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

The article summarizes two plays, "Well, I'll Let You Go" and "Othello," focusing on the theme of fear driving human behavior. In "Well, I'll Let You Go," a retired schoolteacher named Maggie investigates the truth behind her husband's death, revealing the complexities of a long marriage and self-deception. The review highlights how the play transforms from a quiet grief drama into a subtle true-crime story, ultimately exploring how well we truly know our partners.

There are a lot of small, sincere plays that are also very boring. I won’t name names, because I’m not a complete monster, but, as anyone who frequents the theatre understands, a seventy-five-minute drama with no intermission can last several centuries. So I’ll admit I was nervous when I saw a poster at the Studio Seaview, where “Well, I’ll Let You Go” is now playing, that described the show as “a fog of grief,” which sounded suspiciously like code for “dignified but dull.” Luckily, that apprehension quickly dissolved as I submerged myself in the patient, meditative focus that is one of the rewards of quiet plays—the sensation of an audience locking in, then submitting, happily, to the story. “Well, I’ll Let You Go,” written by the actor Bubba Weiler, had a run in Brooklyn last year. It opens on a bare stage decorated with what the script calls “rehearsal versions” of furniture, “not quite right or fully realized.” There are folding chairs and a card table, a reflection of the blanked-out inner life of the show’s protagonist, Maggie Quincy Tyler Bernstine , a retired schoolteacher who is at sea, unmoored by a personal loss of some kind—and reliant on the people around her to fill in the gaps. Conveniently, there’s another presence lingering onstage: an “Our Town”-ish narrator, played with gentle, appealing authority by Matthew Maher. He tells stories about the characters’ past and the origins of their relationships; he lets us know what people think but don’t say. He also urges us to see Maggie’s space through more generous eyes, by describing a piano that we can’t see, or referring to the card table as a glass-topped showpiece that glints with sunlight at “a weird hour of the day when no one is in the room to see it.” Then, one by one, guests show up. Maggie—dishevelled, her posture slumped—feels obliged, despite her shock, to be a gracious host, a role that she is both adroit at and phenomenally ill-suited for. She’s a polite person but introverted and skeptical, a doubter in a town full of churchy, community-oriented do-gooders. And, slowly, we realize that what we’re watching isn’t a slice of life but a true-crime story, with Maggie as detective: her husband, Marv, has been killed in a shooting at a community college. Her neighbors see him as a hero, but Maggie doesn’t seem as certain—and the more we eavesdrop, the more unsettling the details appear. Each visitor holds a clue. There’s a sad-sack, conspiracy-minded cousin, whose life Marv and Maggie kept afloat; a bossy funeral director; Marv’s brother a swaggering Danny McCarthy ; his vivacious wife Amelia Workman , who is also Maggie’s best friend; a former student of Maggie’s who arrives unexpectedly, twitching with nervous apologies a deeply moving Emily Davis ; and, later on, her daughter Cricket Brown . Each person gets a single scene but feels utterly real, with Will Dagger a standout as the cousin, leaking needy bravado, and Constance Shulman very funny as the funeral director, determined to stage a party for a host who refuses to throw one. 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. Like “Well, I’ll Let You Go,” “Othello” is a story of marital suspicion: the Moor sees his wife as a stranger. But, of course, he is looking in the wrong direction. Iago brags, “I am not what I am,” revelling in his ability to disguise himself without changing at all. He views the other actors as pawns, speaking in riddles that take on fresh meaning when the performer he addresses also plays his wife: “It is as sure as you are Roderigo / Were I the Moor I would not be Iago / In following him, I follow but myself.” He sees the world both more clearly and less clearly, because it’s all a game to him: move a prop, hit a nerve. In Bedlam’s chilling “temptation scene,” Quinn’s self-assured, genial Othello arrives as a man in love, then shrivels like a punctured balloon. His insecurities aren’t so hard to tap: his racialized self-loathing, his fear that all women are whores, his anxiety that he is unworthy of love. In a world saturated in hatred, Othello is not a difficult man to direct—Iago just needs to find the right trigger, and let it all unfold. ♦