There’s a sense of occasion to the new “Othello” now at the Barrymore, on Broadway—Denzel Washington, one of our last true movie legends, is playing the titular role, and Jake Gyllenhaal, no slouch in the stardom department himself, appears as his evil saboteur, Iago. Producers are charging north of nine hundred dollars for orchestra seats, the kind of ludicrous, norm-busting event pricing that somehow drives demand; the sidewalk outside buzzes with excitement. Inside the theatre, though, it’s another story.

In Shakespeare’s oddly comic tragedy, jealousy is the prime mover. As the Venetians and the Ottoman Turks squabble over Cyprus in the background, the men before us quarrel over everything—a woman, a job, a handkerchief. Iago, a veteran soldier, hates Othello, his general, a Moor who fights for Venice: Iago’s missed out on a promotion, and he also half believes a rumor that Othello has seduced his wife, Emilia (Kimber Elayne Sprawl). His hatred devours all but his capacity to lie and plot; “I am not what I am,” he says. Iago turns his sights to ruining Othello’s new wife, Desdemona (Molly Osborne), with false clues and poisonous innuendo. Envious of what Othello has, he takes it.

You need energy and clarity to make “Othello” work—to make the language sing and to propel the deceptions forward—especially because the vicious Iago hasn’t got an actual goal, just an appetite for chaos and a ready little knife. The director, Kenny Leon, is uninterested in clarity, though, and the vibe is mild depression: a pre-show projection reading “The Near Future” doesn’t turn out to be particularly useful, and the dreary, gray-columned set, designed by Derek McLane, looks like a parking garage. (Dede Ayite dresses the soldiers in de-rigueur fatigues, the Venetian senators in suits.) Famously, Iago hurls racist abuse behind Othello’s back, calling him, for example, an “old black ram,” and that poison, too, worms its way into Othello’s mind. “I am black and have not those soft parts of conversation that chamberers have,” he says to himself, alone. In this production, Emilia is Black, as are some soldiers in Iago’s platoon. The casting choices might raise a whole host of interesting questions about how this Venice reflects our own time, but Leon doesn’t foreground, or even really acknowledge, them.

Leon and Washington have had triumphs together, namely the Broadway productions of August Wilson’s “Fences,” in 2010, and Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” in 2014. In those shows, Leon turned his eye for behavior to prop-heavy naturalism, where he seems most graceful and at ease. Here, there’s very little reality in his direction—Emilia switches randomly among the jobs of lady’s maid, glamorous chief of staff, and camo-wearing lieutenant, for instance—and too few people look at one another when they talk. At least Gyllenhaal, crazy as a scorpion, makes a point of facing the people he’s bamboozling, jabbing his hand at them as if he could drive his lies in by force. He and Andrew Burnap, playing Cassio, one of Iago’s many persuadable fools, find nice moments together, largely because they seem like they’re in conversation. The rest of the time, if there are more than a handful of actors onstage they drift into a half circle, the hallmark of amateur staging.

When Washington enters, we sense, for one bright moment, the Othello that might have been: he charges in, tucking his white shirt into his blue trousers, and here is his Don Pedro from “Much Ado About Nothing” (the Kenneth Branagh film from 1993), still forceful and on the go. As long as he’s joshing with other soldiers, or glad-handing senators, he moves comfortably. And, early in the first act, Washington’s touch with the verse is casual, knowing, deft. The trouble hits when he greets his “soul’s joy,” Desdemona—who is dressed in a series of Political Wife pants suits—and exhibits only a faint, avuncular enthusiasm. As Leon’s production toils blandly along, Washington employs a light, high delivery, lapsing into vagueness and singsong. Nothing commands his full attention. Othello is supposed to be “declined into the vale of years,” but Washington moves past what might be a portrait of an overtaxed old general into apathy.

Sinking onto Desdemona’s bed, reciting his lines without notable crescendo or feeling, Washington puts Osborne into a weary headlock, and then kind of leans on her to death. As Act V plays out, Othello is often found sitting on this bed, staring out into space. Watching Washington’s gotta-take-a-load-off finish reminded me of his most recent Broadway performance, in 2018—as Hickey in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh,” another presumed cuckold who, it turns out, has murdered his wife. In that production, the director George C. Wolfe had Washington conclude the play sitting in a chair at center stage. As in “Othello,” he stopped engaging with the cast around him, delivering his monologue like an aria, straight out to the audience.

Maybe Washington just doesn’t like blocking? My suspicion is that a director in a rehearsal room, looking at the megastar as he runs his lines, thinks, If only people could experience what we see here, without necessarily calculating the difference between that small room and a Broadway house. But these ill-spent moments do, I think, matter. Ticket prices aside, the theatre really cannot afford to waste a chance with Washington like this. He values the stage, and returns to it often, but, at seventy years old, he’s started hinting in interviews about retirement. It’s heartening, therefore, that he has been talking about a film of “Othello.” I can see it in my mind’s eye already—his magnificently tired face filling a screen, where we can finally see the flickers of waning nobility and waxing madness. Also, it’ll cost maybe twenty-five bucks.

There are still bargains to be had this week in live theatre, however. On Twenty-third Street, at a long, narrow, no-frills space called Nancy Manocherian’s the cell theatre, you can pay fifty dollars and get a “Friday Night Lights”-inflected synthwave-musical retelling of Homer’s Iliad, performed by a joyfully committed ensemble. “The Trojans,” written and composed by the hugely gifted Leegrid Stevens and directed by Eric Paul Vitale, is that rara avis: a gorgeously produced downtown epic, somehow both trash-based (the costume designer, Ashley Soliman, has made football armor out of knee-pad inserts, for example) and luxurious, rich in the way that theatre is meant to be rich—with imagination, intelligence, and potential.

On entry, the room looks like an Amazon warehouse, with boxes piled to the ceiling. If you take a minute to read the labels, though, something seems odd: the addresses all list places like Parthenon, Arkansas, and Athens, Georgia. The glum workers pushing their hydraulic carts and listening to a tinny boom box perk up the moment someone mentions the “old days,” when their town resounded with the rivalry between two high-school football teams, the Trojans and the Highland Kings. Soon, the workers are reënacting the run-up to a long-ago homecoming game—way back in the nineteen-eighties, I’m guessing, based on the occasional Walkman. Back then, the prom queen, Heather (Deshja Driggs), left her boyfriend, Johnny (Roger Casey), for the allure of Highland’s arts program, and everyone freaked out.

Is Heather Helen of Troy? She certainly causes mayhem, as the teen-agers drive their cars—those same hydraulic carts, weaving only inches from the audience—toward disaster. Paris is the coy Daris (Arya Grace Gaston), and the doomed hero Achilles has become the grim-faced Trojan running back Keeley (Erin Treadway, in boxer braids and golden work boots), who refuses to take the field after Johnny utters a fatal insult. Stevens has slyly flipped the sides in Homer’s poem, but we’re not here for a one-to-one narrative mapping of a Bronze Age tragedy. Instead, we’ve come for the same reason that scouts go to high-school football finals: to see stunning talents like Casey and Treadway before everyone else hears about them, and to get back in touch with our love of the game. ♦