Tulsa Shakespeare Company & Theatre North: Othello
Tulsa Performing Arts Center
October 25, 2025
“I swear I used to understand how words work,” I whispered to myself during the first 10 minutes of Tulsa Shakespeare Company and Theatre North’s recent co-production of Othello. As Iago took the stage and started into his opening lines, I leaned way forward, listening hard, lightly panicking—my eyes narrowed in that “turning down the radio to drive better in the rain” squint—as I felt keenly the absence of every single IQ point I’m sure I lost during Covid.
Welcome to watching a Shakespeare play in 2025. If you’re not addicted to short-form content, you’ll probably be fine. For the rest of us, those first 10 minutes are likely to be rough.
It’s not that the actor was hard to understand. Quite the opposite: Karam Alkhatib’s speech was as natural-sounding as you can get in a production of Shakespeare. It’s more that a 17th-century peasant apparently had more capacity for focus and comprehension of complex language than I do anymore.
After a while, though, once I stopped fighting my own brain fog and surrendered to the experience, I started to be able to process it—and the play started hitting with a freshness, edge, and emotional depth that’s a quite a bit harder to come by in the attention-shredding dumb zone of my phone.
After a long slow spell, Shakespeare-wise, Tulsa is suddenly experiencing a Bard-issance, thanks in part to Tulsa Shakespeare Company. Launched last year, the troupe takes a “language immersion” approach to these 400-year-old plays: throw the viewer in at the deep end and they’ll probably eventually swim (or at least doggy paddle). Directed by Brock England, the actors speak at regular conversational speed: no weighty pauses or emphatic iambic pentameter. They’re not going to wait for you to follow: they just go.
Pinned to your seat, with escape via scrolling not an option, your choices are “keep up” or “just vibe with the action”—both of which, in my experience, make for an enjoyable time with this troupe’s shows, whether or not I catch everything they’re throwing. The speed with which they get through the text also means you’re not in the theater for five hours, which is a kindness.