The Fear Driving “Well, I’ll Let You Go” and “Othello”

Like the recent Broadway play “Little Bear Ridge Road,” “Well, I’ll Let You Go” is a portrait of people living in isolation, their walls up—a situation ripe for an explosion. Refreshingly, the play doesn’t cheat its way toward its climax, and instead arrives at something simpler and more affecting: the audience learns what happened to Marv, but the revelation is more about the nature of a long marriage, the question of how well a person knows her own partner—and what it would mean if she were wrong. In Weiler’s plainspoken script, that payoff comes with a light touch, during an exchange with the former student, who sees Maggie as she can’t see herself, and who tells her, “All of the other teachers were old and mean. But you were, like, hopeful?”

In the play’s final moments, unreal things become real: the phantom piano gets played; the sunlight sparkles. There’s a beautiful scene that reminded me of the powerful conclusion of last year’s production of “Oedipus,” which leaped back to a more innocent time. The ending of Weiler’s play allows us to see the empty setting of Maggie’s house in an entirely new way: as a not yet furnished home, at the start of a new marriage—something that might be a mistake, or the opposite. Here is a place that has potential and, perhaps, nothing much else going for it. Isn’t that true of theatre, too?

There’s something perversely logical about a director of “Othello” doubling as the play’s Iago, a manipulator who plants motivations and props, tucking telltale handkerchiefs into bedrooms, imprinting his designs on the world. Iago is Shakespeare’s most disturbing villain, perhaps because he’s his most modern one: he’s a nihilistic troll, a precursor of every 8Chan trickster on the Dark Triad. In a new production by Bedlam, at the tiny West End Theatre, the company’s artistic director, Eric Tucker, pulls off this ambidextrous feat, delivering an unnervingly easygoing performance as Iago, playing him less as an obvious creep than as a glad-handing, physically confident broheim—he’s as disarming as Ted Lasso, if you pay no attention to the noose dangling from his hand.

In Tucker’s staging, Iago is also the character who remains most fully himself, instead of splitting like mercury. Founded in 2012, Bedlam is a theatrical nonprofit dedicated to “the immediacy of the relationship between the actor and the audience,” which, in practice, means a stripped-down environment (a blank wall, wooden bleachers, a string of Christmas lights) and a playful approach to casting. In the company’s most recent production before “Othello,” a satisfyingly delirious reinterpretation of “Pride and Prejudice” called “Are the Bennet Girls OK?,” every male character—from cad to nerd—was played by a single actor, Edoardo Benzoni, his eyebrows aflicker. It was a tour de force that suggested something about the role of men in Austen’s universe, turning all men into one man, his charisma adjusted to taste.

Here, only four actors act out the entirety of “Othello,” in a similarly minimalist way: there are no costumes or special hats to mark the moments when they shift personae, but we always know who is who, through gestures. Susannah Hoffman plays Othello’s wife, the eager, horribly innocent Desdemona; Brabantio, Desdemona’s disapproving father; and Cassio, the devoted lieutenant who Othello suspects is sleeping with Desdemona. Susannah Millonzi is the horndog Roderigo, an easy target for Iago; she’s also Iago’s wife, the cynical Emilia, who sees through men like Roderigo. Bedlam’s approach releases all sorts of unusual and exhilarating juxtapositions in the text. In a particularly elegant moment, Othello, played by Ryan Quinn, drapes his shirt differently to become the sensual Bianca, Cassio’s desperate mistress—which means that we witness the actors who play Desdemona and Othello swapping genders and masquerading as another tormented couple, one betrayal visible beneath the other.