Production examines Othello character’s life behind bars

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This article was published 13/06/2024 (845 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Allowed to roam freely as Oberon and Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Arne MacPherson gets thrown in the slammer as the titular baddie in Shakespeare in the Ruins’ concurrent run of Iago Speaks, a prison-set postscript to Othello.

Joining Iago in the handcuffed two-hander, suitably set within the crumbling stony walls of the Trappist Monastery Ruins, is the man who led the bloodied villain into playwright Daniel MacDonald’s comedic cage match: the jailor, played by Saskatoon’s Joshua Beaudry, who originated the same role last year in his home province with Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan.

The Free Press was MacPherson’s and Beaudry’s choice for their one phone call from the cell on Tuesday.

“We’re speaking from the basement in the green room at the Ruins, and I have Arne and Joshua here with me,” said their temporary overseer, the play’s director, Rodrigo Beilfuss. “If the call gets choppy and terrible, let us know, and we’ll move.”

The line stayed clear. Over the course of their allotted half-hour of contact, the two actors ventured beyond the padlocks of MacDonald’s behind-bar(d) comedy.

As Shakespearean veterans, Winnipeg’s MacPherson and Beaudry are both academically and artistically inclined to an understanding of the character of Iago.

Both have played him and gotten to know, in the words of Samuel Johnson, “the cool malignity of Iago, silent in his resentment, subtle in his designs, and studious at once of his interest and his vengeance.”

In separate productions, both actors have embodied the “honest” no-goodnik opposite the same Othello, Winnipeg stage regular Michael Lawrenchuk, most recently seen in The Comeback at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre.

“Everyone looks to Iago as honest, and one of the great ironies of the play is that he basically never says a true word,” MacPherson says.

“Iago is a person who’s sort of consumed with jealousy, and at the same time, from his position of power, he is very duplicitous and manipulative, using the guise of friendship to trick and manipulate,” Beaudry says. “He’s rather cunning, ruthless and Machiavellian.”

“He’s very verbose too. I remember getting the role and starting to highlight the pages, going, ‘Man! You never stop talking.’ Every second page is a soliloquy.”

Iago’s predilection for chattiness makes the character’s initial, prolonged silence a key source of intrigue for MacDonald, an outside-the-box playwright whose previous credits often deal directly with matters of isolated constraint.

A History of Breathing is set on a post-apocalyptic, two-boat flotilla. In the after-the-explosion play Velocity, a character spends the whole play monologizing while “falling” from a tall building. MacDonald also wrote Bang, a play in which Beaudry appeared at the Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon.

“It was sort of a bizarre memory play about a father working through trauma while strapped to a gurney who takes a drug that makes him relive memories,” says Beaudry of Bang.

After portraying Iago in 2009 at the Ruins, MacPherson had the exposure necessary to make connections to Shakespeare’s version while simultaneously discovering Macdonald’s.

“Everything about Iago is just kind of floating around in your subconscious, and I think that’s really valuable. It also makes this more fun because what we have is a version of Iago in a comedy, which makes it some kind of weird mirror image,” he says.

One doesn’t need to have memorized Othello, or even have read it at all, in order to appreciate the production, Beilfuss says.

Take it from Beaudry and MacPherson, who both resisted the urge to dive too deeply into the source material as they prepared, instead choosing to focus on Macdonald’s rat-a-tat rapartee, which Beaudry compares to The Pinky and the Brain, the animated rodent comedy from the 1990s.

“The dialogue goes back and forth so quickly. It’s quite different from most Shakespeare, which tends to (include) larger speeches, but once Iago starts speaking, the dialogue is just super snappy,” says MacPherson.

“I feel like the big challenge is being present and really listening, getting that tennis match, that ping-pong game really going.”

Neither man has been in jail, but both have visited as part of character research. MacPherson did it as part of his preparation to star in The Kiss of the Spider Woman, while Beaudry visited a re-creation of a prison at Saskatoon’s Western Development Museum.

Both actors, as well as Beilfuss, are prison-movie buffs.

Beaudry recently rewatched The Shawshank Redemption.

“I also like that one where Sylvester Stallone has to break out — Escape Plan!” he says.

MacPherson favours the POW flick The Great Escape.

“I don’t think there’s any person in a prison movie or play who isn’t thinking of escape,” MacPherson says.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

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