‘Othello’ With Denzel Washington & Jake Gyllenhaal: Once Again Iago Gets The Last Laugh – Broadway Review
Gyllenhaal bounds, loose-limbed and bursting with malevolent energy, onto the Barrymore stage and barely takes a breath for the next nearly three hours.
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Denzel Washington, Jake Gyllenhaal in Broadway's 'Othello' Julieta Cervantes
Opening night: March 23, 2025Venue: Broadway’s Barrymore TheatreWritten by: William ShakespeareDirected by: Kenny LeonCast: Denzel Washington, Jake Gyllenhaal, Molly Osborne, Andrew Burnap, Anthony Michael Lopez, Daniel Pearce, Kimber Elayne Sprawl, Neal Bledsoe, Julee Cerda, Ezra Knight, Gene Gillette, Rob Heaps, and William Connell, Ty Fanning, Ben Graney, Daniel Reece, Christina Sajous, Greg Wood, with swing Abiola Obatolu.Running time: 2 hr 35 min (with intermission)Deadline’s takeaway: Othello, director Kenny Leon’s new Broadway staging of one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies starring two of our greatest actors – Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal – in two of the Bard’s best roles doesn’t take too long to recover from an odd misstep: the projection of words onto a back wall suggesting the time is The Near Future. The modern-dress production – a practice that’s become so common among stagings of Shakespeare over recent decades that the disclaimer is anything but necessary. Indeed, I’m not sure when I last saw a Shakespeare in period dress, unless & Juliet counts.
Related Stories News'Beaches' Musical Sets Pre-Broadway National Tour For Fall 2026But that Near Future will cast an unfortunate, possibly unintended pall over the production two hours and 35 minutes later, but more about that then. In the meantime, best just forget the gimmicky time-setting and get on with the show. Or, more to the point, get on to the performances.
Watch on DeadlineIt won’t be enough to say Othello is well acted throughout: With curiosity high about the show’s mega-stars Washington and Gyllenhaal, details are all but demanded. So here’s the short take: Washington is fine, a bit unsure of his characterization occasionally and fitful in his mood shifts. One thing he isn’t is too old for the role: At 70, Washington is several decades beyond the age of the usual Othello, and while his pairing with the much younger Molly Osborne’s Desdemona seems a bit less passionate than fatherly at first, the direction and performances settle into an entirely defensible approach wherein an aging, if powerful, man, beguiled by a beautiful young woman seeming to be in his thrall, falls victim to the green-eyed monster when the idea is planted that a much hotter and much more age-appropriate hot shot has arrived on the scene. Indeed, both Leon and Washington would have been wise to have leaned into that particular motivation even more heavily – young Cassio is played by the very youthful-handsome Andrew Burnap. The kid could inspire any number of green shades to color the old monster bedeviling Othello.
If Washington seems still to be finding a steadier approach to the Moor, Gyllenhaal, as the great villain Iago, is having no such trepidations. Last seen on Broadway in the excellent 2019 solo one-acts Sea Wall/A Life, Gyllenhaal bounds, loose-limbed and bursting with malevolent energy, onto the Barrymore stage and barely takes a breath for the next nearly three hours. It is a remarkable performance, conversational, contemporary and unerringly convincing.
Scholars have pondered for centuries just what lies at the bottom of Iago’s treachery, his hatred for his military boss so outsize for the perceived slight Iago believes he’s suffered (he was passed over by Othello for a lieutenancy that goes instead to Cassio) that the bloodshed and innocence maligned he causes seems absurdly out of proportion. Does Iago suspect wife Emilia and Othello has made the beast with two backs? Or maybe Emilia and Cassio got their beast on. Is it a racial thing? The bottled up aggression of a warrior? Psychopathy? Pure evil?
Gyllenhaal asks perhaps the only sane question: Why choose? All due respect to Lady Macbeth and Richard III, Iago is Shakespeare’s greatest villain with some of the greatest lines: “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock The meat it feeds on” and “Who steals my purse steals trash” and “Strangle her in bed, even the bed she hath contaminated.”
Gyllenhaal grabs hold and never lets go, reciting his lines with all the modern-day suavity, earnestness and, when necessary, crocodile tears to fill up the Barrymore’s massive stage, cavernous as a cathedral with huge (and moveable) stone pillars, and adorned, in Derek McLane’s set design, so sparsely that the actors are free to (or maybe burdened with) filling the air with their skill. Gyllenhaal makes it look easy.
Leon’s direction uses little flash to sweeten the Othello, largely making sure that his fine, large cast moves efficiently and purposefully from one corner of the big stage to the next. He’s assisted by Natasha Katz’ excellent lighting design that creates darknesses (and ominous lightning) when Shakespeare’s doings demand being done in shadow. Dede Ayite’s modern-dress costumes – mostly military olive drab for the jarhead soldiers, and chic, wide-legged slacks and sleeveless vest-type blouses for Desdemona. Justin Ellington’s sound design contributes mightily to the feeling of looming tragedy, especially in the snippets of anxiety-provoking music (of various genres, including, at beginning and end, an almost mocking, queasy-making use of something so overtly Hollywood-romantic that Dean Martin might have lent his wee hours lounge crooning to it.
If Othello really and truly belongs to Iago (isn’t Othello just too easily dupe-able to be the star of his own story, especially in a production in which the actor has traded the blinding madness of youthful passion for the tired, resigned resentments of age?), the play is chock full of intriguing secondary characters, all well played in this production. Burnap give Cassio the wounded boyishness that makes him do mad things, and Kimber Elayne Sprawl brings a fierce intelligence to Iago’s misused wife Emilia.
Molly Osborne and Denzel Washington Julieta CervantesLeon’s production also has the good fortune of Molly Osborne’s Desdemona, a thoroughly modern reading that matches the up-to-the-minute contemporary approaches of both Gyllenhaal and Burnap and contrasts nicely with Washington’s somewhat more traditionally stately readings. If the silos of race are never far away in Othello, this time around there are generational bubbles keeping human isolated.
Unfortunately, the modernizing premise – aside from the de rigueur costumes and odd laptop, more pretense than premise – seriously impacts the emotional punch of the ending. We might assume that in ages past, Othello’s murder of Desdemona was presented as something cockeyed noble, misguided through Iago’s duplicity, a mean trick played not so much on the woman but on the gullible man (the full title of the play is The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, not The Tragedy Of Desdemona, His Horrifically Murdered Wife).
By setting the action In The Near Future, any hint at sympathy for Othello – especially after we’ve just witnessed Osborne perform Desdemona’s heart-wrenching, useless pleas for her life (“Kill me tomorrow!”). Washington’s tear-jerking post-mortem apologies are likely to fall on deaf audience ears, Othello’s suicide a decidedly un-noble good riddance.
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