Performing an Old Contracting

First, a quick congratulatory cheer for Jim Warren and Ralph Alan Cohen on the announcement of their winning the Governor's Award for the Arts. Truly well-deserved. Their work at the American Shakespeare Center is an inspiration to thousands, and to me. Below, you'll find my thoughts on Measure for Measure, playing at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, which would not exist but for the vision of Jim and Ralph -Grant Mudge.

...Went to the Blackfriars' last Sunday night and saw Measure for Measure performed by the resident company. They have really settled into terrific productions over the last two years and it's a treat to see them doing so well.

It was fun, too, to see the play with James Alexander Bond's Spring '08 Richmond Shakespeare Theatre production so freshly in mind. Just the lyrics of the play's primary song, for instance, brought Andrew Hamm's spelndid melody back so forcefully there were tears in my eyes. More on that in a minute.

This production was directed by Patrick Tucker, whose "Original Shakespeare Company" appeared several times at the Globe in London, and whom I had the pleasure of meeting at several conferences, including the Teaching Shakespeare Conference in Chicago in 1998. Also---David Hall, whom we had in to teach a class this past January on Sound and Rhythm in Performance (see pics and video post here), was a part of Tucker's 'original' company.

Patrick's work with cue scripts has been thoroughly interesting. The likely argument is that Shakespeare's company received only their own lines of a play---the whole text being too valuable and too time consuming to keep recopying for rehearsals. See Patrick's book: Secrets of Acting Shakespeare: the Original Approach.

With incredibly strong performers in the ASC's resident company (like John Harrell, Allison Glenzer--deliciously "Overdone" in her role--- Gregory Jon Phelps and Rene Thorton, Jr. to name a few) the rich language of Shakespeare is deliciously clear in this production. So too, with last year's Winter's Tale and Love's Labours Lost, both of which I enjoyed very much but the latter of which I adored.

(Sidenote, it was during that LLL last November that an infant gurgled aloud just before Berowne says "...and when Love speaks!" He looked up into the balcony toward the child and smiled--the audience laughed, and he finished the line: "the voice of all the Gods makes heaven drowsy with the harmony." Only in live theatre, and only when you can SEE the audience.)

This, in contrast to such empyrean sentiments, is as profane Measure as you're likely to see, even by the play's own ribald standards. True, it is about lechery, illegitimate pregnancy, the lust of an apparently virtuous man, pimps, prostitutes and ultimately imprisonment and death-by-beheading. Syphillis jokes, flatulence jokes, body part jokes, and bawds abound. So we're not really looking for loftiness. And apart from one erection joke that I could tell was hugely informative in rehearsal (but should have remained there), none of the bawdiness ran afoul of the play's, ahem, meatier matter.

And there it is. Amongst all of the tawdry bawdry, among all the intricacies of a convoluded plot (Angelo will never know he's sleeping with the wrong woman, it'll be dark!) is a perplexing leading character, Vincentio--the Duke of Vienna, who manipulates and manuevers everyone in the play toward one end or another. He places the strict conservative Angelo in power and "leaves town," then donning a Friar's habit to pass among his citizenry ostensibly to improve their morals in ways he can't as the Duke. We are left to guess at his motivations, and shake our heads at his outright cruelty to the novitiate nun, Isabella.

The Duke tells her that her brother is dead (I'll let you see the play to ascertain his truthfulness), but the manner in which he does it cannot be considered anything but cruel. Why, then?

As the Duke, Blackfriars' newcomer John Pasha is able to carry the play--it feels like the Duke is in every scene---and his strength of voice and presence are terrific. I wanted to see more vulnerability in him, but his choices were certainly valid on their own. But the question of what Shakespeare was getting at with the Duke comes down to two bits of text, and one's a song:

Duke:
He, who the sword of heaven will bear
Should be as holy as severe;
Pattern in himself to know,
Grace to stand, and virtue go;
More nor less to others paying
Than by self offences weighing.
Shame to him whose cruel striking
Kills for faults of his own liking!
Twice treble shame on Angelo,
To weed my vice and let his grow!
O, what may man within him hide,
Though angel on the outward side!
How many likeness made in crimes,
Making practice on the times,
To draw with idle spiders’ strings
Most pond’rous and substantial things!
Craft against vice I must apply:
With Angelo to-night shall lie
His old betrothed but despis’d:
So disguise shall, by the disguis’d,
Pay with falsehood false exacting,
And perform an old contracting. [Exit.]

This song pops up seemingly out of nowhere. It takes us into an act break, but scholars disagree about it. Some say it's Middleton, others argue "obvious" lacunal chunks. Personally I like the feeling of finality it gives to the first half but must acknowledge the weirdness of its verse structure.

In the ASC production, Pasha (as the Duke) really begins to sing. He has an enormous, Broadway voice, which he uses here to hint that the Duke might be a little mad. But the passage does still feel a bit out of place.

Which leads me to the core of it all. Are we to see the Duke as playwright? As puppeteer manipulating the strings of everyone onstage? Or do we see him through a kind of divine-right-of-kings lens in which he plays the role of God? Dressed as a holy man but always deciding things for his people, are we to think Shakespeare is angry at this God? That the Duke, for all his 'divine benevlence' is a venomous depiction of the cruelty of God? Shakespeare certainly knew the difficulty of pregnancy before wedlock. It's almost as if he is finally coming round to proclaim justice on his own actions:

The very mercy of the law cries out
Most audible, even from his proper tongue,'
An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!'
Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;
Like doth quit like, and MEASURE still FOR MEASURE.

In general I don't think we're meant to know. Ultimately, Shakespeare leaves it up to us to decide Isabella's choice at the end of the play, sisterhood or marriage, chastity or adult knowledge. Which moment you'll now have to see to ascertain. If you saw the RS production in Febraury, you know the choice our Isabella made.

Otherwise in the ASC production: Harrell is a delightful Lucio, one I'd like to have seen push his insolence with others even a little farther. But the performance recalls much of Harrell's great skill with words, always deliberate, always fun, and always crystal clear: from Holofernes to Camilo to Benedick and Tartuffe, (just to name a few that it's been my privilege to see) Harrell remains an excellent example of the kind of performer that would have drawn audiences back to the Blackfriars of 400 years past--over and again even as they do today. Wishing I'd seen his Volpone or Richard III. He'll try the supreme wordsmith monarch next with a different Richard: the Second.

James Keegan's Pompey reflects a versatile leading man who can ribbon his beard right along with the clowns and succeed in the task. It's not necessarily comic genius--while he IS funny, he just feels a little out of his element in the direct address comedy---but the strength of the fey Pompeii, the delightful character he's created we enjoy tremendously. I'm looking forward to his Lear.

Our own alum Stephen Lorne Williams (Prospero in the RSF Tempest in 2007) joined the ASC company this season and is a delightful and authentic Escalus. His trial scene of the bawd Pompey and the drunken fool Froth (a nicely convincing Alyssa Wilmoth) was simply a treat, very sweet and ringing completely true. Keegan coming to sit on his lap, nothing compared to Williams' embarrssed grin at the bizarreness of the situation.

I've been wanting to see Sarah Fallon ever since the Professional Theatre Training Program (PTTP) at the University of Delaware began inviting me up to audition their students. We've hired several actors from the school, all fabulous, and Ms. Fallon seems no exception. Her Isabella is at one and the same time somehow the hesitant novitiate in a sisterhood and a woman coming into the peak of her life's strength, vibrancy and adulthood. It's a fascinating portrayal, marked by her shattered visage upon arriving to see the Duke, to plead for justice, thinking her brother dead.

Word among the actors and staff is that the King Lear they're performing is truly outstanding. With Keegan in the title role, Williams as Gloucester, Glenzer and Fallon as Goneril and Regan, Phelps and Pasha as Edmund and Edgar and Harrell as the Fool, I can't wait.