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WASHINGTON, Nov. 17- In the past, white actors who played Othello inevitably became obsessed with makeup. "The whole thing will be in the lips and the color," Laurence Olivier observed in a 1964 Life magazine interview, in the midst of preparing his legendary portrayal. "I'll just use a little tiny touch of lake and a lot more brown and a little mauve."

The rules over the centuries for Caucasians contriving Othello's blackness were, by the standard of modern sensibilities, comically rigid: "A tawny tinge is now the color used for the gallant Moor," instructed an 1827 book on theater makeup. Today, of course, an Othello in blackface might justifiably be subject to catcalls. So is there any way a white performer can comfortably be cast in the part?

Patrick Stewart and the British director Jude Kelly have come upon one: eliminate the makeup altogether. In their kinetic, earth-toned, eye-filling production at the Shakespeare Theater here, Othello, played by Mr. Stewart, is white. The Venetians, from noble Cassio to twisted Iago to doomed Desdemona, are black. And in the race reversing, the company seeks to shatter stereotypes and remind playgoers of the endlessly adaptive nature of Shakespeare's exploration of otherness.

Thanks to some moving and polished performances by Teagle F. Bougere as Cassio, Franchelle Stewart Dorn as Emilia, Patrice Johnson as Desdemona and above all, Mr. Stewart's captivating, devastatingly human portrayal, this "Othello" does not reveal itself as a curiosity but as a fascinating study of the fragile border between possessive love and obliterating paranoia.

Interestingly, the racial turning of the tables does not tilt the play toward ham-handed irony; rather, it tends to take the racial issue off the table. Though a few glaring casting problems, having more to do with technique than philosophy, deny the production the glowing mark of distinction it might have earned, the overall sensitivity and quality of the effort is ample justification for the risks its creators took.

The vigorous, sinewy Mr. Stewart, wearing a hoop earring and a serpentine tattoo on the back of his shaved head, is Ms. Kelly's chief insurance that her version never seems a mere trick. In this modern-dress production, she places him at the helm of a mercenary force that occupies Cyprus, rendered strikingly by Robert Innes Hopkins as a bomb-strafed fortress. (A romantic score by Michael Ward adds Italianate warmth.) The most controversial use of color in the play, however, may be in Mr. Hopkins's costumes: the Venetians' plum-colored fatigues (the Cypriots wear tangerine) make the actors look like members of a United Nations peacekeeping unit as outfitted by Banana Republic.

Othello himself is often played as a towering man of honor, a virtual stone figure on a pedestal. Untethered in other important ways from the role's history, Mr. Stewart finds in his Othello a charmed soldier of fortune more interested in making love than war. There is a sigh-inducing passion in his poetic recall of how he wooed Desdemona with words. "She loved me for the dangers I had passed/ And I loved her that she did pity them," he says, and it's abundantly clear that this is the conquest he most highly treasures.

The speech is delivered during an early scene in which Othello is engaged by Venice's noblemen to rout the Turks from Cyprus; it's also one of the moments in which the play's racial tensions are most apparent. Brabantio, Desdemona's father (Darrell Carey), opposes his daughter's secret marriage, and he makes his objections plain.

In traditional productions, surrounded by a roomful of white faces, Othello seems a figure of strength and sympathy. But when Othello is a white military leader-- what more recognizable authority figure exists in Western culture?-- it's hard to feel particularly sorry for him. It's an instance in which race reversal does not jibe with an audience's sense of the way the world beyond the theater works. More troublesome in this production, however, is the disappointingly wan battle of wills between Othello and his nemesis, Iago. The villainous underling who flatly announces, "I hate the Moor," is in some ways the play's most accessible character. He speaks to the audience constantly; we watch the drama unfold, in a sense, over his shoulder. Ms. Kelly's notion is an Iago who is a bitterly frustrated minor officer, passed over for promotions and even asked, humiliatingly, to carry Othello's luggage ashore.

But Ron Canada provides a dishearteningly wooden Iago, which robs his scenes with Mr. Stewart of their delicious cat-and-mouse aspect. The performance also unbalances Iago's encounters wiht Roderigo (Jimonn Cole), the jealous suitor he manipulates. Mr. Cole goes way over the top in his sniveling fool of a Roderigo, in what seems a vain attempt to energize his exchanges with Mr. Canada.

The tonic in this production comes in its portrayal of domestic disintegration. Ms. Johnson and Mr. Stewart have a winsome rapport that makes their marriage a true coupling, and until her fiery death scene, Ms. Dorn, as Iago's mate, conveys the dead-eyed complacency of a battered doormat. Mr. Stewart is never anything less than uncanny in his psychological portrait: it's like watching an autopsy on human feling. The precise moment at which Iago first plants doubt about Desdemona's constancy register's on Mr. Stewart's intense features; you sense the tragic events to follow in the terrifying blink of his eye.

This fine actor, so magnetic a Prospero in George Wolfe's 1995 "Tempest," seems to get better and better. Next time, it might be even more rewarding to see his Iago."

END OF REVIEW