona start to take hold in Othello, Washington’s rage has a flat impotence to it, and the emotional weight of a worn-out whoopee cushion.
Othello is not an easy character to play. Unlike most of Shakespeare’s title characters, he is afforded no real moment or soliloquy of his own, no chance to think through his feelings, make choices, or connect with the audience. At one delightful moment after Iago leaves the stage, Othello seems to be ramping up into such a space. Suddenly Iago comes back, interrupting him and dispelling the moment entirely. This is in truth his play, not Othello’s.
And yet by leaning into the pathetic quality of the character from the start, establishing Othello as a kind of bumbling mush-mouthed figure who isn’t quite smart or cultured enough to hang with Desdemona’s father or Othello’s boss the Duke, Washington affords himself nowhere to go as the play goes on. We feel nothing for him but a growing disgust as Iago manipulates him further and further. And he seems to feel nothing himself, either. Grief, rage, fury all elude Washington in this performance, even after Othello discovers the truth. His death scene, as conceived by Leon, is strangely (and hilariously) reminiscent of one of Monty Python’s most famous sketches.
The show reminds me of another Python sketch, as well. While it’s true that Othello is raking in the bucks, it’s doing so by charging outrageous prices. “Gross” takes on a whole other meaning when center orchestra seats as far back as row M are going for $921 from the box office. When New York Post columnist Johnny Oleksinski called the show out for this, he was uninvited from the press pass he would normally be afforded to do his review. (Oleksinksi saw the show anyway. He dubbed it “one slooow-thello.”)
Appalling prices are not just a problem at Othello. George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck is charging $799 for Row P of the orchestra. Andrew Scott’s one-man Vanya is going for $449 a pop at the Lucille Lortel off-Broadway, while the back row of the orchestra at BAM’s off-Broadway Streetcar starring Paul Mescal, also a row M, is $335. Producers may represent this as great for Broadway as a whole, and a necessity for shows that want to lure high-profile stars. (Given the show’s total lack of scenery, stagecraft, sound design, or meaningful costumes, one wonders f just how much of the budget actually went to Washington and Gyllenhaal.). But really what we’re seeing here is the latest example of the city’s seemingly never-ending surge of inequity, normal people pushed out in favor of the super-rich and the ultra-connected, and the can-do shows and actors who are the beating heart of Broadway displaced in favor of the theatrical equivalent of a Marvel summer tentpole: celebrity-stuffed, and emotionless.
Meanwhile these prices will only inspire higher seat prices across the board, as has been the case so many times before, making it that much harder for people to come see shows. A rising tide does not lift all boats when it’s a tsunami. And producers like these aren’t folks who love Broadway. They’re vulture capitalists trying to strip mine it as they bury it.
I’m sure many in the Othello audience would declare themselves progressives who voted for Kamala Harris and despise Donald Trump. And yet it was impossible to sit watching that production and not feel like a witness to exactly the reality the president and his allies aspire to, decadent, obsequious, and flatulent in equal measure. Who cares if it’s a terrible show, or that its tickets were insanely expensive, or that there’s a guy sleeping in a box outside? We got to see Denzel and Jake.
At the intermission of the show I attended, two men apparently got in a shoving match over the water fountain. That, too, alongside the publicists’ attempts to silence a critic asking legitimate questions about the future of theater as an art form while it is being descended upon by producers cum vulture capitalists, feels far more of the moment than many in the audience, and perhaps its lead actors as well, might be comfortable with acknowledging. Truly, on every level, “Come and see the violence inherent in the system.”
Before I went to see Othello, I reached out to Fordham’s library and theater departments, wondering if they might have filmed that 1977 production so that I might watch the young Washington work. I imagined having the chance to put a worn VHS tape into some very old and creaky VCR, perhaps “Denzel Othello” written in marker on the paper strip stuck to the side. From out of a shaky picture with occasional bars of static he would emerge, , this lanky kid, a king in the making.
But there was no trace of the 1977 production to be found, beyond the words of those who saw it. And sadly, there is little trace to be found on Broadway, either.
