Is Othello a Moor, as the full title The Tragedie of Othello, the Moore of Venice would indicate? Is he Black, as he calls himself in Shakespeare’s play and several others characters call him? Would Shakespeare even have recognized a distinction? Yet academics do cross swords over these questions, at the same time insisting that race is a “construct.” (Never mind that they’re discussing an imaginary person in a play, who has no genetic substance at all.) As the director Kenny Leon demonstrated on Broadway with Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, he’s adept at extrapolating from local to universal concerns. With any luck, his limited-run Othello, likewise on Broadway, will blast polemical attitudinizing to smithereens. Possessed of a wiliness of thought as hypnotic as his statuesque physical presence, the 70-year-old Denzel Washington assumes a title role he first assayed at 22. His Shakespeare portfolio has expanded considerably in the meantime, what with appearances as Coriolanus and Richard III at the Public Theater in Central Park, Brutus in Julius Caesar on Broadway, and Macbeth in the movies (plus he’s counting down to King Lear in a few years’ time—prospectively his last hurrah). As Othello’s nemesis, the snake in the grass he calls “honest Iago,” Jake Gyllenhaal brings very different assets to the table. A dyslexic Shakespeare virgin, Gyllenhaal started prepping with a Columbia professor and a Royal Shakespeare Company-credentialed acting coach more than eight months ago. Hornswoggling everyone in sight requires a lot of fast talk; on the list of Shakespeare’s longest parts, Iago, with his 1,088 lines, takes second place only to Hamlet, with 1,506. “Maybe, I should have started with a sonnet,” Gyllenhaal mused in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, adding that he likes to freak himself out. “The feeling I want to have is, ‘Can I do it?’” Past history, as we know, is no guarantee of future performance. Still, this is the guy who cannonballed into the deep end of the musical-theater pool starring in the latest Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s brain-twisting Sunday In the Park With George. Said his big sister and role model Maggie Gyllenhaal, “I’ve never seen him happier than when he’s onstage singing.” Let’s see how happy he gets playing Shakespeare. —Matthew Gurewitsch