Why should you catch Theatre for a New Audience’s Othello at Intiman? Because, depending on your familiarity with Shakespeare’s tragedy and/or luck with previous stagings, it may be the first time you’ve ever really seen it.

Director Arin Arbus handles the play with an extraordinary clarity. A child could understand what’s happening yet the production isn’t childish. Arbus lets us look past whatever usually gets in the way of our settling into Shakespeare—like the knowledge that we’re in the presence of a Classic—and lays the play before us as if it were a terrific old text she’d just lucked into rediscovering. Such an approach has its hazards but they’re worth the rewards.

Aside from an almost unintelligible opening 10 minutes or so that passes by at low volume and high speed, there isn’t a wasted phrase. And there’s no pretense in interpretation. This isn’t Shakespeare updated to the Roaring Twenties or transplanted on the moon. This is Othello, no more, no less. Iago (John Campion) destroys General Othello (Sean Patrick Thomas) by turning Othello’s all-encompassing love for new wife Desdemona (Elisabeth Waterston) into lethal jealousy. Why? “I hate the Moor!” screams Iago, who’s been denied a promotion. Campion pounces on the line like an angry dog unleashed…and we’re off.

The show, accompanied by a cannily clean design aesthetic (a chair or table here, a bed brought on there, acting areas that are sometimes merely pools of light), relies on creating its physical production out of physicality. That’s occasionally dicey: Most of the ensemble at some point or another engages in the hand-waving, finger-pointing, face-making school of illustrative acting that puts them an iamb’s distance from ham. Lucas Hall’s handsome Cassio, Othello’s lieutenant, could almost be one of the dewy, silly lovers from Shakespeare’s raucous comedies. And we wait for Campion, whose magnificently mercurial Iago plays the buffoon while playing everyone else for a fool, to rub his hands together and howl “Mwah-ha-ha-haaaa!”

Happily, Arbus encourages vitality without allowing stupidity. Her take is so down-to-earth that the climactic crime of passion feels not like the most famous scene of a famous story but more a domestic dispute gone quietly, horribly awry—two people battling each other through blind love. Othello, in his furious affection, wants Desdemona to admit she’s wounded him. She’s too innocently enamored of him to comprehend the depths of his irrational rage. (Waterston’s whole body quivers with every fearful declaration of defiance. Desdemona is early on referred to as a “fair warrior” and she’s exactly that here: a woman nervously holding her ground but holding it nonetheless.)

Yet by freeing the text of its cultural burdens—neatly avoiding any racial or Freudian overtones—Arbus also seems to have removed some of its weight. It’s impossible to be bored or confused by the production but it’s a challenge, too, to be moved beyond a glowing appreciation for its lucid dramatics (the show flies by at two-and-half-hours).

The emotional stakes aren’t raised high enough, which may be the reason for the charismatic Thomas’s ineffectual lead performance. Why, for instance, doesn’t Othello, who’s obviously capable of violence, react more strongly when Desdemona’s father refers to him as “soot”? And when Othello realizes the horrifying enormity of his misjudgment regarding Desdemona, why aren’t we in tears?

The production reaches its greatest heights in the quietest moments, when Iago is ever-so-slightly mumbling the Moor into a state of heightened suspicion or, better, just before Othello enters the bedroom to suffocate Desdemona: Emilia (Kate Forbes), Iago’s long-suffering wife, brushes Desdemona’s hair (“Preparing the corpse,” said my opening night date) while the two women bemoan female oppression. It’s in such a scene that Arbus’s ease reveals lines or whole passages to which we’ve never paid enough attention.

And that’s the show’s true gift: letting us feel smart for noticing what’s always been there. By offering Shakespeare unencumbered, Arbus, living up to the company name, does indeed allow theater to reach a new, and potentially even greater, audience.