Othello with the Boise Bard Players

Or: Trajectory

Taylor Hawker’s Iago goes about his villainy like a freight train. Energetic, cheerfully unstoppable he ploughs through all obstacles, his honest face fixed, his lines fast and voluble. No one can withstand his desires and earnest force, not his drinking buddy Rodrigo (Declan Kemp) nor his trusting superior Cassio (David Cowan) nor his commander and friend, the heroic Moor of Venice, Othello (John Wicks). We, the audience ourselves, are shunted smoothly down the track of his designs. Only occasionally in his wide eyes and fallen grin, do we see the sparks and grinding of iron wheels.

Set in the round in the basement of Meriden’s Masonic Lodge, the Boise Bard player’s Othello is traditionally barebones as one would like, though there are a few extra frills that might have been trimmed off. The, admittedly lovely, piano music pipped in for retrospective monologues would not be out of place in the soft-focused moments of a well-made soap opera. But we’re not in a soap opera, we’re in Othello, a high stakes thriller of murder, passion and deceit (so maybe more like a soap opera then I first thought.)  There are other moments that caused at least this pair of eyebrows to quirk. Props to the acting vigor of Shana Tavares as the unfortunate Montano, gamely bleeding to death in a meeting that, for her, could have been a missive, or the perhaps unintentionally but welcomely comedic turn of Ludovico (Matthew Melton), a diplomat utterly unprepared for the torment he has walked in to.

Tinkling ivories aside, the tragedy remains sharp as ever. Desdemona (Dana Roehr) is all sweetness and cherry-pie, stouthearted and true but no dainty waif when the world comes to take bites out of her. Her screams of frustration as her husband’s cruelty, and her tears of desperation, cut to the heart. Roehr’s performance is one of utmost honesty. Emilia (Tiara Thompson) is a tragedy of a different kind. Sharp and smiling, Emilia is tender with her employer (though the class divide between them, whose spanning might have saved Desdemona’s life, is subtly highlighted), but when the chips are in, Thompson strikes with edged words and acidic attention. But even more than the excellent tools Shakespeare providers her with, Thompson holds up a tricky facet of Emilia’s life in the half sexy half, spiteful game she plays with Iago, whose alarming snipes come off, in her own sight and substance as one of those cookie marriage quirks, and that we see luminescent and writhing red flags. You can be smart and driven and sure as anyone and still be betrayed by those closest inside your guard.

And what of Othello, our eponymous, wife-killing hero? If Iago is a freight train, Wicks makes his Othello a V-2 Rocket, sleek and fiery, meant for greater things but flipped to devastating ends. The danger of the part for an actor, one dear reader that I have seen mire a grand Othello before, is bluster and cold military barring. Wicks neatly sidesteps this potential pitfall. His general is rizz personified; warm and steady, the kind of leader, one imagines, who captures the hearts of his troops, to whom a St. Crispian Day speech would come as easy as winking. His sternness is tempered with gentility, his love with playfulness, his place as a Black man in a hostile white society maintained with complete unflappability. Until of course, fatally, he is flapped.

The metaphor of early space objects serves well as Wicks shows us an Othello unmoored by the seemingly irrefutable evidence of his wife’s dishonesty, the character (but not the actor) floating, lost, unmoored, before the fire of his rage is kindled and he strikes out for devastation. It is in those moments before, dangerous and undecided when Wicks forces Iago off his iron rails, his inevitable victory, and allows Hawker to scramble and cobble together lies forged in the fires of duress. There comes a moment spread on the floor, when Wicks and Hawker have locked eyes, and electricity sings around them. Their characters are for once on the level: the falling angel and the rising fiend.