Shakespeare’s Othello has been making a splash on Broadway this season. Playing at the Ethel Barrymore Theater from March 23 to June 8, Othello shows features of the greatest actors alive today in one of the best dramas ever written. With Denzel Washington as Othello, Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago, and Molly Osborne in her Broadway debut as Desdemona, Kenny Leon has directed a production that has broken box office record after box office record.  

Shakespeare on the page and Shakespeare on the stage can be quite different. In Leon’s adaptation, we are transported to “the near future,” where Othello, Iago, and company are dressed in American military garb. This is helpful for contextualizing the military aspect of the play, which can too easily be overlooked. The sparsely decorated set features only a number of columns, which move during the performance to break up the stage in different scenes, and an adjustable platform on center stage. Minimalism in set and dress focuses attention on the stars.  

Their delivery of lines is fast, such that the five-act play was completed in 150 minutes. What to a reader’s eyes takes time and concentration to discern in the text, Washington, Gyllenhaal, and the others blazed through, sometimes making it hard to tell what was being said (especially if, as in the case of the ladies sitting next to me, an audience member had not read the play beforehand). My uncle, who has performed Shakespeare professionally, informs me that the logic of fast delivery is “moving at the speed of thought.” As the characters strive to reach their resolution, the intensity of their desire resembles the frenetic pace of racing thoughts. In this case, the fast delivery through portions of the play also exemplified “speeding up for the sake of slowing down,” allowing critical moments to be accented by a slower pace. 

Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal were remarkable. In a play about a man of great-souled force of character, it was only fitting to have Denzel Washington as Othello, where he could exert his usual swagger and powerful delivery in shaping the role. Was it a performance on the level of his work in such films as Malcolm X, John Q, or Fences? No. But he had great range, timing, feel, and brought humor to the tragic: an important release. (Sometimes the audience laughed where there was no humor—for instance, Act 5, Scene 2 “yet she must die,” a line Washington did not deliver comedically.) Beginning relaxed and confident as a general of “perfect soul” (2.2.36), Othello developed the spry, cold fury and that loud, croaky, emotional yowl that Denzel does so well. 

Yet Gyllenhaal stole the show as Iago, who orchestrates all of the action and drives the plot forward in his ambition to undo the Moor. Gyllenhaal was not overshadowed by Washington’s Othello but instead convincingly showed that Iago is actually the more prominent figure in the play (and one of the most prominent in all of Shakespeare, with the second most lines of any of his characters, behind only Hamlet).  

Updated setting notwithstanding, the cast mostly stays close to the original text and spirit, avoiding the temptations to interpret the play through the prism of late-twentieth-century American racial consciousness. A review on New York magazine’s Vulture website lambasted the play for not being woke enough. According to Sara Holdren, Leon’s Othello is guilty of tone-deafness for featuring other black cast members without commenting on their race (such as Kimber Elayne Sprawl as Emilia and Ezra Knight as Montano) and for not challenging or removing racial language problematic by 2025 standards, such as the use of “Moor” as an epithet. “Perhaps most confusingly, this Othello seems determined to say almost nothing about race, 400 years ago, now, or in the near future,” she writes. 

But this is absurd. The interracial marriage between Othello and Desdemona and the issue of Othello’s “moorishness” are of a different set of concerns for Shakespeare’s time, namely the tensions between membership in the community and the modern, cosmopolitan character of a city like Renaissance Venice. The idea that Othello is a play about race bespeaks our own obsessions, not those of the Elizabethan theater. Emilia being played by a black actor character is of no relevance to Shakespeare’s story. 

Moreover, Holdren’s claim that the Washington-Osborne/Othello-Desdemona casting was “one of the least sexy unions” is likewise off the mark. The match between the doomed lovers is not primarily about “chemistry.” Othello and Desdemona’s love is born out of her love of the exotic and adventurous and his desire to be fully integrated into Venetian society (“She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them.”), an “opposites attract” dynamic. Age is the most significant divider between the characters, and sex is not the primary driver of their relationship. (Othello’s statement to the Venetian nobility in 1.3 is left out of Leon’s script: “Vouch with me, heaven, I therefore beg it not / To please the palate of my appetite, / Nor to comply with heat (the young affects / In me defunct) and proper satisfaction, / But to be free and bounteous to her mind. / And heaven defend your good souls that you think / I will your serious and great business scant /  For she is with me. No . . .”). Sexual obsession takes over only when Iago makes Othello think in those terms. So Washington, seventy, and Osborne, twenty-seven, play the dynamic right. 

If there was anything left to be desired, it was the ladies. Desdemona is overshadowed, though Osborne plays her part very well. Emilia is delivered half-wrong, though Kimber Elayne Sprawl beautifully taps into Emilia’s rage after seeing Desdemona’s murder. Emilia reads as a cynical, sharp character, but on stage here she is cynical-sarcastic only to become cynical-furious in a way that does not quite cohere. With stars like Washington and Gyllenhaal so prominent as the leading men, the important female roles become smaller on Leon’s stage than are on the page. 

Othello and the success of its run has been hailed as part of the “post-COVID comeback” of Broadway, full of productions with A-list actors. Having seen three shows in as many days—Othello, alongside Stranger Things: The First Shadow and Glengarry Glen Ross—I found the praise for this production well-deserved. It might frustrate Shakespeare purists, but Leon’s adaptation blends the timely and the timeless. Dressing the original spirit in a contemporary aesthetic, the cast and crew show their faithfulness to the tragedy without falling into the sin of “presentism.” Othello might even be an indication of something greater than a mere “post-COVID” return: a return to great art for its own sake.