Less auteur- than actor-driven and far more powerful is Boston Theatre Works’ Othello (at the BCA Plaza Theatre through March 11). Director Jason Slavick gets out of the way of a quartet of powerhouse performers whose ability is such that one hardly minds the amateurs in the cast. The spare, intense staging boils down (or up) to a showdown between Jonathan Epstein’s alternately bullying and brooding villain of an Iago and Tony Molina’s thunderous yet childlike Othello. Unlike many modern African-American actors, Molina does not shy from the arguably racist savagery Shakespeare wrote into the part but ameliorates it with a sensual yearning for Desdemona that the old warrior can barely resist. These two are abetted by the defenselessly sincere Desdemona of Susanna Apgar and the eruptible Emilia of Elizabeth Aspenlieder. All four hail from Lenox-based Shakespeare & Company, which knows its way around the Bard, and their combined forces are enough to beat back the irritating eye pops and old-age mannerisms of some of the supporting players.
Not that the acting style favored by the principals is subtle; these folks wrap their capable arms and well-trained larynxes around the primal feelings in Othello and make the tragedy desperately real rather than declamatory. And neither does the staging shy from the black-comic irony in Iago’s increasingly flamboyant effort to push his gullible military master into the open arms of “the green-ey’d monster which doth mock/The meat it feeds on.” Indeed, there is no little mockery in the manipulations of Epstein’s Iago, and Molina’s Othello takes the bait with an open mouth.
The cast of this chamber Othello numbers nine, with supporting players doubling in minor roles in the manner of S&C’s Bare Bard productions. (There has not, in the manner of those stagings, been significant paring of the script, however.) Epstein, coming and going among the revolvable blood-red panels of Zeynep Bakkal’s set and slamming them as he goes (at least once on the amusingly hapless Roderigo of Michael McKeogh), uses the scenery to punctuate his character’s calculated explosiveness, which combined with alternately heavy-handed and craftsmanlike manipulation keeps his marks off balance and makes him deadly. A lot of the action takes place atop an onyx-colored platform center stage that serves as both a pedestal for Desdemona and a square barely big enough to hold this larger-than-life Iago and Othello, who face off there, their imposing bodies but inches apart, at intermission. (There is an interesting undercurrent of homosexuality in Epstein’s Iago, who never stops poking, prodding, or pushing the men but stiffens visibly when touched by a woman.)
There are moments when I might have preferred this duel to the death to have been slyer, less overt. The perverse villainy of Epstein’s Iago is so studied that you don’t know whether to hold him in awe or his suckers in contempt. But in the end, between Apgar’s initially affectless Desdemona’s serene yet pained (and ultimately panicky) self-sacrifice and the anguish Molina brings to Othello’s destruction of the thing he so urgently loves, the BTW production, simple yet brutal, brought me to tears. The old pity and terror prescribed by Aristotle: they’re here.
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