Theater Review: Denzel Washington in ‘Othello’

Bad theater can be uniquely enraging. (Arguably, I’m here writing this because I once got very mad while watching a play.) But it can also be simply baffling. Who approved of this? What does this thing actually want to say? Is anyone in this room, onstage or off, having a good time? Why do the cops’ flak jackets say “Polizia” while the military uniforms have American flags on them? Does this play take place in a future where the U.S. has annexed Venice? 

“This play” is Othello, currently looking pretty spry as it breaks Broadway box office records and charges as much as $921 for tickets. “Othello will outlive you!” my tenth-grade English teacher shouted at a kid in my class who didn’t feel like tuning in for a day of close reading. She was and is right, though it’s clearly not Shakespeare racking up those grosses: It’s Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal. And while it’s true that a Venn diagram exists between celebrity-driven projects and compelling art—and that the center can be a thrilling place—Kenny Leon’s passionless new production is about as far from that overlap as it’s possible to get. Audience and ensemble alike are lost in a hinterland so disconcertingly sleepy and beige that it’s hard to summon anything as visceral as fury. At the forefront of the whole thing, Washington isn’t bothering—at least in any legible way—to feel much, so how can we?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge scribbled a note in the margins of his copy of Othello about “the motive-hunting of Motiveless malignity” — a reference to the way in which the play’s treacherous villain, Iago, cooks up a variety of shallow rationalizations for a hatred that’s too deep and insidious to stem from any neatly explicable circumstance. But what of the motive-hunting of a motiveless production? Leon’s Othello has no opinion, no reason for being beyond the movie stars at its center. It barely even has a pulse. On a set of heavy, generic columns by Derek McLane, actors in standard-issue navy suits and Desert Storm–style fatigues reshuffle themselves into indifferent configurations. (“The Near Future” reads a lone projection on those columns at the top of the play — though what this is meant to teach us about the rules of this onstage universe, who can say?) Eventually, the monoliths start sliding ponderously back and forth to break up the space—as a truly bewildering melange of transition music plays—but for a long time, Leon seems unsure of what to do with his actors besides have them walk straight downstage-center and stand next to each other to conduct a scene. Eye contact is in bizarrely low supply; even more scarce is any sense of urgency or enthusiasm.

As Cassio, the handsome lieutenant that Othello has promoted above Iago, Andrew Burnap makes the most solid effort to put something behind the words, but he’s hardly the play’s engine. That combustive energy has to come from the poisonous plotter, Iago (Gyllenhaal), and from Othello himself, the honorable general that Iago tortures and deceives into a shattering act of violence. Gyllenhaal, while sturdy enough with the language, achieves only intermittent glints of Iago’s venomous vitality. Back in his Hurt Locker crewcut, he’s square-shouldered and furrow-browed, straightforward and bro-ish. He and Washington spend long stretches of the show with their hands in a martial clasp behind their backs — the kind of attempt at “realism” that’s always a bad excuse for not giving characters a full psychophysical life. It’s all well and good to avoid mustache-twirling as Iago; it’s another thing to remain largely opaque, to dampen the electrical current of the character’s terrible canniness. Gyllenhaal’s most human moments come during his soliloquies, where his face sometimes twists into ugly hurt and his voice thickens: He’s playing Iago’s stated motives—Othello’s failure to promote him and his own vague suspicion that the general might have cuckolded him—as earnest drivers of action. What he’s not doing is tapping into a deeper, more frightening, less decipherable devil.

Washington, meanwhile, seems—or at least seemed, the night I saw the show—to be miles away from the Barrymore Theatre. He starts the role smiling and unflappable, his trademark dignity and charm doing the bulk of the work, albeit at a fairly low voltage. And while it makes sense to give Othello a long arc—from integrity and decency to decimated, brutal heartbreak—Washington stays so stubbornly reeled in that it’s hard not to think he and Leon are intentionally avoiding the part’s inevitable leaps. Othello isn’t exactly the most approachable of Shakespeare’s plays in 2025: Like The Merchant of Venice, it carries around a vexed and insoluble discourse. Is it racist or does it show racism? (Both can be true.) Is it a great role for a Black actor or is it a trap — a narrative that, for all Othello’s seeming nobility, ultimately showed London audiences a Black man getting gaslit into exactly the kind of violent behavior they perhaps expected of him all along? In order to take on the play today, a creative team has got to have a profound sense of why — of what this thing is deeply about, what it’s doing in a modern context, how the racial dynamics of its world are in conversation with those of ours, and of who its characters are as living, breathing human beings and why we should care.

None of that is present on Leon’s stage. It may be that Washington’s lackluster performance stems from a misfiring if understandable desire to avoid stereotypes of outsize passion—of big, blustery emotional fireworks in a thorny role of color—yet the result is that we go on no journey with his Othello. We listen to him say words; we don’t, even as he enters the bedroom of his innocent wife, Desdemona (Molly Osborne), to strangle her, experience his awful interior transformation. Instead, as he approaches her in these fateful moments, a truly unsettling percentage of the audience is still laughing. (The more-than-40-year age gap between the actors also gives rise to one of the least sexy unions I’ve ever seen on stage; when this Othello gives his sleeping wife a series of tortured final kisses, he bends over stiffly from the waist and pecks her chastely on the forehead.) Washington seems most comfortable leaning into little relatable flourishes that might earn a chuckle—his “Why did I marry?” when Iago starts to crack the seals of his confidence is more wry and sitcom-ish than distraught—but that impulse curdles up inside a speech like the one he’s got to give as a prologue to murder. “I’ll not shed her blood, / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, / And smooth as monumental alabaster,” he says. (Leon leaves in place pretty much all of the play’s language that idealizes whiteness and denigrates Blackness.) Then he pauses before continuing, almost nonchalantly: “Yet she must die.” The audience giggles. Is that what the production—what any production of Othello—really wants?

Washington isn’t alone in his drastic underplaying of the story’s stakes. When Desdemona and her lady-in-waiting, Emilia (Kimber Elayne Sprawl)—Iago’s wife, here styled as a fellow soldier in an ambiguous status relationship with the general’s wife—enter at the top of the production’s second act, they’re looking for a handkerchief that will prove pivotal in Iago’s schemes, and Desdemona knows its disappearance is no trivial thing. “Believe me, I had rather have lost my purse / Full of crusadoes,” she tells Emilia. But Osborne and Sprawl enter the stage casually, taking Leon’s favorite route as they meander toward downstage-center. Osborne’s “Where should I lose that handkerchief, Emilia?” sounds about equivalent to, “Girl, have you seen my car keys?” Later on, Sprawl breezes through one of the play’s best speeches, Emilia’s sharp, brief gut-punch on the hypocrisy of men. “But I do think it is their husbands’ faults / If wives do fall,” she tells the shaken Desdemona. It’s a ferocious eighteen lines in a play that can’t be credited with doing an overall great job with its women — but Leon has Sprawl stand behind Osborne, who’s seated on a bench, and deliver the whole thing facing out, connecting to no one, targetless and underpowered.

Those adjectives could also be more generally applied to the production, which often feels like it’s joined Jason Isaacs in stealing Parker Posey’s lorazepam. Perhaps most confusingly, this Othello seems determined to say almost nothing about race, 400 years ago, now, or in the near future. Here, Montano (Ezra Knight), the governor of Cyprus where Othello and his troops are stationed, and Emilia are both played by Black actors, but Othello is still the only character whose Blackness seems to matter, as well as the only one referred to as a “Moor” — a word that, yes, carries a specific ethnic definition, but that’s also just as frequently flung around as a slur in the play. (Even the production’s approach to that friction feels shaky: The term’s usage in action causes no distinct ripples among the characters, and the show program describes Othello as “a Moor” and a “Marine Corps General” as if the phrases were equally neutral.) Leon also retains record-needle-scratch moments like the Duke of Venice (Neal Bledsoe, giving Gavin Newsom) seemingly praising Othello by telling Desdemona’s father, “Noble signior, / If virtue no delighted beauty lack, / Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.” If characters are going to talk like this, we’ve got to understand something about the world they’re inhabiting: If it’s a fundamentally, historically racist world—ours or a variant thereon—then how many of the people living in it are aware? How does it weigh on them? Who battles it, who hides from it, who exploits it? Who feels anything about it at all? Questions, perhaps, for another production, one with more blood in its veins, no matter the cost of its seats.

Othello is at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.