I was so discombobulated by my first encounter with Theo Severyn and Christopher Korkian, I could barely focus on my audition. “I’m auditioning for Iago,” I announced and closed my eyes, attempting to summon the soliloquy I was so confident I’d memorized. I lay with Cassio lately—and then, to my horror, nothing. My mind was blank but for the image of Theo slamming Christopher against the door, Theo wetly kissing the back of his own hand, pressing his palm against Christopher’s mouth. I opened my eyes. “Sorry,” I said. “Can I be on book?”
“Certainly, dear,” said Wanda. “You didn’t need to memorize anything, you know.”
Naturally, my memory returned as soon as I held my printed-out soliloquy in my hand. Afterward I lingered by the door, frustrated with myself. “I just have to say,” I said, “I really want to be Iago.”
“That’s useful to know,” Wanda said warmly. “I’ll bear that in mind.” She peered through her cat’s-eye glasses at her clipboard, ready to call in the next auditioner.
She didn’t understand. I had never wanted anything as desperately as I wanted to be Iago. How could I explain? “It’s just,” I said, clutching the printout against my chest, “I feel like I really get Iago. Like, I am Iago.”
I remember that Wanda’s earrings were bunches of grapes made from pink pearls. They jingled merrily as she threw back her head and laughed.
“Goodness,” she said. “That’s a bit alarming, isn’t it?”
I left the audition certain I’d blown it. But six days later, the cast list went up, and there it was: Iago – Fay Vasquez-Rabinowitz. Thursday night only, but still. I was distantly aware of Nell speaking to me, congratulating me, reassuring me. I didn’t respond. All I could do was stare at my name, at the word Iago, at the space between the two.
On Friday afternoon, the full cast met in the Meetinghouse Loft for the first read-through. Wanda seated us all in a circle and began, as she liked to do, by asking the leads to describe their characters. Bottom went first: “When he’s not on the battlefield or giving a speech, Othello is secretly very unsure of himself.” Daylily Jones went second: “Desdemona is very trusting, and she always sees the best in people. If something goes wrong, her first instinct is to blame herself.” That sort of thing.
“Now, Fay, in your audition,” said Wanda, “you spoke a bit about feeling a connection to the character of Iago. What does he mean to you?”
As a perennial bit player, I usually considered this exercise a tedious waste of time. But now that I was a lead, I fancied myself to be under intense scrutiny from my castmates. I cast a pained glance at Nell beside me, but she looked lost in thought, no doubt preoccupied with her own impending précis of Emilia.
“Well,” I said, looking around the circle of faces, “Iago is evil, for sure. But I don’t think he would be evil if he lived in a time when it was socially acceptable to be gay.”
There was scattered laughter.
“Seriously,” I said. “He wouldn’t need to fuck up Othello’s marriage—”
“Please, Fay: screw up,” said Wanda. That was what passed for school-appropriate language at Idlewild.
“He wouldn’t need to screw up Othello’s marriage if he could get married himself. Iago, I mean. Like, to another dude.”
I was flagrantly bluffing. These were not my authentic thoughts on the nature of Iago. I did not truly believe that Iago would cease to be evil if the Venetian government legalized gay marriage—though gay marriage was itself such a pie-in-the-sky abstraction in 2002, even at Idlewild, that I invoked it mostly as a rhetorical device. Still, the shallowness of my argument embarrassed me even then. I resorted to it only because (a) I couldn’t find the language to articulate precisely why I did perceive Iago as a queer character, and (b) I knew it would create sufficient discomfort to preempt any follow-up questions.
The gambit worked. With a briskness just shy of sarcasm, Wanda said, “Thank you for sharing your thoughts,” and moved on to the other Iago. “What about you, Theo? Do you agree with Fay?”
“Uh,” said Theo. “Not so much.” He was sitting rather bizarrely in his black plastic chair, his spine twisted in a catlike contortion so that one arm remained draped over the back of the seat even as he turned to face Wanda. His legs were crossed, and one foot jiggled madly in the air, creating a slight breeze that rippled the fringe of the scarf around his neck. He was, on the whole, a strange combination of excess energy and total languor. “It’s not that deep,” he said. “I think he’s just a dickwad.”
The cast laughed. My face burned.
“That’s no way to speak about your character,” said Wanda. “No one is just a dickwad. Is there anything about Iago that you can personally relate to?”
On the chair next to Theo, Christopher Korkian (who was cast in the role of Friday night Cassio) said, “The fact that he’s a dickwad.”
The cast laughed. Theo pretended to be outraged. “Bitch-ass mothafucka, I’ma choke you out,” he said, doing one of his character voices. He pulled off his scarf—it was a camel-colored tartan, the Burberry pattern, though I didn’t know that at the time—and approached Christopher as if to strangle him with it. Christopher leaped off his chair, and Theo began to chase him around the room, scarf brandished. People giggled and shrieked and ducked for cover. As Wanda struggled to restore order, Nell muttered, “This is why you don’t give leads to sophomores.”
It took quite some time before we were able to begin the actual read-through, which itself was even slower going. Wanda, a strict Shakespearean constructionist, was not in the habit of making cuts for length or comprehensibility, and she was determined to read through the full text in one sitting. Apart from Othello and Desdemona, all roles had been double-cast; for fairness’s sake, Wanda instructed the role-sharing actors to take turns reading alternate scenes, which was exactly as confusing and inefficient as it sounds. Through the window, the sky darkened. The cast’s excitement turned to torpor. And as I read aloud my Iago lines, alternating scene by scene with Theo, distress set in.
How vividly I could visualize what I wanted my Iago to look like! How clearly I saw his wickedness externalized as telltale sissy traits that set him apart from everyone else: the effete flicks of the wrist, the lightly sibilant pronunciation, the fine dark clothing that clung suggestively to narrow hips. Eyeliner, perhaps. The image set my heart racing with joyful narcissism, a full-body epiphany that this was it—with “it” existing simultaneously as “the physical manifestation of what I like best about myself” and “that which I most wish to fuck.”
But this queer-coded villainy relied on a gender transgression that moved in only one direction. During that first read-through, I made the sickening discovery that I could not perform effeminacy—I physically couldn’t. When I flicked my wrist for emphasis, I saw myself as a hand-flapping teenybopper ditz. I pictured myself in eyeliner and realized I would be indistinguishable from Juniper Green or Rollerblading Maddy or any other average-faced girl in drugstore makeup. Tight trousers and half-unbuttoned shirts would only draw attention to my breasts and stomach and other excess flesh so anathema to the gaunt Iago of my Platonic ideal. I’d so looked forward to delivering lines like “My lord, you know I love you” and “I am your own forever,” but when I did so I heard my own voice, shrill and pink, and wanted to weep over the wrongness of it.
How unfair, I thought, gazing across the circle at Theo. He had no ear for the rhythms of iambic pentameter. He mispronounced carrack and hyssop and other words I’d gone to the trouble to look up in the dictionary beforehand. He rattled out his longer speeches at the machine-gun clip that always betrays the novice Shakespearean actor (see Romeo + Juliet, 1996, dir. Baz Luhrmann). And yet he was better suited to the role of Iago than I would ever be, simply by virtue of his boyness—his slim-hipped, snakelike body, twisted impossibly in that black plastic chair; his black turtleneck and cashmere scarf and sleek hair that flopped asymmetrically over one eye; his arm draped indolently over the back of Christopher’s seat, creating on first glance the illusion that his arm was around Christopher’s shoulders. What a waste. Theo Severyn didn’t know what he had.
After the read-through, walking west across Union Square in the windy dark, I tried to explain all this to Nell.
“If you can’t be effeminate,” said Nell, “maybe you can be manly. Combat boots, dog tags. Shave your head. You’re supposed to be in the military, right?”
She didn’t understand, I thought. But then neither did I. “I don’t know,” I said. “I really think Iago should be pretty.”
“Well, you’re pretty,” said Nell.
“Sure,” I said. (I never thanked Nell for anything. There would come a time, later, when I wanted to, but by then the backlog was too vast; I didn’t know where to begin.) “But a girl is supposed to be pretty. I want Iago to be pretty in a way that feels creepy and wrong, so the audience will get that he’s gay.”
“You think being gay is creepy and wrong?”
Of course I didn’t. Did I? Unable to formulate a counterargument on the spot, I hesitated.
“Oh my god, you’re a homophobe,” she said. “I see it now. You want to turn all the gay guys straight so they’ll do you.” It was a joke. Nell often defused real problems by presenting them as jokes. At the time I failed to appreciate what a talent it was.
The wind blew harder. We paused at a sidewalk kiosk selling winter accessories—cheap hats and gloves and pashminas that would no doubt unravel within hours after purchase. Nell was drawn to the newsboy caps; the surly vendor provided her with a hand mirror so she could check herself out as she tried them on. Idly, I examined the cloches, the berets, the scarves. I picked up a slate-blue scarf with a long fringe. Experimentally, I flung it over my neck.
“Hey, that looks nice,” said Nell. She held up the mirror so I could see myself. Only my face was visible in it, not my body, and visibility was low in the orange light of the streetlamps. My first thought, upon seeing the reflection, was that I looked like someone else.
Another cold gust tore through Union Square. I tightened the scarf around my neck. In the mirror, I saw the fringe ripple in the wind.
“Five dollars,” said the vendor, and I bought it.
From that night onward, using the scarf, I began to practice. I did it alone, after Nell had gone home for the night, or on weekend mornings after I got out of the shower. Standing in front of my bathroom mirror, I tossed the scarf over one shoulder and recited my lines, making my voice as deep as it would go. “My lord, you know I love you,” I droned. “He hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly.” I flipped the scarf, beheld myself from another angle. “It’s not that deep,” I told the mirror. “I think he’s just a dickwad.” I tried again, pushing my voice even lower. “Just a dickwad.”
It hurt my throat to speak this way for more than a minute at a time. I figured that my vocal cords, like any muscle, needed to be trained and strengthened. Night after night I pushed them past the point of pain, hoping the exercise would pay off in time for the play.