In 2018, the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park program produced what some might call a quintessentially Shakespearean Othello. Under the direction of Ruben Santiago-Hudson, this production was staged simply, with Elizabethan costumes and stone arches, and followed the play’s familiar trajectory of the titular character’s betrayal and decline into madness at the hands of the person he trusts most. Othello, played by Chukwudi Iwuji, was described by critics as “compactly handsome… with an intellectual nimbleness and romantic mien,” and was countered by the “formidable charisma and wonderfully naturalistic delivery” of Corey Stoll in the role of Iago. One might think that two such performances do great credit to the work Shakespeare wrote, in which Desdemona’s “heart [is] subdued / even to the very quality of” Othello because of his “mind… his honours and most valiant parts,” and in which Iago himself confesses that, despite his hatred of Othello, he must “show out a flag and sign of love” while Othello leads the war against the Turkish army before Iago can begin to wreak his revenge against him (1.3.251-254, 1.1.151-154).

However, the production was met with cold reception by several notable critics, who said that, compared to other twenty-first century productions of Othello that have seized upon the play’s “searing contemporary relevance,” this one felt “stodgy and dull.” The stumbling block for these critics appeared to be the appeal of Corey Stoll's Iago. Hollywood Reporter critic Frank Schek opens his review with wonder at the audience’s “rolling laughter… [at] Corey Stoll’s rollicking portrayal of the villainous Iago,” and notes that Stoll’s performance is the “most unorthodox aspect” of an otherwise “slavishly traditional staging” of the play in seventeenth-century dress. Schek later confides that, compared to an off-Broadway production of Othello directed by Sam Gold in 2016, this one seems to have “little reason for being.” This sentiment is echoed by Ben Brantley of the New York Times, who asserts that Stoll “is not quite the evil genius that Iago must be.” For Brantley, Gold’s production, set in a twenty-first-century military bunker, is the more successful because it highlights the fact that, in “Shakespeare’s taut portrait of lives razed by jealousy… everything that occurs is so irrevocably inevitable… the cause — to use a word Othello memorably repeats — lies in the precisely defined personalities of everyone who inhabits the play’s closed universe.” As such, Gold’s Iago, played by Daniel Craig, who “lends Iago a disarming, virile charm, through which only [the audience] can glimpse [his] contempt and the calculation,” embodies the sociopathic qualities necessary to propel the play to its tragic conclusion. Brantley sees Stoll’s Iago, on the other hand, “less as a supersmart psychopath than a riled-up good old boy.” As I see it, Santiago-Hudson and Gold’s respective productions illustrate two schools of thought for interpretations of Othello. In the former, neither the audience nor the other characters are ever completely sure about what Iago’s true intentions are until Othello finally murders his wife; whereas Gold’s production allows the audience to see through Iago’s deception and identifies him as the villain from the very beginning.

Gold’s production highlights a recent trend towards didacticism in contemporary theater, in which theaters produce works that highlight social issues and political topics in ways that make a production’s stance on a topic unambiguously clear to the audience. This tradition is thought to have gotten its start from Bertold Brecht’s exercises in epic theatre and audience alienation in the early twentieth-century (Verfremdungseffekt). Brecht was interested in the theater’s “potential for moral instruction,” and sought to move the theater away from producing work that was solely created for the audience’s entertainment in favor of work that was “epic, instructive [and] didactic.” One of the ways in which Brecht made theater ‘instructive’ was by creating emotional distance between the audience and the events depicted in an artistic work so that the audience would not get swept away by their feelings about the piece. This, in turn, created opportunities for the audience “to understand [the work’s] causes” and express their opinions on the subject. The objectivity Brecht emphasized in theater had a widespread impact, particularly on the political theater movements that began to gain traction after World War II, and people began to view the theater as a forum for interrogating society, rather than a venue for entertainment. Brecht’s work continues to exert its influence on the way theater artists and audiences alike engage with theater today.

The didactic impulses of the contemporary theater are, in many ways, antithetical to Shakespeare’s own approach to his plays, as Shakespeare is set apart from other dramatists by the way that he invites his audience to engage with the questions his plays pose to them. While his contemporaries were more so concerned with “how audiences and actors should behave” and how dramatic work could serve as an active “tool of metanoia” for the public while they were in the theater, Shell argues that “Shakespeare was not in the business of exhorting his hearers, he depicts instances of virtue and vice while deliberately, even ostentatiously, leaving the rest to inference.” For Shakespeare, the spiritual and moral transformation of his audience did not occur while they were watching a play, but as a result of their thoughts as they left the theater to go home.

One of the greatest challenges modern theatre companies face in mounting a production of Othello is determining the motivation behind Iago’s apparent “motiveless malignity.” To an audience today, Iago’s discussion of how much he hate[s] the Moor” comes uncomfortably close to contemporary conversations around racism. If the actor in the role of Iago chooses to play him as the obvious antagonist, he allows the audience to rule him out of further consideration because they dismiss him as the play’s villain from the first. However, doing so precludes them from the opportunity to examine whether they themselves possess the propensity for that same malignity, and prevents them from identifying the qualities within themselves that could compel them to feel such hatred in the first place.