The End Game of "Measure for Measure"

"Measure for Measure" closes Sunday, Aug. 29, after a two week run at the Stonington Opera House on Deer Isle, but I've been thinking about the show since January, when I enrolled in a Shakespeare class taught by Harvard Professor Gordon Teskey. The class was a survey of Shakespeare's works, but students also learned how the events of Shakespeare's life and times shaped his writing. Teskey is a charismatic teacher. Students have organized a Facebook page for him because they love hearing him read Chaucer. I loved hearing him read Shakespeare, too, and there's no mistaking the actor in him, especially because he's one of the most stylishly dressed members of the academy. (The Harvard Crimson fashion columnist wrote a story about him.) This summer, Teskey was teaching in Venice, but he took a few minutes to answer questions about "Measure for Measure" -- a play I find difficult but that he helped me see more powerfully as a story about self sacrifice and as a demonstration of Shakespeare's progressive sense of structure for comedy and tragedy.
Given Teskey's expertise, I wanted him to help us understand more deeply the final scene of the play in which Shakespeare disconcertingly ties up the ends of a comedy that tipped so dangerously toward tragedy. As we continue to investigate this play, Teskey sets us up to consider how we might see the final scene.

Here's Teskey on the final scene of "Measure for Measure":

The most difficult scene technically is the final one. So much happens in it, and there are so many dramatic reversals. The moment when Mariana begs Isabella to kneel with her and beg the Duke to spare Angelo's life -- this when Isabella still thinks Angelo has murdered her brother -- is deeply moving, because Isabella does so. She is at last moved to pity for someone. But so much else occurs in the scene: the unmuffling of the Duke and the humiliation of Lucio as well as of Angelo, the trick with the head of Ragozine, and so on. It is very hard to stage and to keep up the pace, which should be rapid, without confusing the audience. It is thrilling, a little bewildering, funny, emotionally moving, and at the end (perhaps) a little mysterious.

Some rise by art

Put actors onstage together, and you probably can guess what will happen: theater. But what about after hours? Let's say they're sitting around the table eating dinner together after a performance. Are they still acting?

Turns out, the answer is sometimes yes.

In 2006, when the Stonington Opera House cast of "As You Like It" was finished performing in the evening, the members often found themselves sitting around the late-night table together eating dinner and making up characters -- as actors do. They had also been inspired by the sign on a defunct diner -- Conni's Restaurant -- and sometimes shared a romantic vision of what it might be like to leave the big city and make it in a small coastal town on an island.

"Stonington is so beautiful in the way it creates community," said Rachel Murdy, who was in the 2006 production of "As You Like It." "We had a microcosm community in that theater group. We had this ongoing idea that we could buy the restaurant that was for sale and open an avant-garde restaurant. We would live year-round in Stonington and have that kind of life. We dreamed about that, and we felt so strongly about it that when we left Stonington we had a reunion and had lunch together and literally decided to do that: have a restaurant."

And that's when "Conni's Avant Garde Restaurant" was born. The show is an original work of audience interactive cabaret theater that also includes food and drinks. Not dinner theater exactly. But dinner prepared and served by the cast in the midst of an evening of storytelling that swears the avant garde is still alive. Or not. You can read more about the past New York production here and about the current production at Club Oberon in Cambridge, Mass., here.

Right about now, however, you might be thinking: What does "Conni's" have to do with the Opera House Arts production of "Measure for Measure," running Aug. 19-29 at the Stonington Opera House? Good question.

The answer is embedded in the Stonington Opera House motto: "Incite art. Create community." Not only did the creators of "Conni's" find their inspiration in Stonington where the opera house is located. But they carried that spirit back to their home bases and kept it alive in far-flung areas. Many of them return in this year's production of "Measure for Measure": Rachel Murdy, Melody Bates, Stephanie Dodd, Peter Richards and Jeffrey Frace (who is directing "Measure"). That means they are rehearsing Shakespeare in New York City and traveling for the next three Sundays (July 18, 25 and Aug. 1) to Cambridge to perform in "Conni's."

Even though these actors are familiar with one another through graduate school at Columbia University and their performances at the Stonington Opera House (and if you've seen their Shakespeare work, then they're familiar to you, too), I like the idea of them working on two shows together this summer. By the time we see them in their Shakespeare characters, they will have presumably formed an even stronger ensemble connection.

As a side note, Murdy was part of the original creative team for "The Donkey Show," which was a hit in New York City years ago and was revived by Diane Paulus, artistic director at American Repertory Theater, at Club Oberon last year. After being in the show originally, Murdy also helped Paulus re-create the show for the Harvard scene. "Donkey Show" is still playing Friday and Saturday nights in Cambridge -- and if you're up for an unusual double header, a Saturday night disco version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (on which "Donkey Show" is based) and Sunday dinner at "Conni's" could be as intoxicating as a double header at Fenway. (Well, for me, anyway.)

But back to our main story. In "Measure," old Escalus warns: "Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall." If the performance connections between Stonington, New York City and Cambridge teach us anything, it is the opposite of a warning. It is a validation: Some rise by art, and some by community gain all.

A Disco Donkey Dream

Diane Paulus is one of the most exciting theater artists in America today. You may have read about her recently in a New York Times article on women directors. Or you may know her as director of the Tony Award-winning Broadway revival of the musical Hair. She is also the artistic director of American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA, where an earlier work of hers The Donkey Show (a collaboration with Randy Weiner) opens in August. Donkey is Paulus' 1999 disco adaptation -- that's right, disco -- of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Like Shakespeare in his own time, Paulus looks back to classic works of theater and opera to make new works for modern audiences. It's a bit like re-mix, but riskier because it's live.

In the case of Donkey, Paulus uses the story of Midsummer, but not the text. It's more Studio 54 than Elizabethan England or Athens. She changes everything to magically tell the same story and a whole new story at the same time. "I am a huge fan of marrying tradition with modern culture," said Paulus earlier this week in a phone conversation. "That’s one of my passions. So to go back to Shakespeare, who in my mind is one of the greatest sources of structure and character and story, and mash that up with some of the elements that we as audience have experienced in not only modern but more specifically in pop culture is a specific interest of mine."

Listen to the podcast of our entire 8-minute chat or read the transcript. Paulus also talks about the themes of Midsummer, the liveliness of theater in Shakespeare's time and her interest in "theater as experience."

That's what Hair is, too: an experience, or as we might have said back in the '60s, a trip. Actors bound into the audience to deliver the "love in" up close and personal. Similarly, in the NYC production of Donkey, anyone who wanted could dance with the actors to bumpin music such as I Love the Night Life and Car Wash. Paulus' ideas for Donkey and for theater are very much in the ballpark with the Community Reads the Stonington Opera House hosted over the last 10 days: Citizen actors giving voice to Shakespeare's poetry and breathing life into his characters -- and to the rompy love stories and family tangles we all face in the theater of our own lives.

In the end, it's all about the "love juice" (as Oberon calls it) that intoxicates us the minute we walk into a place like the Opera House or a Broadway house. It's the work of directors such as Paulus at American Rep and Julia Whitworth at Stonington Opera House to draw us into the dream.

A Midsummer Night Dream opens tonight, July 2, and runs through July 12 at the Stonington Opera House on Deer Isle in Maine. The Donkey Show runs Aug. 21-Sept. 26 at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA.