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In ‘Othello’ Jake Gyllenhaal Goes After Denzel Washington Like Project 2025 on DEI
There couldn’t be a more relevant time to bring Shakespeare’s play about racism, jealousy, and revenge to Broadway.
Before you rush out to see Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal in the Broadway revival of Othello, here’s the skinny on the play itself — and it’s significance at this particular moment in time.
When he was about 20, William Shakespeare came across an Italian novella about a nice girl who marries a Moor against her family’s wishes. The unnamed Moor is a distinguished general who truly loves his new wife but is deceived by a lieutenant into believing her unfaithful. In fact, the malicious lieutenant is angry because the general’s wife has ignored his advances.
Through skillful cunning, he gets his revenge when he and the deceived husband murder the wife, disguising her death as an accident. This heavy handed cautionary tale was meant to warn young women that a sad fate awaits them if they disobeyed the family’s wishes.
Twenty years later, Shakespeare thought about that old story again. By this time, he’d written 26 successful plays, including The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. Now at the top of his game and a wealthy man, he decided to write his own version. And that is how his Othello was born in 1604.
Shakespeare transforms the story from finger-wagging scare tactic into a poetic exploration of jealousy, racism, and revenge. Most of it written in iambic pentameter.
Othello is Aristotelian tragedy at its best. To experience this play — especially when it’s done well — is to be overcome with pity and fear. Unlike comedy, it delves deep into the human psyche, presses its finger on the painful sore spot, the core wound that has a counterpart of one kind or another within each of us.
Blackface vs Black skin. For the next two centuries, white actors darkened their skin slightly to make Othello seem Arab. When Ira Aldridge became the first African American to play the role at Covent Garden in 1833, some critics responded in starkly racist terms.
