TT: Suspicious minds

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on my recent visit to Cleveland’s Great Lakes Theater Festival, where I saw new productions of Othello and An Ideal Husband. Here’s an excerpt.
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When a drama company puts on two shows in alternating repertory, it’s smart for the artistic director to pick a pair of scripts that can be played off one another–though not necessarily in an obvious way. You wouldn’t think, for instance, that Shakespeare’s “Othello” and Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband” have much of anything in common, but they prove in practice to be mutually illuminating, bearing as they do on the subject of how suspicion can wreak havoc on a marriage. Cleveland’s Great Lakes Theater Festival is mounting handsome stagings of both plays in collaboration with the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, where the two productions originated this summer, and as I watched them in close succession earlier this week, I was struck by how smoothly they fit together.
Risa Brainin’s “Othello” is a modern-dress staging whose reference points are wholly contemporary, all the way from the clamorous action-flick incidental music of Michael Keck to the central-casting performances of the excellent actors: Othello (David Alan Anderson) plays the regular guy gone wrong, Iago (David Anthony Smith) the brash, sarcastic Bill Murray-ish sidekick with a giant chip on his shoulder, Desdemona (Sara M. Bruner) the chirpy innocent who can’t believe what’s happening to her until it’s too late. The results, though unsubtle in the extreme, are also terrifically effective–and not just on their own populist terms, either. This is a blood-and-thunder “Othello” that roars down the track at several hundred miles an hour…
Nearly every production of an Oscar Wilde play that I’ve seen in recent years has been performed on a set that sought to reproduce more or less literally the Vicwardian décor of Wilde’s own time. Not so the Great Lakes Theater Festival’s version of “An Ideal Husband,” whose simple unit set, designed by Nayna Ramey, consists of a drape, some columns and a half-dozen stage-wide steps, plus enough period chairs to allow the characters to seat themselves as they please. Between the set and Jason Lee Resler’s high-society costumes, nothing more is needed to create a look that is at once stylized and stylish.
Sari Ketter, the director, writes in her program note that she conceives of “An Ideal Husband” as a “fairy tale.” To that end she fills her sparsely decorated stage with a ballet-like corps of black-clad butlers at whose seemingly magical behest the other actors come and go, a charming conceit executed with the most delicate of touches….
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Read the whole thing here.