Christian Smith

Bridging the Arts

4/6/19
The Imperfectly Perfect Othello

I went to see Othello, by Jared Larkin of the Wesminster College Theatre at the Courage

Theater in Salt Lake City on April the Fifth. It is the story of jealousy, Iago, scornful over being

passed up for promotion, vows to attain his vengeance on Othello, who promoted Cassio over

himself. In these events, he manipulates everyone from his wife Emilia, who is the housemaid of

Desdemona, Cassio, and Othello himself. Cassio and Othello both finds themselves pawns of his

manipulations, with Othello convinced of Desdemona’s infidelity, and Cassio manipulated into

looking like the culprit.

The play utilizes a single stage which plays multiple roles over the course of the play,

from the temple of which Othello and Desdemona are wed, the battleships which face the

Ottoman Empire, the houses and barracks, and every other location, often with minimal (if any)

changes to the environment. It’s fairly common within theater, given the original plays would

often use a mere houseplant to suggest a forest. Music is used quite lightly, only for stage

transitions, often with a suspenseful tone to it. The costumes feel as if from the renaissance, with

puffy sleeves and rapiers with armor, in fact this later becomes quite useful in untethering it from

this very time period.

Othello stands tall, and seems akin to a paragon at the beginning of the play where he can

do no wrong, and his wife is utterly faithful to him in every way. However, underneath the

seeming perfection which shapes Othello, is a deeply insecure man, an outsider who has been

subject to epilepsy, a moor, a black man among the Italians and Greeks which make up the

Venetian empire. This insecurity and personal flaw, despite his near perfection everywhere else

in his life destroys him, as Iago plays at it, and uses it to manipulate him into murdering his own
 Christian Smith
Bridging the Arts
4/6/19
wife for adultery that she did not commit. It is given the impression that his seeming perfection

in public life may be to cover up, to make up for his outsider status among the Venetians. As a

moor, as someone with epilepsy, whom his wife had to marry in secret against the wishes of her

parents, and of at the beginning many a racist epithet is used to refer to him. This only further

fuels his insecurity with his wife, as he believes her to be laying with someone more like her, a

Venetian rather than a Moor like him. Here we see the effects of racism on a person, they are not

allowed to be anything less than perfect, and to let anyone see less than that, is to invite disaster,

derision, and disposal as a “mere moor.” This is one aspect of the play that easily plays into other

minorities as well, not simple a black man, but perhaps a woman, or an LGBT person, they are

required to be perfect, or to be considered nothing, held to an effectively higher standard by the

low expectations placed upon them.

Speaking of LGBT, the play actually performs an interesting choice, Roderigo, Iago’s

partner in crime, who is jealous of Othello for marrying Desdemona, is in fact Roderiga here, a

woman. We see woman in many places of government and authority, such as Lodovica or the

various soldiers serving to untether the play as a whole from its historical setting, despite taking

place during the conflicts between the Ottomans and Venetians. The historical setting becomes

more fantastical here, a world in where racism now takes the shape seen in modern day, and

LGBT and women’s rights have progressed again, nearer to our level. With that said, despite

this, the momentum that is the original play still makes itself heard, and this is in many ways as I

can tell, a reaction against the original work’s depiction of woman, in a play that arguably

revolves around slut shaming with the constant words of “whore.” It serves to make this conflict

somewhat surreal, and to make Iago and Emilia’s relationship as well somewhat surreal, as in

this more modern world, what reason could a woman like Emilia, who has proven rather
 Christian Smith
Bridging the Arts
4/6/19
independently minded, to wed a sexist jerk and provocateur as Iago? In other senses, it also

serves to emphasize the vacuous and ultimately harmful nature of slut shaming.

Desdemona is the perfect wife here, but that ultimately proves her undoing here, and in

many ways, only serves to heighten Othello’s insecurities. She is unable to confront Othello and

demand him to explain himself precisely. She never speak backs and is utterly obedient, and this

in itself results in the failure to discover the plot until it is far too late, and Othello strangles her

in her bed. The world’s more welcoming and progressive nature towards women serves to

showcase the true failure of the perfect housewife. Put simply, it is a person who cannot know

their husband, and one person their husband cannot know underneath perfection. Emelia on the

other hand is far from the ideal housewife, her and Iago would fight, she talks back and raises her

voice to Iago and Othello both. Even in a conversation between the two of them, she outright

states that she would easily cheat on her husband would give her the world, in her words, “Who

would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch?” Were Desdemona more like

Emelia, ironically someone more likely to cuckold Othello, she would have been able to dissuade

Othello from his path by forcing him to confront his reasoning early, before it came to a boiling

point. In this sense, Emelia, despite being wedded to a wretch of a man, and outright going

against the classical virtues Desdemona personifies, is portrayed as a much more ideal person,

who end the end is the reason Iago ultimately fails in his plan. In Emelia as well, the play as

proposes a more frank and even combative relationship to ultimately be superior to perfect

harmony, for in their perfect matrimony, Othello and Desdemona had no methods of which to

work out their differences, much to the tragedy that would later take place.

Othello deals with subjects to deal with race, adultery, slut shaming, insecurity, and the

imperfection of perfection. Racism may hold no official power, but it still makes itself known in
 Christian Smith
Bridging the Arts
4/6/19
the mindsets of the characters, be it Iago’s racist remarks, or Othello insecurities manifesting in

many ways a result of racism toward him. The play combines the renaissance era with the

representation of women and lesbians to untether the play from a specific time and place, to

place more focus onto the nature of a relationship, of the wife, and to focus the plot on the

tragedy faced by women as well as men. What we get in the end is a small but interesting twist to

the play of Othello, which in many ways opposes the ideal wife as a harmful ideal even when

reached, and perfection as ultimately harmful to the very people who embody that perfection.