Sher’s solution to the situation ^(I)was to place the four singers in a geometric pattern among the cubes and leave them there. Attention was not guided by either onstage action or musical development—the scene wandered until Iago’s slap-‘n-snatch moment arrived out of nowhere—and it was hard to pin down whether the loss of momentum emanated more from stage or pit. In the wonderful Act III scene that determines Otello’s course of murderous action, a crackling little scherzo set between the private agonies that precede it and the crushing public finale that follows, tension is intended to build by opposite means: Otello, hidden, must see Iago flashing the handkerchief and bantering with Cassio, hear them laughing and pick up words here and there, without betraying himself despite his mounting rage and depair. Here, Iago led Cassio around and through the plastic boxes (it looked like a tour of an industrial shipping department). The distractions of incessant movement and obvious aesthetic incongruity could not have dismembered the scene more efficiently had that been the conscious intent.

There’s not much point in examining more closely a production so fundamentally misconceived. It should be junked at the earliest possible opportunity. I’d say “Remember to recycle,” but I’m afraid it’s not biodegradable.  A word before it goes, though. Gazing down at this Otello and Iago, I see a coupla white guys shootin’ the breeze. A little later, I see a white husband havin’ a spat with his white wife. All three of them, in fact, look whiter than white, downright bleached, as the lighting beams down on them. Odd, because the title of the play on which the evening’s opera is based is Othello, the MOOR of Venice (emphasis mine), and right away I hear Iago talkin’ smack about “that Moor,” with his “swollen lips,” and about “His Moorish Highness.” And then I hear Otello bemoaning the “tenebrous shade” of his visage, and later yet from Iago, in Cassio’s supposed dream, about the fate that gave Desdemona to the . . . MOOR (emphasis in the setting, Iago sticking it to Otello).

It happens that I write this just as a story has appeared in The New York Times about the withdrawal of the eminent director Gregory Mosher from the promising-looking Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s devastating All My Sons (see the NYT, Dec. 19). The dispute, painful for everyone involved, concerns Mosher’s wish to cast a black actor in an important supporting role. The Miller estate, represented by the playwright’s daughter, Rebecca, refused to consider this on the grounds that the play’s time-and-place circumstances would not have provided for the neighborly acceptance of a racially mixed marriage; thus, Mosher’s preferred casting would undermine the integrity and believability of a play dependent on the assumptions of a realist style. The article also refers back to a similar incident involving the estate of Edward Albee in the casting of the role of Nick in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?