Three highly-trained American Special Forces soldiers return home from the war zone. Their newly-promoted leader—tormented by symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), issues of racial inferiority, and paranoid delusions of his bride’s infidelity—is driven to insanity, with deadly consequences for all.
At first glance, this sounds like the synopsis for the latest war crimes flick playing at your local cinema. It’s doubtful the name Shakespeare would come to mind, or that audiences would recognize the tragic plight of Othello in this context. But this is how director Tiger Reel adapts the Shakespearean tragedy, opening Friday in a co-production between Reel’s Action!
Theatre Company and the Production Company, at the Lex.
A veteran director of over 15 years (he co-directed John Paul Karliak’s solo comedy Donna/Madonna, which is currently running at the Lounge), Reel’s revamping of classic texts — particularly Shakespeare’s — has become something of a trademark for him. Even when he isn’t in the director’s chair, he sometimes treads the boards as a member of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, whose signature piece The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged) continues to play all over the world. One would think that creating a streamlined, 90-minute, modern-day version of Othello with only seven actors would require quite the writing skills, but Reel is quick to point out that the scissors are mightier than the pen.
“I don’t have much of a writing background, per se. My process is whenever I get a play, particularly a really well-known one like Othello, I try as best I can to act like I just got it in the mail. With computers, it’s gotten much easier to just get rid of any directions and settings, and read it with fresh eyes. Then I can really see what images come to mind and what images play with the text. This story is three soldiers coming back from a war and for some reason, they can’t seem to leave the violence behind. Ideas about post-traumatic stress syndrome immediately came into my mind.”
For Reel, re-setting and adapting the characters in Shakespeare’s pieces is not a gimmick. The idea is not to bend the story and the people to fit the time and place, but to take what’s organic in the text and bring it forward. “Instead of going to Cyprus to battle the Turks for Italy, the whole battle has been turned into a sort of night raid, similar to our Special Forces team taking out Bin Laden. It’s that type of monumental event that results in Othello getting promoted to his position. Cyprus has been turned into a military base in Ft. Cyprus, Florida. In a contemporary context, it makes no sense that Desdemona would go to a battlefield to be with Othello and live with him. Which lends itself to this whole idea of soldiers coming home to the States and bringing that violence from abroad back with them, which is a story that we’re hearing a lot of these days.”
Through this modernization, Reel has also used contemporary elements to navigate around directorial choices and pitfalls he often associates with typical productions of Othello. “One of the traps of it always seems to be that Othello seems to be duped rather easily. He doesn’t appear to be listening to anyone but Iago. He kills his wife over some pretty paltry evidence. A lot of productions already have Othello kind of bent at the beginning, and Desdemona already a doormat. To me that’s not terribly interesting, because you’re playing the end before you get to it. So I thought to myself, ‘If I set this in a modern military setting, what are the political and social issues that go along with that?’ Immediately torture, interrogation, and CIA black sites factored in. What if Iago was one of these interrogators?”
So by simply repositioning Iago with a more concrete, recognizable skill set, Reel’s scenario lends more credibility to the plot. “Iago is the lead interrogator for Othello and Cassio’s Delta Force/Special Ops team, so he knows how to get inside people’s heads, he knows how to get people to say things and understands human nature to a greater extent than anybody else in the play does. He’s also able to compartmentalize that part of himself, so when he’s around other people, no one thinks of him in that light. He is always referred to as ‘Honest Iago’ and no one thinks he’s responsible for any of this until the very end. Also, when he comes to Othello, he does it very cleverly. He doesn’t say ‘Hey man, look out for your wife! She’s cheating on you!’ He makes Othello beg for the information. So the way we’ve set it up, Othello has no reason to doubt Iago. Iago has never lied to him, and he’s never been wrong about anyone. In fact, he’s almost single-handedly been responsible for every piece of useful intelligence and success they’ve had out in the field.”
Another element of Othello’s character that contemporary audiences could have trouble relating to are the fits of insanity and rage that he experiences. Presuming psychotic episodes aren’t commonplace for the typical theater audience, Reel introduces the element of post-traumatic stress as a reasonable explanation for the title character’s fragile mindset.
“In the text, Shakespeare had it written that Othello has these sort of epileptic fits. We’re sort of morphing that into PTSD. So you have Iago really getting into Othello’s head and manipulating him to the point where he can actually make these seizures happen just by talking to him. It’s not quite to the degree where you mention the Queen of Spades and your subject goes and kills the President, but it’s to the extent that Iago can weaponize Othello and focus his cross hairs by the end of Act One, and the second act is basically Othello being used as a guided missile towards Desdemona.”
Despite what seems like a rather drastic overhaul to the original work, Reel is adamant that the language is preserved in order to stay true to the piece itself. “Other than cutting it down to 90 minutes, Shakespeare’s original text remains intact. We changed Desdemona’s father to her mother, who is a Michele Bachmann-esque character, so we had to tweak the gender pronouns here and there, but that’s about it. I feel like if I have to change the text too much to make something fit, then that’s not really the story.”
Of course, when having a discourse about Shakespeare’s doomed Moor, race must factor in. For Reel, this production is a chance to reflect the way he feels racism exists in America today. “In Shakespeare’s script, there only seems to be a couple of characters that are outwardly racist in what they say. At one point Iago says ‘The old black ram is tupping your white ewe’ to Desdemona’s Father—or in this case, Mother—but that seems pretty calculated to me, like he’s trying to get a rise out of her parent, who probably is racist. With this piece I wanted to address the low-grade racism we all still carry around with us. Desdemona’s mother refers to Othello as ‘that which she did fear to look upon’ and there’s another reference to Othello as an ‘it’ rather than a person. Today, that’s a bit more subtle than calling someone the ‘N-word’, but it’s still dehumanizing. He’s also accused of using witchcraft to win over Desdemona, which is sort of like the Tea Party using a picture of Obama with a bone through his nose and saying ‘Oh no, that’s about healthcare and calling him a witch doctor’ when we all know exactly what they’re saying and why they chose that imagery.”
“Today you hear people all the time saying things like ‘So this black guy walked into the store’ instead of just ‘So this guy walked into the store’ and you have to wonder in what way does the person’s race factor into the story? Othello is often referred to as ‘Black Othello’, as a means to make him feel ostracized, even though he rises up in the ranks. It’s very apparent that he is an outsider and does not feel a part of their world, despite his title. And everybody treats him a little differently than anybody else, along with the fact that he’s risen so highly in the ranks.” African Americans are rare in the current military command structure, particularly in Special Forces, notes Reel. “We can all point out Colin Powell, but we need to recognize that he really is the exception to the rule. There’s a large amount of African American men and women in the US military, but there’s very few represented in the command structure.”
When asked about what he feels the benefits are to updating Shakespeare’s work and steering away from the usual tights and high collars, Reel is quick to point out that it’s people’s concepts of “Shakespearean” that need to be updated.
“If somebody asks me if I’m going a Shakespeare play ‘traditionally’, I don’t think they understand what traditional really means. They usually mean some vague Elizabethan type of dress. If they asked you if you were doing a traditional version of Julius Caesar, they would probably mean togas, even though originally they performed Julius Caesar in Elizabethan dress. They never mean ‘Are you doing it outside with no lights, no set, with boys playing girls, and the groundlings talking back?’. I have done Shakespeare as that type of period piece. But my feeling is that except for those people who insist on Shakespeare being set in its ‘original’ period, it usually is an impediment to the audience getting to the story. If an actor comes out wearing pumpkin pants and a big feather in a hat, you have to leave in all of the big speeches explaining to you that ‘This man is a general’. Whereas if you just put him in a US general’s uniform, not only can you cut out most of that text, but you don’t have that barrier with the audience, who can’t see past the pumpkin pants. In terms of social status, as Americans we don’t really understand where someone like a duke falls in the societal structure. But we know what a general is. My feeling has always been that it’s much easier to reach your audience if you set the story in a social context that that they are familiar with.”
Going back to the notion of how this contemporary war-time setting is reminiscent of many popular films, Reel states that he derives much of his inspiration for settings from popular films, which he feels only helps makes the material more accessible to the audience. “I think movies are a great educational resource for people nowadays. Films like The Hurt Locker have familiarized us to a certain extent with war imagery, PTSD, and that type of environment. I think it’s always better to have the audience use the toolbox that they come in with, rather than spend 30-45 minutes having to educate them on where this story takes place.”
It seems that for Reel, the effort of adapting and contextualizing Shakespeare for contemporary American audiences is a matter of immersion rather than accessibility. He is not taking Shakespeare “down to our level” as some traditionalists might suggest, but rather demonstrating to us what Shakespeare’s work truly is — timeless.
Othello, produced by the Production Company. Opens July 15. Thurs.-Sat. 8 pm. Through Aug. 20. Tickets: $25. Lex Theatre, 6760 Lexington Avenue, Hollywood, CA. www.theprodco.com or 1-800-838-3006.
