Illinois Shakespeare Festival’s Measure for Measure a must-see production
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure is a comedy, but comedy meant something different in the seventeenth century, as did tragedy. Rooted in the traditions of Greek theater, the labels had to do with structure and the elements each sort of play was expected to have, not whether the plots were tragic or comic, as we use the terms today. The endings of each sort tend to be a telltale sign. Tragedies end in death (maybe lots of them . . . think Hamlet); comedies end in marriage (which is a polite metaphor for what is presumed to happen on the wedding night, let’s call it procreation, the opposite of death . . . think Much Ado About Nothing).
So, yes, Measure for Measure is a comedy, but the issues it raises are quite serious. Likely written and first performed in 1604, it was Shakespeare’s twelfth and final comedy (as far as we can say), and the scholarly consensus is that Will had done all he cared to with the comedic form and was ready to take on more serious subjects, subjects which fit more easily into the tragic mode. Soon to follow, then, were Othello (probably the same year, 1604), Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra (all, let’s say, 1605-1606 – definitive dating is tricky).
This summer the Illinois Shakespeare Festival has accepted the challenge of presenting this most serious of comedies – and, as one would expect, given the Festival’s tradition of excellence, director Jenny McKnight, cast and crew have created a production that is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking. Due to Covid restrictions, it is a lean cast of only ten players, making their achievement with such a complex text even more impressive. My wife and I saw the July 14 production on an absolutely ideal night for the Globe-like open-air theater.
Set in Vienna, the city-state’s Duke, Vincentio, places his Deputy, Angelo, in charge while he goes on a long journey. Vincentio has been lax in enforcing the laws of Vienna, and the city has become rife with corruption and debauchery. Bordellos and monasteries stand side by side. Angelo, in the duke’s absence, decides to exercise his power and set Vienna in order. The first person to be caught in Angelo’s legal snare is Claudio, who has gotten his intended one, Juliet, with child before their marriage. Claudio is sentenced to death by the overzealous Angelo. Claudio’s sister, Isabella, who is on the verge of taking her vows to become a nun, goes to Angelo to plead for her brother’s life. In actuality, the Duke does not leave the city, but disguises himself as a friar.
Much of the play’s action involves Vincentio (disguised as a friar usually), Angelo, and Isabella (played by Grant Goodman, Chauncy Thomas, and Isa Guitian, respectively). It is mainly through their impassioned exchanges that Measure for Measure explores issues of morality, legality, mercy, and salvation (among other weighty topics). Isabella is the dramatic focal point, as both Vincentio and Angelo desire her and use their positions of authority to claim her (or her body at least) for their own. In this regard, Guitian manages most of the play’s heavy lifting, and she does so with admirable flair. Goodman and Thomas prove worthy sparring partners.
From our contemporary perspective, there is definitely a #MeToo aspect to the play. Given events over the last several months in particular, involving George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner (and, sadly, so on and so on), I also found myself keenly focused on what the play says about the authority of the state to enact and enforce laws without accountability. In her Director’s Note, McKnight writes, “The world of Measure for Measure is a world out of balance, particularly where gender and power are concerned. Women have little agency, Men become intoxicated with the authority and status that they possess. Characters who represent the state, characters who represent the church, characters who represent the citizenry, and characters who represent the marginalized all seek – as Isabella demands – ‘justice, justice, justice, justice’.”
The director’s description of the world being “out of balance” is communicated in myriad ways, including particularly subtle and clever ones. I noted, for example, that Vincentio and Angelo (representatives of the state) wear tunics that appear almost metallic (suggesting the state’s power and rigidity), but their cut is asymmetrical (literally, from a sartorial perspective, out of balance). Susie L. High is credited with costume design for the production. I offer only this one costume-related example, but costuming is an especially important element in the Festival production, and I would encourage paying special attention to it.
On a related note, McKnight has devised an interesting framing device involving the costuming of the players. Shakespeare is fond of using clothing metaphors as a way of suggesting characters’ deceptive natures: they appear one thing, but in truth are something quite different. Nearly every character in Measure for Measure is hypocritical to a greater or lesser degree, and McKnight’s framing device seems to play with this Shakespearean conceit.
Measure for Measure is a serious comedy, but there are definitely funny bits. Several are expertly provided by the roguish characters of Lucio (Dan Matisa) and Pompey (Nathan Stark, who also plays the condemned, Claudio). The best comic material falls to Elbow, a “simple constable” (cut from a similar cloth as Much Ado’s Dogberry), and Rondale Gray plays the part to perfection.
All the Festival players deliver strong performances, several with dual roles: Lisa Gaye Dixon (Escalus/Francisca), Christian Castro (Froth/Friar Thomas, as well as fight captain), Nora McKirdle (Juliet), and Erica Cruz Hernández (Overdone/Marina).
Measure for Measure, along with The Winter’s Tale, is playing throughout July and into the first week of August. Both are must-see productions.
Illinois Shakespeare Festival delivers an endearing performance of The Winter’s Tale
Even among Shakespeare enthusiasts, The Winter’s Tale may be something of an acquired taste. It is a strange play. The contrast in tone between the opening acts’ heart-wrenching tragedy and the closing acts’ rollicking comedy has made it seem to many that Shakespeare fused together two very different plays, and perhaps not wholly successfully. In the eighteenth century, many saw The Winter’s Tale as a blemish on Shakespeare’s legacy. Alexander Pope included it among a handful of plays that were so poorly crafted they couldn’t have been the work of the Bard, who may have only contributed a few lines here and there to a flawed play that mistakenly bears his name. In 1756, the legendary Shakespearean David Garrick rescued the play by essentially amputating its first half and titling his revision Florizel and Perdita. A Dramatic Pastoral in Three Acts, Altered from The Winter’s Tale of Shakespeare.
Appreciation for the play grew over the centuries, but even in contemporary times it has been known as a problematic play to produce. There are those starkly contrasted halves, for one thing. Also, it is almost entirely a play of effect with very little attention devoted to cause. And, frankly, what are we going to do about the bear?
Always attracted to the odd literary duck, I fell in love with The Winter’s Tale on my first reading, more than forty years ago. My 18-year-old self probably couldn’t have articulated very well just why I found it so appealing, but my 58-year-old self can say without question it is, in fact, the play’s strangeness that I find so engaging. Shakespeare was taking a risk (actually several risks), which was nothing new, but these specific risks were unusual, even for him. There is evidence that his star had faded toward the end of his career; even his own King’s Men were inclined to perform other playwrights’ work. He must have been tempted to return to a style that packed houses just a few years before, or to mimic the plots of his colleagues who were now shining more brightly. Instead, he gives us The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest (both, probably, 1611)—plays that are so unusual they do not fit nicely into the three canonical categories of tragedies, comedies, and histories; instead, becoming known as romances.
I teach a graduate course in Shakespeare, and I always make sure to include The Winter’s Tale (in recent iterations, the other two plays are The Tempest and Othello, with The Taming of the Shrew on standby and sometimes getting the nod). I am so enamored of The Winter’s Tale it is difficult to imagine a production causing me to love it even more—but the Illinois Shakespeare Festival production, directed by Rebekah Scallet, has done just that. Apollo held back the rains long enough for my wife and me to attend the July 11 performance, and we are in his divine debt.
The Festival was not in production last year, of course, because of the pandemic, a pandemic that we are still very much in the throes of; therefore, Covid-19 impacted the current production. Shakespearean theater is minimalist by its very nature, but Scallet managed to create an even more scaled-down performance. Most notably, the play is performed by a skeleton crew of just twelve actors, each of whom has at least two parts, some three. Doubling and tripling, etc., of roles in Shakespeare is not unusual, but generally it doesn’t involve actors handling two or three major roles in the same production. What is more, there are no ensemble actors who could add to the production’s energy onstage.
According to Scallet’s note in the program (online), the smaller cast was an effort to observe social distancing as much as possible, to create space between the actors. The strategy certainly tests the players’ mettle—and each meets the challenge with aplomb. Because of the strange nature of the play—its fusion of tragedy and comedy—the actors have to assume both kinds of roles, resonating at both ends of the spectrum, darkly serious and raucously comedic, at times turning on a dime (a sixpence?).
Dan Matisa, for example, takes on the lead role of King Leontes, who inexplicably comes up with the deranged notion that his very pregnant wife, Hermione (Erica Cruz Hernández), and dearest friend, Polixenes (Christian Castro), have been having an affair, and that the soon-to-arrive baby isn’t his. Leontes is positively venomous, ordering Hermione to be imprisoned and wanting the newborn baby girl to be burned alive. Matisa also plays Autolycus, the roguish prankster who is the source of much of the final acts’ merrymaking. The characters are diametrically opposed, yet Matisa manages both convincingly, with his Autolycus, especially, being among the best performances of that part I’ve seen.
Another standout for me is Grant Goodman, carrying the roles of Antigonus and the Shepherd who finds Leontes’ abandoned baby girl, Perdita (played delightfully by Isa Guitian, once she grows up). Antigonus convinces the enraged Leontes to spare the girl’s life, but as a compromise he must deliver her to the wilds of Bohemia and abandon her there. Again turning on that sixpence, Goodman’s Shepherd ushers in the transition from tragedy to comedy and is responsible for some of the biggest laughs in the second half of the play. Goodman’s chemistry with his Shepherd’s Son (Nathan Stark) is worth the price of admission by itself. Their comic timing is flawless.
Perhaps the best example of how the pared-down casting has led to some of the play’s most memorable moments comes in Act 5, scene 2, when Shakespeare compresses the action into a series of reports by three passing Gentlemen, updating Autolycus regarding what has transpired in King Leontes’ palace. In the Festival production, Autolycus is replaced by a Sicilian Attendant at Court (Ben Matthew), and the three Gentlemen’s reports are delivered via a positively protean performance from Chauncy Thomas, becoming The Gossips, inhabiting three distinct personas, one after another, much to the audience’s delight. Thanks to Matthew and Thomas (along with Scallet’s creativity), a scene which largely serves the function of hastening the plot in the original becomes a high point in the Festival production.
One of the alterations that Scallet makes is adding a prologue to the play, delivered from the upper tier of the stage by personified Time, played by Lisa Gaye Dixon (also Paulina). The personification of Time was one of the play’s features that turned early critics, like Pope, against it; and even in modern performances, directors often delete the character. Instead, Scallet leans into the narrative device, even adding, as I said, a new speech to open the play. The prologue puts the production in context, identifying that the pandemic has affected the production and in what ways, all in language worthy of Shakespeare’s original. Dixon’s stage presence, especially as Paulina, is commanding; and one senses that her fellow actors know they must achieve their best performances to keep from being overshadowed.
I must also underscore the performance of Rondale Gray (Cleomenes, Mariner, Florizel), whose energy and athleticism seem a throwback to the King’s Men themselves. The entire cast is wonderful, even those players not mentioned here in the interest of brevity.
I know I’ve experienced a great production when I begin to see a play I already know well in new ways. The ISF production of The Winter’s Tale definitely accomplished that. As mentioned earlier, we believe the play was first performed in 1611, and Shakespeare may have written it after an especially deadly outbreak of the plague which closed the London theaters for most of 1609 and 1610. The Festival’s staging of The Winter’s Tale seemed like history repeating itself. I felt great joy at being back in the Festival’s Globe-like theater after nearly two years, but I couldn’t help thinking of the half million Americans who lost their lives to Covid in the meantime (a half million and counting). In this context, the two distinct moods of the play seem exactly right: the fear and the darkness attached to the years of pestilence, contrasted with the pure joy of having survived when so many others did not. The theatergoers who saw the earliest performances of The Winter’s Tale must have felt a similar relief to what my wife and I experienced last night: the delight of returning to something close to normal, after so much fear and anxiety.
Moreover, in the play’s presentation of an out-of-control king who insists on a reality he has created from his own deluded imagination, I thought of what the country has experienced for the last five years (and continues to experience). I felt the desperation of Leontes’ councilors as they tried to bring him to his senses before destroying everything in the wake of his ego-driven fury. But no logic can alter his absurd ideas, not even a proclamation from Apollo’s oracle.
Finally, what about the bear? Those familiar with The Winter’s Tale know it has one of the oddest stage directions in the Shakespeare canon (presumably written by the Bard himself, and not a later editor). From Act 3, scene 3: “Exit, pursued by a bear.” We don’t know what Shakespeare had in mind. Some like to believe the King’s Men brought a live bear onstage to pursue Antigonus. Thanks to the popularity of bear-baiting in Shakespeare’s day and the popularity of performing bears, there were plenty of bears to be had in London, both wild and tamed. There were bear-baiting pits near the Globe in fact. Some believe Shakespeare had an actor dress in a bear costume, or maybe it was a special effect (a sound made offstage perhaps).
When I saw the Festival’s production in 2011, the director went with an enormous silhouette of a bear projected onto the stage’s backdrop along with a terrifying series of roars amplified via the sound system. It was neat. So when one attends a performance of The Winter’s Tale, there’s always the intriguing issue of how they will handle the bear.
You wish . . . you’ll just have to go see for yourself. Performances of The Winter’s Tale, along with Measure for Measure, will run throughout July into the first week of August. Go. You deserve it.
Austen’s successful debut at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival
Every summer central Illinoisans are treated to the pleasures of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival in Bloomington, now in its 42nd season. The tradition has been to offer two works by Shakespeare and one of another sort. For the 2019 season, the non-Shakespeare offering is an adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride and Prejudice (1813), marking the first time Austen has been adapted for the ISF stage. I will cut to the chase: Go see it.
I attended the preview performance July 5. The evening’s sultriness did not discourage Festival fans from attending. The players, managing in their Regency garb, played to a sold-out house. In back, the artistic crew took a last look before finalizing the production for the summer. Among those taking notes was Deanna Jent, who adapted and directed Pride and Prejudice. Jent, a professor at Fontbonne University, also directed last summer’s performance of Merry Wives of Windsor. Those Regency costumes, which effectively broadcast the Austen vibe, were designed by Misti Bradford.
The central figure of the novel, strong-willed Elizabeth Bennet (second born of five daughters, all in search of husbands), was played by Aidaa Peerzada, who shone especially brightly when clashing on stage with prideful Mr. Darcy (Fred Geyer), but downright radiantly when on stage with the imperious Lady De Bourgh (Lisa Gaye Dixon). Peerzada and Geyer had a tall order to fill, almost as tall as a Regency gentleman’s hat, to capture the chemistry of one of literature’s most famous couples, and they have risen to the challenge admirably.
However, I must especially commend Dixon’s performance as the meddling Lady De Bourgh. The part has limited stage time, but Dixon commanded the space, just as the role required, and De Bourgh’s verbal sparring with Elizabeth brought out Peerzada’s best. Fourth of July fireworks fizzled compared to Dixon and Peerzada’s pyrotechnics.
All of the performers added to the delightful adaptation, including Kevin McKillip (Mr. Bennet), Nisi Sturgis (Mrs. Bennet), Ashley Hart Adams (Jane Bennet, the eldest sister and Elizbeth’s special confidant), and Chauncy Thomas (the always affable Mr. Bingley). I especially appreciate McKillip’s sense of comedic timing. The veteran actor perhaps captures Jane Austen’s dry wit best of all the talented players in the cast — at times eliciting a roar from the audience merely by the perfect look.
The highlight of the production — for me, and it would seem the audience as a whole — was Jordan Coughtry’s interpretation of Mr. Collins, a cousin of Mr. Bennet who arrives to assess the Bennet property that he will one day inherit and to select which Bennet daughter he will marry (at least, that is his design). Coughtry is a remarkable Mr. Collins, sculpting Austen’s clownish clergyman into a character who is both true to the novelist’s original vision but also unique among the many actors who have portrayed him on the screen. Coughtry’s Collins is pompous, over-confident, insensitive — and yet wholly endearing . . . to the audience, that is, but not so much to the Bennets.
Coughtry is almost too good. He owns the stage in the first half of the play, which could be seen as problematic since Mr. Collins is a secondary character in Pride and Prejudice — important certainly, but normally one thinks of Elizabeth and Jane as dominating the reader’s attention. Perhaps fortunately, Mr. Collins’s stage time is lessened in the second half of the play, which allows Elizabeth, Mr. Darcy, and other characters more central to the plot to shine a bit brighter.
Nevertheless, Coughtry’s Collins commands the largest laughs, and the audience always perked up when he stepped on stage.
My only concern regarding the production is that it closely resembles the Joe Wright-directed film version of 2005 (starring Keira Knightley as Elizabeth and Matthew Macfadyen as Mr. Darcy; screenplay by Deborah Moggach). Rather than an adaptation of the novel, at times the Festival play seems more like a pastiche of the Joe Wright film. I recognize, however, that this is an idiosyncratic concern. Besides having taught the novel in college courses a few times, I have watched the film many, many times. It is one of my favorites, and I’ve shown it to classes more times than I can count. The typical Festival-goer would not be burdened with such familiarity.
To be clear: I’m not suggesting something like plagiarism or even mimicry, not at all. The unfolding of the play definitely adheres to Austen’s original work in ways that the Wright/Moggach film does not. In fact, one of the things I admire most about Deanna Jent’s adaptation is that she oftentimes advances the plot via characters’ narrating the action in third-person snippets taken from the pages of the novel, or nearly so. It is a clever way to compress the time span of the original and bring into the script some of Austen’s narrative voice — a treat for actors and audience alike.
Speaking of treats, Jent’s adaptation also makes terrific use of dance, as does Austen’s novel. In straitlaced Regency England, dancing was critical to courtship, and Austen’s Netherfield Ball scene is one of the greats in all of English-language literature. Likewise, Jent masterfully employs dance in the service of plot advancement, characterization, and mood-setting. (Sarah West is credited as dance captain for the ISF production, and Gregory Merriman as choreographer — kudos to both.)
It’s difficult to imagine a central Illinois summer without the Shakespeare Festival, and this production of Pride and Prejudice is yet another triumph in its proud history. I repeat: Go see it while you have the opportunity.
(As You Like It and Caesar are the Bardic offerings this summer.)
A truly delightful Romeo and Juliet
Second only to Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet is the Shakespeare play I’ve seen staged most — only because the famous love story is staged so frequently — and there’s no question that the production I saw last evening at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival in Bloomington, Illinois, was by the far the most imaginative (while staying true to the text) and most emotionally engaging I’ve experienced. Directed by Doug Finlayson, the Festival production was truly delightful.
As one would expect, the portrayals of the title characters (played by Dylan Paul and Laura Rook) were at the heart (ha) of the production’s success — and I want to speak to these portrayals in some detail in a moment — but Finlayson took a number of creative risks in his treatment of what could be the best-known and most-read of Shakespeare’s plays (I’m basing my statement on the fact that so many high school freshmen read the play), and every roll of the creative dice was a winner. Moreover, judging from audience reactions, I know I’m not alone in labeling the production a triumph.
In the interest of time and reader attention span, I won’t try to speak to every risky choice made in the Festival production, but I do want to underscore a few. One was in the production’s costuming (designed by Linda Pisano). Often directors set Shakespeare plays in more contemporary settings (for example, a couple of years ago I saw another marvelous production of Romeo and Juliet, by the famed Acting Company, situated in 1920s Mississippi), and the costuming of course is instrumental in communicating and selling that setting choice. For the Festival production, however, the costuming was all over the map — with some characters dressing in Renaissance-style wardrobe, others looking more like extras in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and still others appearing as if they’d just come from shooting a Gap commercial, in jeans and trendy jackets … to name just a few apparent influences, and these influences were often mixed together for individual costumes.
I’ve seen some productions of Romeo and Juliet in which the costuming was designed to delineate between the feuding Capulets and Montagues, almost as if they were sports teams wearing home and away colors; but the costuming in the Festival production was no help whatsoever in figuring out family loyalties — especially when the fight choreographer (D. C. Wright) had the combatants moving in intersecting chaotic circles, thus further confusing the audience as to who was opposing who, especially early in the production.
The “confusion” of costumes — mixing and matching across centuries and geographies — and the chaotic fight scenes worked to emphasize the absurdity of the feud in the first place. That is to say, even a careful perusal yields a sameness about the Capulets and Montagues — any differences which were so profound that they should result in a bloodfeud either never existed or have long since disappeared. This point is emphasized in the play’s final scene, in the Capulet vault, when the Prince asks, “Where be these enemies? Capulet, Montague, / See what a scourge is laid upon your hate …” (5.3.290-91). In other words, here, among these dead, there appear no family distinctions whatsoever.
Another artistic risk in the play is the use of contemporary top-40 music interspersed with more traditional compositions — perhaps most notably Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” when Romeo and Juliet first meet and instantly fall in love at the Capulet masquerade ball. In fact, the Katy Perry song plays for the first time as the teenagers ascend a platform at the front of the stage, creating an almost cinematic (or TV) effect of focusing the audience’s attention on the pair to the exclusion of everything else happening on stage, the way that a framing close-up would work on the screen, silver or plasma.
Let’s talk about the portrayals of the leads for a moment. Both young actors, Dylan Paul and Laura Rook, are quite wonderful as they embrace the youthfulness and immaturity of the title characters. After all, we often forget that Juliet is only thirteen and Romeo not much older, fifteen or sixteen. As such, the famous garden scene is touching and romantic, but also very funny as the characters’ awkwardness is underscored in a way I haven’t seen before — giving a new dimension to a scene that is arguably the most famous in all of literature.
By far, though, the most interesting and complex character in the play is Juliet — and with whom the most risk is taken in the Festival production. She is played as downright childish in the beginning, tomboyishly roughhousing with her little brother and cousins, carrying around a stuffed animal (a lion — symbol of power, especially masculine power, even though it’s the lionesses who hunt and supply food to the pride). When Juliet enters the masquerade ball, her status as thirteen-year-old beams forth thanks to her costume, and the way the actor carries herself of course. Juliet wears a colorful and fun dress that ends above the knee, along with equally colorful butterfly wings. We at first see her from only the waist up, and when she walks into full view, we see that she has “topped off” her ensemble with pink high-top Chucks — a marvelous touch that takes the audience completely by surprise. She could be any adorable thirteen-year-old going to a junior high Halloween party.
In the famous garden scene, Juliet carries her stuffed lion toy onto the balcony. She is wearing a cloak and hood of pale green. After Romeo, awkwardly, makes his presence known, Juliet ultimately loses the toy and cloak, thus revealing an alluring bare-shouldered nightgown beneath. It seems that in this brief scene Juliet transforms from a toy-carrying tomboy to a sensual young woman. This transformation is also communicated via the butterfly emblem that we associate with Juliet throughout. Besides her butterfly costume, she wears a small butterfly barrette in her hair in several scenes, and there is a large cotton sheet with a picture of a butterfly that serves several purposes: banner, bridal bedsheet, and ultimately funeral shroud. The butterfly is appropriately juvenile (how many teenage girls festoon their lockers, notebooks, bedrooms, and body parts! with butterflies?), but it also represents dramatic transformation in nature, maturing from caterpillar to butterfly, or from girl- to womanhood. It’s also worth noting that Juliet refers to Romeo, in 3.2, as “[s]ole monarch of the universal earth” (94, my emphasis), perhaps stressing, in the context of the Festival production, the kindredness of the newlyweds.
I was especially delighted that the Festival was doing Romeo and Juliet this year because the play is one of several subtexts I tinker with in my recently completed novel, “An Untimely Frost” — the title of which is taken from 4.4 when Capulet says of his daughter (prematurely) that “Death lies on her like an untimely frost” (55). In a later chapter in my novel, the protagonist attends an oddball production of Romeo and Juliet, so I spent several weeks studying the play to write that chapter in particular.
All in all, it was a typically terrific evening at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival (in spite of the heat and humidity), where I enjoyed a production of The Winter’s Tale just last Saturday.
12 Winters Blog 
leave a comment