Summary 
Traditional outdoor staging of Othello features a commanding Moor who is a brutish physical force manipulated by a vengeance-seeking but not demonic Iago. Straight-forward, earnest drama with a potent conclusion.
Design
Directed by Nick Rudall. Set by Charles O'Connor. Costumes by Dorothy Marshall Englis. Lights by Julie Mack. Sound by Aaron Paolucci.
Cast
Aldo Billingslea (Othello), Jack McLaughlin-Gray (Brabantio), Ryan Lee (Cassio), Robert Gerard Anderson (Iago), Walter Brody (Roderigo), David Kortemeier (Duke), Larry McDonald (Montano), James Marlott (Lodovico), Thomas Clinton Haynes (Gratiano), Carrie Lee Patterson (Desdemona), Rebecca MacLean (Emilia), Rebecca McGraw (Bianca).
Analysis
Director Nick Rudall, Chicago actor and longtime artistic director of Court Theatre, takes on the challenge of staging an outdoor Othello with the Illinois Shakespeare Festival's youthful ensemble. He keeps the play within 1560s Venice, with gold and white awnings, a canopied gallery with an orange-lit winged lion overhead, a covered water well at stage right, a hand-railed balcony, and brick columns. The apparent opulence impresses - as do the Moor's military accomplishments - but the city, like Othello himself, suffers from inevitable inward collapse: plaster has split and fallen, brick has decayed, and wood has become weather-beaten and rotten.
Robert Gerard Anderson's casual Iago provides a contrast to the foppish Roderigo. Roderigo wears purple finery with an elaborate hat and fluffy white collar, whereas Anderson's bald but goateed Iago wears inelegant dark gray with black belt and boots. He appears common and typical, able to blend into a crowd, and Anderson's straight-forward delivery furthers the sense that this Iago is less a diabolical villain than a plotting soldier bearing a grudge. Anderson's characterization raises the specter that Iago's malevolence may be disturbingly prevalent in society but diminishes some of the dramatics of his evil intentions.
Anderson's "honest" Iago, clearly puppet-master to Roderigo's puppet, directs the man's verbal assault upon Brabantio with gestures and hand-signals, while always remaining concealed. They take turns at the well, Iago in 1.1 to refresh himself and Roderigo in 1.3 in a weak attempt at drowning himself. He emerges without his sopping wig and with little pride, and he makes his insipid 2.3 attempt at an assault upon Cassio with a spit of game meat.
Cassio provides a similar counterpoint to Iago. Cassio, dashing and handsome with dark hair, speaks with likeable boyishness and behaves with well-mannered dignity. His entreaties of Desdemona and Emilia in 3.3 - with Iago observing from the overhead gallery - reveal him as sincere and earnest, much the antithesis of Iago. Like Roderigo, and later Othello, he is easily manipulated by the conniving ancient.
The towering Aldo Billingslea portrays Othello as a brawny and imposing warrior. He first appears upon the darkened stage in a fur-hooded light brown robe and over-the-knee brown leather boots, and with his arrival the stage glows with warm yellow light. He twice shouts down the raising of swords by Brabantio's men, and on neither occasion does he flinch or reveal fear. Bald, bearded and bold, he looms over the Venetians and takes full command of the situation, from Brabantio's accusations of witchcraft to the preparation for impending war with the Turks. Billingslea's mammoth Moor is played as all brute strength and physical prowess.
Carrie Lee Patterson's frail Desdemona, with her tremulous voice, sad expressions, and slight figure, seems far from a "fair warrior." This fragile Desdemona, pale-skinned and red-haired, is all internalized emotion, and when reunited with Othello on Cyprus, she is wrapped in his arms and spun around. Othello then kneels before her before resting her like a china doll upon his knee. The contrast with Iago and Emilia is stark, as Iago disparages his wife with public insults, keeping his distance from her from across the stage.
Rudall dramatically stages the 2.1 Cyprus storm. The winged lion rotates to reveal a cannon that shoots with a bright flash and an echoing blast amid scurrying soldiers, thunder crashes and lightning bursts. As with Othello's arrival in 1.3, the stage warms with light upon Desdemona's safe return to shore. For the subsequent victory celebration, the well becomes a bonfire with a spit for cooking meat, accompanied by exotic mid-eastern music.
Anderson's Iago manages to mock courtesy into lechery, wishing Othello and Desdemona "happiness to their sheets," and his plot to be "even" with Othello "wife for wife" - with its implied affair between the Moor and Emilia - renders his scheming less demonic and into a more human, albeit more mundane, quest for revenge.
The play's accelerated second act focuses on Othello's internal collapse - "when I love thee not, chaos is come again" - and makes for compelling theater. Iago's embrace of Emilia after the 3.3 discovery of the prized handkerchief provides a contrast for Othello's 2.1 embrace of Desdemona at Cyprus: he roughly kisses and her lifts in the air, then lewdly slaps her behind and dismisses her. When demanding "ocular proof," Billingslea's Othello seizes Iago by the throat, driving him to his knees and then to his back, nearly strangling the life from him. Iago's slap of Emilia is echoed by Othello's striking Desdemona across the face in 4.2, highlighting Iago's success at insinuating his baseness into Othello's underdeveloped psyche. The domestic violence occurs after Othello's epileptic collapse -- during which Iago kicks his prone body - and after his prideless 4.1 crawling from the well to the stairs to overhear Cassio's castigation of Bianca-as-Desdemona.
The conclusion arrives with Patterson's frightened Desdemona breaking into her mother's 4.3 "willow" song with chilling suddenness. Othello's purple-spotlighted 5.2 murder upon their marriage bed is depicted as ritualistic to the point of being nearly tribal: he snuffs three candles with his bare hand, kisses Desdemona three times, then smothers and strangles her before snapping her neck in three distinct attempts before she finally expires.
The ensemble's youth works against this production, with the production's finest performances being the mature portrayals of Brabantio, with his wounded "mangled matter" against the Moor, and Emilia, portrayed as an honest but eternally suspicious servant. Nevertheless, the play's inherent themes compel, and Rudall's production includes several insights. Billingslea's Othello's resolve falters whenever Desdemona moves close to him in 4.2, so he continually shies away from her, even while condemning her, and in 5.1 Iago readies to stab and kill Cassio, but must forebear as the guards approach. The somber finale, with its bloodshed brought about through Iago's malevolence, leaves the audience with an appropriately tragic understanding of very human misunderstanding.
Note: A version of this article was edited and published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Vol.19, No.4, Fall 2001.