First Look at IDIOT SAVANT

Rehearsals for IDIOT SAVANT are well underway - and we had a chance to join them this week for a sneak peek at the show. See Richard Foreman, Willem Dafoe, Alenka Kraigher and Elina Löwensohn in action as they prepare for the first performance on October 27.

Where it all began - OTHELLO Rehearsal Diary by Avery T. Willis

As we prepare for another weekend of OTHELLO performances - we'd like to share this excerpt from the Rehearsal Diary of Avery T. Willis from the first day of rehearsal on September 22, 2008.

Dr. Avery T. Willis has collaborated with Peter Sellars as an assistant director and dramaturg since 2006.

September 22, 2008 | In medias res

Our first day digesting this play called Othello. As we navigate the text together during this two-week workshop, we begin to create a collective re-imagining of this highly fraught, deeply feared, and misunderstood text. As each actor begins to absorb the text with Peter’s probing guidance, there is a palpable sense that this particular group at this particular time has the skills and the endurance to actually reclaim Othello from those who still fear black sexuality and still feel that blackness is “other”. A new vision of the world of the play emerges, based on a democratic ideal, like the LAByrinth company itself, in which every voice is counted, and every soul, as Cassio says, is in line to be saved.

In media res. It is the deepest part of night, the birds are strangely awake. A new crisis overseas: the Turkish fleet is bearing fast on Rhodes or could it be Cyprus. Iago gumes with a fresh professional and personal wound. The President paces in the Situation Room, the press gathers outside for an emergency Press Conference. The Staff frantically prepares briefings, others seek out the General. The General is in bed trying to enjoy one uninterrupted night of love with his new wife, a Senator’s daughter. The General is the General now but back in the day he was a White House intern just like Iago and Cassio and Montano. Cassio became a Navy logistician, Iago followed Othello into a military career, and Montano got herself posted to occupied Cyprus. There are no secrets, their lives are so intertwined that they love and hate each other simultaneously. Desdemona enters this world of entangled friends and lovers determined to resurrect love as a heavenly union between two people. But, as she discovers tragically: people are cruelest to the ones they love the most.

Click here to read the full Rehearsal Diary.

OTHELLO Rehearsal Diary © Avery T. Willis and Wiener Festwochen 2009

New Philip Seymour Hoffmam Interview

Check out this extended video interview with Philip Seymour Hoffman discussing playing Iago in our current production of OTHELLO.

Peter Sellars’s Artistic Process by Barry Edelstein

Barry Edelstein directs the Public Theater's Shakespeare Initiative.
Pictured at left: John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman in OTHELLO. Photo by Armin Bardel.

Peter Sellars's reputation for artistic experiment precedes his arrival at the Public with his first Shakespeare in fifteen years. The impulse behind this production, Sellars has written, was a simple but powerful question about the play: “Can we make a production of Othello that sheds the trappings of our forebears’ racial hierarchies and assumptions and that addresses the realities and possibilities of the Obama generation in a new century?”

Sellars's answer is onstage. But here’s another question: How did he arrive at this answer? I've been involved with the production for over a year. Some selected moments from it offer insights into Sellars’s creative process:

1. Don’t take everything at face value.

Those of us who work on Shakespeare in the mainstream American tradi­tion take as our first principle that Shakespeare’s characters say what they mean and mean what they say. There’s no subtext in Shakespeare, the thinking goes. Everything’s in the words themselves, and no one communicates between the lines.

Peter Sellars asks, simply, “Are you sure about that?”

What if Iago’s famous set-piece about “good name in man and woman” being “the immediate jewel of their souls” is not merely some nostrum whose banality is meant as a feint to keep Othello off balance—another step in a grand, premeditated manipula­tion—but is instead a cry from Iago’s heart? What if “my good name” that’s been “filched” from him is in fact not some hypothetical, not some rhetori­cal flourish, but is instead, well, his own good name? He’s already said that he suspects Othello of sleeping with his wife Emilia. What if he can’t bring himself to confront his friend with that suspicion? What if the only way he can talk about it is in code? What if the words Iago says here are dense with implications beyond what they seem to mean on their surface? For Sellars, there’s subtext, insinuation, half-truth, misdirection, and hidden meaning everywhere.


2. On the other hand, don’t take refuge in irony.

Another article of faith in mainstream Shakespearean acting is that you can’t get more than a line or two in these texts without running into something ironic, some surprising witticism intended to keep emotion at a distance.

Sellars isn’t interested in irony. He distrusts it, or, more accurately, he’s more interested in what lurks behind it than in the thing itself.

Consider Othello, examining Desdemona’s hand after concluding to his agony that it’s betrayed him by fondling Cassio, and concluding it “a good hand, a frank one.” Actors typically render those six monosyl­lables through clenched teeth and under arched brows. Not here. Sellars has asked his Othello to say the words with utter earnestness, as if Desdemona’s hand is indeed to him both good and frank: truthful, honest, and straightforward. The result is that Othello is plunged directly into the dilemma that tortures him: he believes his wife’s hand to be true, but he can’t avoid the certain knowledge that it is also false. The moment is devastating, a double-bind of ecstatic pain, of wretched tenderness. And all because Sellars insists on directness and an eschewal of irony, witticism, and alienating distance.


3. The lines you feel like cutting are actually the center of your production.

The typical process of cutting Shakespeare for production involves excising material that seems, to the director's entirely subjective eye, repetitive, hopelessly abstruse, or, in some cases, an obstacle to the smooth deployment of some clever overarching “concept.”

Sellars’s approach, however, is different, and typically idiosyncratic.

For Sellars, the material in the text that seems most problematic is the material that bears deepest scrutiny. Its problematic nature is to him an indication of precisely why it’s so important, because the assumptions that make a passage seem dispens­able are to him what theater exists to question in the first place. Does a given line seem incomprehensible? Then we must ask what about our language has changed in 400 years that makes the line hard for us to understand. Does a sequence seem to violate some set of norms that obtain in our theater or our society? Then it is those norms that should be cross-examined, and not the sequence.

Thus the two Clown scenes in Othello, by all usual accounts cuttable comic-relief throwaways whose Jacobean puns are dead to modern ears and probably weren’t all that funny anyway, are here not excised but instead made central to Sellars’s reading of the text. Specifically, they shed important light on the female characters in the play, as Sellars has re-assigned the Clown’s lines to the composite character of Bianca Montano. What, in the rare productions that don’t cut it, is mere lifeless banter between Desdemona and some unknown, inexplicable buffoon, becomes in this production an intense and surprisingly intimate conversation between two women. Their sororal bond, forged in the face of the irrational behaviors of their respective men, becomes one of the few moral certainties in a play full of deception, subterfuge, and malign personal attack.

CLICK HERE to read the full article, "Making a New OTHELLO".

OTHELLO Video Preview

OTHELLO preview featuring interviews with Peter Sellars, Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz. This video is a preview of a longer video interview series we will be releasing shortly. Stay tuned!