Madison has a pair of significant theater premiers this weekend, with Blitz VIII and Carousel. Meanwhile, in Stoughton’s Veteran’s Park, Open Spaces Theatre Company had the opening night of its production of Othello on Wednesday, three days after a demolition derby in nearby Mandt Park. This is the sixth year the company has produced an outdoor Shakespeare play in Stoughton. Remaining performances are Saturday and Sunday at 6:30, plus a 1 p.m. show on Sunday. Tickets are $5 and the performance is about three hours, with minimal cuts to the script as far as I can tell. It’s bring your own seating but you can bring food as well.

Photos of Thursday evening’s performance are below. The setting is Newport, Rhode Island in the 1950s, and this plus the outdoor staging made it possible to introduce what may be the first pink bicycle ridden onstage in a production of Othello since Shakespeare’s time. A few of the actors have been in Madison productions. I saw Francisco Torres (Othello) in Broom Street’s Dancing in Cleo’s Café, and Nicole Gottleib (Desdemona) was in University Theatre’s The Rover. Andrea Kleiner (Emilia) has been in a number of Broom Street productions and was in Strollers’ All My Sons, Warren Hansen (Duke) was Catesby in Richard III, and Lukas Brasher-Fons (Roderigo) is one half of the Mazer Comedy performing duo.

John Gustafson (Iago) has also been in a number of local productions; the roles I associate most strongly with him are Louis in Angels in America and George in the film Going Great White (and God, I suppose), so I was interested in seeing his take on this role. Actually, given that one of the reasons Iago is so insidious is that none of the other characters begin to consider doubting his honesty until it’s too late, it makes sense to cast someone you don’t immediately associate with one of literature’s most infamous villains. While “John Gustafson played Iago in Stoughton’s production of Othello” sounds like a piece of news from Lake Wobegon, in actuality Gustafson gave a strong performance and pretty much owned the first half of the play. Iago may “hate the Moor” but he appears to love his game of vengeance. I especially liked the chemistry between Gustafson and Brasher-Fons, who brought out the humor in the role of Iago’s accomplice Roderigo without excessively milking it.

The two previous versions of Othello I’ve seen — Orson Welles’ film version and APT’s 2004 production — have had an influence on how I imagine the character sounds, so I had to work a little to endorse an Othello with a voice more in the tenor range speaking in a measured sort of way. Othello didn’t have the aggressive theatricality that Iago did but was rather more natural in his demeanor for much of the play.

The weather and location made for a pleasant setting to view a play. The park started getting dark around the start of the final scene, which allows for some stark but dramatic lighting.

And I’m no local historian but I think on Thursday night the words “What ho! What ho! A sail!” were spoken for the first time in the Stoughton Culver’s, at a cast gathering after the performance.