Directed by Arin Arbus, this Othello is really a New York production: birthed at Theatre for a New Audience, reviewed to much acclaim, and shoved into Intiman's season when Bart Sher—who was supposed to direct his own Othello—announced his resignation. This Othello—which gave Charles Isherwood of the New York Times, and many others, a serious case of the vapors—was supposed to be a plum, a gift for Intiman's audience. But something funny happened on the way to Seattle.

Opening night's production at Intiman had none of the heralded steel, electricity, and spark. The war god Othello (Sean Patrick Thomas) had all the masculine energy of a nice guy mowing his lawn—not the man who is allowed to violate a deep social taboo, marrying a white senator's daughter, because he's a paragon of nobility and the baddest ass in the Venetian army. Othello is a tragedy because the hero begins so strong and ends up writhing and weeping on the floor—unmanned, betrayed, duped. Othello should begin the play on a precipice; Thomas begins on a stepladder. He doesn't have far to fall.

You may also remember Thomas from Save the Last Dance, the 2001 movie about a gallant black man who teaches a white ballet student about "moves" and "flava" and how to slouch. It's a goofy movie, a dated relic about how white girls and black boys are supposed to act. But the fact that the racial politics of the movie are so embarrassing raises a question: If the fantasies of racial harmonists are coming true, if there's more cultural space for people of African descent to be timid and nerdy and bad at fighting and dancing and sports—anti-Othellos or simply a-Othellos—will that suck some of the dramatic wind from Othello's sails?

A brief recapitulation: Othello and Desdemona, a senator's daughter, fall in love and marry in secret because they know the senator would disapprove. The senator finds out—the beginning of Iago's plot to vivisect the Moor—and demands a midnight audience with the powerful duke to complain. The duke listens to all sides: the senator's (the African bewitched her!), Othello's (all I did is tell her exciting war stories), and Desdemona's (yes, he's black; no, I don't care).

The duke approves the marriage, mostly, it seems, because he needs Othello to fight the invading Turks. You know the rest: little lies, bigger lies, drunken misunderstandings, a strawberry handkerchief, and a lot of death on one marriage bed. If Othello were a white war hero who married Desdemona, the senator wouldn't care. It's the senator hearing that "an old black ram is tupping your white ewe" that drives him bonkers and sets the tragedy in motion.

Shylock, Shakespeare's other great racial outsider, would—I think—have less wind taken from his dramatic sails were he a gentile. The dramatic momentum in Merchant of Venice depends as much on capitalism and cruelty as on cultural identity. Aaron the Moor, the third and far more minor example (from Titus), could be anybody—he's just a bottomless pit of malice whose race hardly matters. But Othello's blackness is everything; it inverts the cult of warrior nobility with something as thin as the color of skin.

The world has seen white Othellos—Patrick Stewart played him in 1997 in a "photo-negative" production where all the other actors were black. But even the experiments in cross-casting demand that we have this dangerous-black-man stereotype in our minds, even if just to watch the play against the grain. Othello is over 400 years old—what challenges will directors and actors face as attitudes toward race and cultural identity change in the next 400?

Anyway—back to this Othello. The set, by designer Peter Ksander, is boldly stark: two doors, sometimes two chairs, a long table, and a wood floor of wide planks, mottled in black and white. The minimalism is refreshing when so many companies are trying to trick out the classics with digital gadgetry (the Wooster Group's high-tech, many-screened Hamlet; Radiohole's lo-fi, bric-a-brac, multimedia take on Moby-Dick).

Instead of the sweet but steely flower at the center of Othello's heartbreak, Desdemona (Elisabeth Waterston) is merely tall, with a hint of the cold fish. The passionate conflagration between Othello and Desdemona—the passion that gives them the courage to marry in secret and the passion that will result in their deaths—is absent. It must've fallen off the back of the truck on the way west on I-90.

Othello's greatest performance goes to John Campion as Iago, who looks and sounds a lot like philosopher (and pop-media star) Slavoj Žižek. Block-shaped and gray-bearded, Campion reveals his machinations in a phlegmy, Slovenian brogue. His transitions between the impassioned soliloquies and the casual way he erodes Othello's confidence in his wife's fidelity are terrifyingly mercurial and tightly controlled.

"I hate the Moor," he hisses, venomous spittle gathering in his beard. Shortly afterward, he casually remarks to Othello: "I know our country disposition well;/ In Venice they do let heaven see the pranks/they dare not show their husbands;/their best conscience/Is not to leave't undone, but keep't unknown." Iago dips his poison in Othello's ear so artfully, it's traumatic to watch—if Campion can lie so thoroughly, so convincingly, who in the world can we trust?

Kate Forbes, as Iago's abused wife, Emilia, is also excellent—wise and sad, she slinks around the stage like a dog waiting for its next beating. While everybody else in the play is freaking out about race, Emilia meditates on gender. She tells Desdemona that men "are all but stomachs, and we all but food;/To eat us hungerly, and when they are full,/They belch us."

She beats John and Yoko to the punch by 363 years: Woman is the nigger of the world. recommended