Why You Should Go to "Measure for Measure": A Top Ten List

The Stonington Opera House production of Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure" opens on Thursday August 19. If somehow you're still looking for reasons WHY you should attend, look no further. Below are 10 inarguable reasons to go to the show. What's your top reason for wanting to see Shakespeare? And what's your excuse for not going, huh?


Top Ten Reasons You Should Go to "Measure for Measure"


1. You're setting a record. You've seen all 10 years of Shakespeare productions at the Stonington Opera House, and you couldn't bear to miss year 11.

2. Savannah, Georgia is your favorite American city, and you can't afford to go there this year. Director Jeffrey Frace has transformed Shakespeare's Vienna, where the play is set, to 1950s Savannah. Very steamy.


3. You're a cook, and you think "Measure for Measure" might be the next "Top Chef" contender. Turns out, the title of Shakespeare's play is taken from the Bible. It's about measuring mercy, not flour.


4. You heard the play is about "Mercy." "Measure for Measure" IS about mercy but not the TV series "Mercy." Spoiler alert: Taylor Schilling is NOT in the Opera House cast.

5. You're into original music. Lawd alive, are you in the right place! Shakespeare was a music-loving fool, and Phillip Owen's original music has a southern draw and deep heartbeat. He grew up in Texas. (But we won't hold that against him.)

6. You like your Shakespeare wacky. If that's the case, you're in the right place. The Duke is played by a woman. The bawd Mistress Overdone is double cast as the Chief Nun at a cloister. And one of the scenes is almost as creepy as the Swedish film version of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." Laskigt!


7. You like cowboy hats and boots. And a rifle. Yep, you read it right. The costume designer has had some fun with this one.


8. Somebody told you Shakespeare was boring and hard to understand (even though it's English). It's poetry, dude. You have to listen. But the Stonington actors understand Performance 101: If you don't speak the language understandably, you get a lot of empty seats. You'll get it. We promise.


9. You want to understand our world today. Shakespeare may have written "Measure for Measure" in 1604, but 406 years later, the lessons about leadership, justice, mercy, love and class rage are still relevant. You got it: If it ain't relevant Shakespeare, we're not doing it!


10. One word: HARMONICAS!!!!

Do You Relate to Shakespeare?

Guest blogger Abigail Bray lives in Blue Hill (Maine) and is a student at Deer Isle-Stonington High School. She enjoys writing and will be contributing posts occasionally during the run of "Measure for Measure" Aug. 19-29 at the Stonington Opera House. She also works at Fisherman's Friend Restaurant, a tasty place to eat dinner before or after the show!




As a sophomore in high school, I found reading “Measure for Measure” for the first time a bit of a struggle. Some of the situations were almost easy to relate to while others were a bit harder. I think we all can agree that there is at least one person in our lives who is strict and stubborn, and who decides to fix whatever situation he or she thinks needs fixing, like Angelo did while the Duke was “out of town.” And at one point or another, we all have to choose between helping someone close to us, or staying true to what we believe in, as Isabella was forced to chose between her virginity and her brother’s life.



Other parts of the play are less easy to relate to. Because things have changed drastically since the 16th century, it is now more common for women to have children out of wedlock. Another situation I cannot relate to is Claudio changing his mind and asking his sister, whom he knows to be very virtuous and chaste, to give up her virginity to save him. It is one thing for Isabella to decide; it’s another to put her in the kind of situation where she feels obligated.



Although “Measure for Measure” isn’t one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, I feel that it helps us compare and contrast the difference in politics and morals of the 16th century with today’s.

Who cares about Shakespeare?

One of the most frequent comments I hear about Shakespeare is: "Why read his plays?" What does a playwright working 400 years ago have to say to us in the 21st century? The language is difficult, the stories are antiquated, the characters are remote from our tech-driven lives and, frankly, who cares?

I love these questions! And "Measure for Measure," which will be performed Aug. 19-29 at the Stonington Opera House, is the perfect play for coming up with answers and addressing these worries and dismissals of the Bard.

Here's the set-up for the story: The Duke of Vienna, seeing that the laws of the land have grown to lax, hands over state duties to his Deputy and goes under cover to watch as his stricter proxy strictly enforces the law. The first person arrested is Claudio, a young gentleman whose fiancee is pregnant. Oops, no pregnancy out of wedlock tolerated! Go straight to jail, Claudio, and prepare to die! But wait: Can Claudio's virgin sister Isabella, who is about to enter a cloister, save her brother's life through pleading with the Deputy? Better yet, will she agree to have sex with the Deputy in exchange for leniency for her brother? And what about the closure of the whore houses in the suburbs? Good for the moral realm, but, ouch, bad for the economy.

O, Vienna, what a tangled web is weaved round your leaders, families and community!

So you think none of this is relevant today? Let's tease out a few themes:

• Fall guys who take the rap for leaders.
• Women who are forced to negotiate life and death issues with sex trade.
• An economy in which the "little guy" (in this case, hookers) gets hurt because of anxieties about the laws, especially concerning the economy. (Hmmm...the word "Arizona" comes to mind.)
• And what about the morality of religion: Is a woman's virtue and fundamentalism more important than a man's life?

It's enough to make angels weep.

But instead of weeping, why not join us tonight for a community reading of "Measure for Measure" -- 7 p.m. Tuesday Aug. 10 -- at the Brooksville Free Public Library. We sit around a table and read the play with the help of volunteer citizen actors like you. Come read about "then" and think about "now." Most important, let's see if we can answer the big question: Who cares about Shakespeare?

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.

Best Use of Barbies Ever: Or "Measure for Measure" by 10-inch dolls

As preparation for the Stonington Opera House production of "Measure for Measure" -- as well as for the library reads in Brooksville, Brooklin, Stonington and Deer Isle -- I'm re-reading the play. But I've also been surfing the internet for more background information on ideas and productions. To me, this is one of the most complicated of Shakespeare's plays, and I confess that I find it problematic -- and not just because scholars consider it one of the Bard's "problem plays" (which is another way of saying the themes don't fit neatly into comedy, nor can the characters be easily categorized as heroes).

We'll dive into the fascinating background and themes of the play later with the help of a few outstanding scholars and directors.

In the meantime, I want to share a clever two-part YouTube version of "Measure for Measure" featuring Barbie dolls (and created as a project for a Shakespeare class). It's corny at first, seeing the dolls, but actually it serves as quite a good synopsis of the play. It strikes me that there are lots of imaginative ways to approach Shakespeare. My own preference is to enter the story through the text. Others, such as director Jeffrey Frace and the actors at the Stonington Opera House, prefer the platform of a stage. And still others like, well, dolls.

And not just Barbie dolls. Last year, when a boy I know saw the Stonington Opera House production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," he went home and re-enacted a segment of the play with an old set of toy horses we keep around the house for kids.

Turns out, Shakespeare has resonance in more than simply our thoughts. We are free to reinterpret his stories as imaginatively as we want -- with dolls, puppets, movies, poems, dances. I encourage you to watch the "Measure for Measure" Part 1 and Part 2 Barbie YouTube videos, and I think you'll also enjoy this 9-year-old boy's interpretation of last year's "Midsummer."

Of course, the next question is: How will you adapt Shakespeare to your own favorite storytelling technique?

Check out more information about the Opera House Arts production of "Measure for Measure" Aug. 19-29 at the Stonington Opera House.

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.

Burt Dow Deep Water Man!

With opening night just over a week away, the cast and crew of Burt Dow Deep Water Man are hard at work. Yesterday, I joined sculptor, Michael Stasiuk, who is creating amazing props for the performance, to help paint the puppets for the show.

Like much of the performance, the creation of the props is a truly collaborative effort between people from away, local students, volunteers, and staff. Students in a Deer Isle-Stonington Elementary School art class helped to make the puppets, designed by Michael Stasiuk. Under the direction of Mr. Stasiuk, a team of volunteers is helping to paint and decorate the giant sea-creatures that will share the stage with the human stars of Burt Dow Deep Water Man.

The puppets are being painted in the old Stonington Elementary School with a little help from the soothing guitar music sounding from the boom box. With some masking tape, several cans of paint, and a little help from Martha Stewart (or rather, her glitter), the amazing creatures are taking shape. Mr. Stasiuk mixed paints to capture some of the vibrant and often times clashing, yet miraculously working together colors, in the book by Robert McCloskey (the colors of the whales were described by one volunteer as “just like the colors I wore in the 80s!”).

We antiqued chickens and painted a giant octopus (just to name a few!), helped by the performance’s director and stage manager. After the puppets are initially primed in a solid color, Mr. Stasiuk and the volunteers are using paintbrushes and pieces of foam pillows to color and shade the props, sponging color on top of color, and sprinkling with glitter.

To see these fantastic props in person, buy your tickets to Burt Dow Deep Water Man! As someone who has been fortunate enough to catch a sneak-peek, let me tell you, the stuck-in-your-head-while-you-walk-around-the-house-singing tunes are not to be missed!