STAGE

Shakespeare generally is performed by players directed to speak “trippingly on the tongue,” but in a Chicago production of “Othello,” they don’t speak at all. “Silent Othello,” produced by the 4-year-old Italian American Theater, tells the tale of the Moor of Venice without the bard’s poetry, and also without sets or secondary characters. The five actors on the bare nightclub stage rely instead on mime, dance motions and traditional Italian gestures--many of them impolite. “We don’t pretend it’s Shakespeare, but you could consider it a mirror to Shakespeare,” director Frank Melcori says. “We don’t have the verbal techniques to do spoken Shakespeare, but we have other techniques we can use to tell a story.”