‘The Tragedy of Othello’ @ Bishop Arts Theatre Center
—Martha Heimberg
Imagine that the new head coach for a pro football team in Dallas is a supremely qualified Black woman secretly married to the team’s even more famous white wide receiver—and that an overlooked member of the coaching staff is furiously plotting to bring everyone down. Stir in the modern weaponry of social media and you have a wildly explosive situation. Curious?
Franky D. Gonzalez, playwright-in-residence at Bishop Arts Theatre Center, has freely adapted Shakespeare’s 1603 play, The Tragedy of Othello, to include not only issues of power, jealousy and racial prejudice, but gender bias as well. That’s a lot of pressure to pump into two hours of theater, even including a 15-minute halftime. The adaptation, premiering at Bishop Arts, follows Shakespeare’s plot and characters ingeniously, cleverly shifting names along with gender. Desdemona, Othello’s wife in Shakespeare, becomes the gallant and faithful Desmond Mitchell (Jon Garrard), and a fateful handkerchief becomes a player’s glove used to arouse jealousy.
The Dallas team (the franchise is never actually named) introduces the passionate and fierce Imani Othello (Denise Lee) with great fanfare at a press conference. We also meet her new assistant coach, a young white woman named Michaela Cassio (Riley Turner), who proves level-headed and loyal. Othello’s appointment as head coach sets the play in motion by angering Jacob Iago (Jericho Thomas, who also directs), who expected his old coaching colleague to give him the coveted job.
Iago sets out to destroy Othello by spreading rumors of her husband’s infidelity, and stoking her jealousy to a murderous flashpoint.
Dallas audiences know Lee as both an award-winning actress and an earthy cabaret singer. Here, her tough-talking Othello urges the team on, telling them that winning is everything, cursing, and swearing by her “f***ing”plan to crush anything in the way of winning the national championship. But there’s more to this coach. She’s soft-spoken and alluring in early scenes with her husband, assuring him that her job of winning the game won’t interfere with her wifely knowledge that her star receiver has an old injury that could suddenly take him out of play.
Evil Iago tells Desmond’s racist father (Chris Abraham)—a major shareholder in the Dallas team—that his rich, talented white son is married to Othello. Dad explodes, and pays Iago to do whatever he can to separate his son from a Black woman, no matter who she is.
Thomas’s confident Iago sets about his malevolent plot with calm delight, sure that he can manipulate everything (and everyone) to his own ends. He assures Othello he is loyal and trustworhy—all the while working overtime to put everything in place for her professional and personal downfall. We watch Iago grab his phone and surreptitiously record the old man’s ugly racist words about his son’s beloved. Who knows how cunning Iago might employ such a vicious weapon—if only to push Othello into a rage?
Over and again, Iago uses the modern technologies of video recordings and social media to spread rumor and inflict misery. How is it that injured Desmond becomes available for a great player trade to Detroit? What must Othello do? Does the team come first? Soon we hear a rumor that the head coaching job in Detroit is up for grabs. An opportunist like Iago is right there to push his interests and undermine the honest love of Othello and Desmond.
Shifting the setting of a play about the destructive power of envy, ambition and jealousy—from the battlefield of war to the playing field of professional football—immediately puts Shakespeare’s characters in the here and now. The money and power at stake in pro football is a part of the sport’s attraction: there’s a game on at least three nights a week during the season. The language of winning at war and winning at football is already familiar. Throw a long bomb. Defend the quarterback. Destroy the offense. What does '“destroy” mean in the context of this play?
Mya Cockrell’s telling set design features sideline benches and a huge scoreboard that includes a list of characters with their names and changing affiliations—including who’s playing on who’s team. Becki McDonald’s revved-up sound design and Philip Vilar’s lighting intensify the building emotion.
Perhaps the most dramatic shift in this adaptation is the gender reversal, which adds a poignant layer of societal bias to the role of Imani Othello— a driven soul in Lee’s portrayal, passionate in her all-out commitment to show the world she can succeed in her job as well as any white man. Under constant public scrutiny for being “the first” (first Black woman head coach)to break through, she’s also the first to land on the shards of shattered glass.
As the plot gains speed toward its terrible ending, this ingenious adaptation of an old story is another tragic reminder, that while we’ve gained some yardage, our winning game for a just and egalitarian society is still on the field, outcome TBA.
WHEN: October 19-November 5, 2023
WHERE: BATC, 215 S. Tyler Street, Dallas
