Editor’s note: Michael Patrick Thornton has been replaced for the final two weeks of the run by fellow Gift ensemble member Gabriel Franken.
So it’s interesting to see how Pakistani-American actor Kareem Bandealy handles the title role in Gift Theatre’s gutsy new modern-dress Othello, directed by Jonathan Berry.
Yet as Iago’s insinuations take hold, Bandealy’s increasingly disoriented Moor reverts to behaviors that seem to well up from some suppressed part of him. His speech, his mannerisms, his bearing, his choices all seem increasingly, well, foreign—an effect rendered more emphatic by the Levantine music used by sound designer Christian Gero. In the end Bandealy’s Othello feels an awful lot like Amir, the corporate lawyer in Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Disgraced, who marries the whitest woman he can find and scorns what he regards as the barbarism of his south-Asian Muslim heritage only to succumb to a version of that barbarism when the contradictions become too great to bear.
Through 8/24: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM Gift Theatre 4802 N. Milwaukee 773-283-7071 thegifttheatre.org $20-$35
