Who's got the power?

Yu Jin Ko is a Shakespeare scholar at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and our guest conversationalist for the Talk Back after the production of "Measure for Measure" 7 p.m. Saturday Aug. 21 at the Stonington Opera House on Deer Isle in Maine. He will be joined onstage by director Jeffrey Frace and Opera House artistic director Judith Jerome to talk about the play, the production and Shakespeare's life and times. Recently, I asked Yu Jin (whose name is pronounced Yoo Gin) to answer three questions. The first is below; the second is here and the third is here. You can buy tickets to join us Saturday, Aug. 21 (TONIGHT!) after the show. Bring your own questions!

AA: Who is the most powerful person in this play?

YJK: You have so many centers of power and the source of power is so different for each in this play. Harold Bloom [the literary scholar] suggests that the most captivating character in the play is Barnadine, the prisoner who refuses death because he has been out drinking the night before. He presents a kind of irrepressible vitality that escapes the whole moral system of the entire play. He embodies that superfluidity of artistic energy that Shakespeare always displays in his plays. In some sense, he is the most powerful character. But more conventionally, you’d have to choose among Angelo, the Duke and Isabella. For me, it’s Isabella. She might come across to some as prissy and puritanical. But beyond all of that, the value she puts on her chastity, which she values above her brother’s life, is a value that is integral to her sense of self and takes her out of circulation – erotic and commercial – defining Vienna, a very corrupt and sordid society into which the Taliban in the form of Angelo has moved. Curiously, Isabella is the most powerful character because she tries the hardest and with the most force to define herself away from the categories of selfhood available to her.

Taking the "Measure" of Flannery O'Connor

Several years ago on a visit to Savannah, I came upon Flannery O'Connor's house on Lafayette Square. Her childhood home is now a museum, but that didn't stop me from walking straight up to it and hugging it. Or hugging a corner of it. I've done this with the houses of several writers whose art has deeply influenced the way I see the world. The first time I went to Paris, I walked directly to Gertrude Stein's house and hugged it, too.

But Flannery O'Connor has been in my thoughts these days as I've been reading "Measure for Measure," running Aug. 19-29 as this summer's annual production of Shakespeare at the Stonington Opera House. Director Jeffrey Frace, who played Oberon in last year's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in Stonington, has a literary crush on O'Connor and decided to run "Measure" through the filter of her Southern Gothic style and Catholic sensibility. The production reportedly is "dripping kudzu and Spanish moss," according to Linda Nelson, executive director at the Opera House.

Here's what Frace says about O'Connor:

She creates characters and situations that are as real as she can imagine, and then, as events transpire she learns more about them. Often she’s surprised at what transpires. But she is interested in flawed characters, characters suffering from spiritual blindness and in need of grace. Sometimes that moment of grace arrives in this lifetime: often it is accompanied by violence and death. Shakespeare, uncharacteristically, was more merciful on his characters in Measure for Measure. At least they all live. It is a comedy, after all. But there is spiritual blindness a-plenty, and real suffering along the way. And what is at stake is more than the love life of a sympathetic young person or two: it is the health and welfare of a whole community.

Now, for a brief primer on O'Connor:

• She was born Mary Flannery O'Connor in Savannah, GA in 1925.
  
• Her work includes novels, short stories and essays.


• She studied writing at the famous Iowa Writers' Workshop with the likes of Robert Penn Warren. In her 20s, she was diagnosed with lupus, an autoimmune disease from which her father died when she was a teen. She died at age 39.


• She was obsessed with birds.


• Her work can be very funny and very creepy.


• It's likely her most famous work is "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," a short story about an argumentative southern family that meets a serial killer. You can see the cutting approach to the human condition in this line about the annoying grandmother in the story: "She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."


• Her work is deeply concerned with redemption -- and the tension between the Christian mission and un-Christian people.

That last part makes O'Connor a perfect fit for "Measure for Measure," which shines a surreal light on the workings of justice -- in the state, the city and in love.

Theatergoers always ask me the best way to prepare for attending a production of Shakespeare, and I encourage them to read the original text. This time, I also invite readers to pick up a copy of Flannery O'Connor's short stories and explore her world, too. She and Shakespeare have much to say to each other.

Is February too early be thinking about Shakespeare in August?

By Alicia Anstead
I've been thinking lately about the way the performing arts, and plays in particular, linger in our thoughts long after the curtain goes down. Plays, after all, are completely ephemeral. They happen, and they're gone. Except they're not. Think of the plays you've been to that have stayed with you -- whether because of the play itself (themes of love or death, for instance) or the circumstances in which you saw the play (the friend you were with or the phase you were going through). The poet T. S. Eliot talks about measuring life in coffee spoons. But some of us measure our lives in plays. I do at least.

But that's about what happens during a play or after a play. What about everything that happens before a play? A few weeks ago, Linda Nelson and Judith Jerome announced that Measure for Measure, directed by longtime friend of OHA Jeffrey Frace, is the play for Shakespeare in Stonington this summer. (Mark the dates: August 19-29, 2010.)

I couldn't be happier, in part because the experience starts now. Or rather, it started for me as soon as I heard the news. Immediately I turned to my handy cell-phone app PlayShakespeare.com and downloaded the text. For three days during a conference in New York City, I breathlessly read the play on my phone while riding the train to and from the event. At one point, I was so engrossed I missed my stop and ended up several stations away from my own. Wow, do I love when that happens, even if I'm late for something else.

On this read through, I was struck by the utter strangeness of Measure for Measure. It's called a problem play, but it's more than a problem play. It's a testy exploration of justice, mercy, personal agency and, once again, marriage. (Remember all the messiness about marriage last summer with A Midsummer Night's Dream?! If not, re-visit the blog posts that explore: I do, I don't, I might, I couldn't possibly "aspects" of marriage.) M4M is set in Old Vienna, but the themes of premarital pregnancy, enforcing the letter of the law, a woman's right to her own body and the shiftiness of politicians are all very relevant in the 21st century. Alas.

Thus begins our journey. Seven months before the show, the art has started to work its magic. I'll be checking in from time to time between now and summer with reports, tips and teasers about the play, the production and other related news. In the meantime, I'll be thinking -- and I hope you will be too -- about this question: When does art begin? When does it end? And what happens in the space between?

This is the first of 2010's posts on ShakeStonington, OHA's blog devoted to all things Shakespeare, created and edited by OHA's critic-in-residence Alicia Anstead. You can subscribe directly to ShakeStonington, and be alerted to all future updates, by going to shakestonington.blogspot.com.

Is February too early to think about Shakespeare in August?

By Alicia Anstead

I've been thinking lately about the way the performing arts, and plays in particular, linger in our thoughts long after the curtain goes down. Plays, after all, are completely ephemeral. They happen, and they're gone. Except they're not. Think of the plays you've been to that have stayed with you -- whether because of the play itself (themes of love or death, for instance) or the circumstances in which you saw the play (the friend you were with or the phase you were going through). The poet T. S. Eliot talks about measuring life in coffee spoons. But some of us measure our lives in plays. I do at least.

But that's about what happens during a play or after a play. What about everything that happens before a play? A few weeks ago, Linda Nelson and Judith Jerome announced that Measure for Measure, directed by longtime friend of OHA Jeffrey Frace, is the play for Shakespeare in Stonington this summer. (Mark the dates: August 19-29, 2010.)

I couldn't be happier, in part because the experience starts now. Or rather, it started for me as soon as I heard the news. Immediately I turned to my handy cell-phone app PlayShakespeare.com and downloaded the text. For three days during a conference in New York City, I breathlessly read the play on my phone while riding the train to and from the event. At one point, I was so engrossed I missed my stop and ended up several stations away from my own. Wow, do I love when that happens, even if I'm late for something else.

On this read through, I was struck by the utter strangeness of Measure for Measure. It's called a problem play, but it's more than a problem play. It's a testy exploration of justice, mercy, personal agency and, once again, marriage. (Remember all the messiness about marriage last summer with A Midsummer Night's Dream?! If not, re-visit the blog posts that explore: I do, I don't, I might, I couldn't possibly "aspects" of marriage.) M4M is set in Old Vienna, but the themes of premarital pregnancy, enforcing the letter of the law, a woman's right to her own body and the shiftiness of politicians are all very relevant in the 21st century. Alas.

Thus begins our journey. Seven months before the show, the art has started to work its magic. I'll be checking in from time to time between now and summer with reports, tips and teasers about the play, the production and other related news. In the meantime, I'll be thinking -- and I hope you will be too -- about this question: When does art begin? When does it end? And what happens in the space between?