Molly Osborne

Shakespeare’s leanest tragedy gets a starry, headlong production that embraces the action but misses the mystery.Just moments earlier, he was an infatuated new husband, and she his “gentle love.” Now, in Act III, Scene 3 of “Othello,” he vows to kill her.What has happened? Why does Othello, the great Black general, the savior of Venice in a war with the Ottomans, resolve to murder Desdemona, the pearl of the white aristocracy he has won at great risk?The scene in which this strange alteration occurs is one of the most gripping, baffling episodes in Shakespeare, and it remains so in the starry Broadway revival of “Othello” that opened on Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.We can be grateful for that — and yet, in Denzel Washington’s commanding performance, what’s especially gripping is perhaps too baffling. As in his many movies, he leads with action, giving us a general whose psychology is as obscure to us as it is to him. Speaking very fast, with a slight mid-Atlantic accent, and stiffened by his ramrod military bearing, he betrays little evidence of the sorrows and injuries that moved Desdemona when he wooed her. Speed and decisiveness (“to be once in doubt is once to be resolved”) seem to matter more than emotion.Usually the obscure one is Othello’s ensign, Iago. Though Shakespeare provides many possible reasons he might have wanted to poison his commander with lies about Desdemona, awakening the famous green-eyed monster of jealousy, we are typically still in the dark at the end, when the cur is sent to his punishment. “I am not what I am” is his paradoxical, irreducible credo. Then what is he?Yet in a fascinating reversal, this “Othello” offers an Iago far more legible than his master. Jake Gyllenhaal’s eely take, with a physical wiggle to match his moral one, is a little bit mad scientist, a little bit Travis Bickle. His blue eyes pierce the atmospheric murk as he tracks all possible routes to his goal, like a rat in a maze, in the process allowing us to see how a twisted man thinks. He is a calculator of grievance; havoc is the carefully tabulated result. He adds up.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More