T. Charles Erickson
In William Shakespeare’s time, stewed prunes were commonly served in bordellos because they were thought to be a kind of prophylactic against venereal disease.
When Pompey, a clownish character in Measure for Measure full of bawdy street talk, said “stewed prunes” back in 1604 or so, you can be sure all in the audience broke into knowing hee-haws and elbowed their mates.
But would the reference land for a modern audience?
Just to be sure, maybe substitute “cherries”? Or “nuts”? Or “salty nuts?”
Courtesy Long Wharf
For weeks during preparation for the play, the question of how to translate that humor, and others like it, preoccupied Noah Brody (pictured) and his colleagues in the fast-rising Fiasco Theater Company, the innovative ensemble that is now presenting the play at Long Wharf Theatre.
The Fiasco production at Long Wharf runs through Dec. 20.
Measure for Measure pits Angelo, a hard-ass enforcer of sexual laws, against Claudio and Juliet, a couple who have broken one law slightly by having consummated their marriage without having had a church ceremony. On such a technicality Angelo has sentenced Claudio to death. When Isabela, his sister, takes a break from her nun’s initiation to plead for her brother’s life, Angelo agrees to a pardon, but only if she’ll sleep with him.
Such hypocrisy — or is it the swooning, blinding madness of true lust or love? or the drunkenness of absolute political power? — is only the beginning of the play’s dark complexities. The play, often called a “problem comedy,” was penned shortly before William Shaxbird, as he was spelled in the royal record books of 1604, moved on to exceptionally dark stuff in Macbeth and King Lear. For those of you in my curmudgeonly-between-Thanksgiving-and-Christmas crew, who remain cranky, perplexed, and, in this spiritually precarious interval, not quite ready to acknowledge that human nature is a profound mystery that can only be understood through manic shopping, this production might be just what the therapist has ordered for us.
The play also happens to be one of Long Wharf Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein’s favorites, so when he saw the company’s production in New York City a year ago and noticed the efficiency and clarity of the production, he invited the young actors — all of whom completed Brown University’s graduate theater program in 2008 — to strut their stuff in New Haven.
The six actors in the ensemble play eleven roles. Two of them direct. The actors sing, in beautiful six-part a capella harmony, songs by Renaissance composer William Byrd. They also move the furniture.
All of this is in addition to having spent months of preparation studying Shakespeare’s text, drilling down on his language and meanings, and emerging with a production as Shakespeare might have wanted it (according to Brody), yet entirely comprehensible to modern audiences, and without any tricks, tics, fancy gadgetry, or elaborate staging.
“We love Shakespeare, Shakespeare has been our best teacher. We always approach [a project with the idea] that he knows better than we do, and if we listen, it’ll emerge,” said Brody during an interview at the theater’s upstairs lobby, shortly before he went in to change for an evening performance as both love-slain Claudio and the clownish pimp Pompey.
Yet “The script isn’t holy,” he added. “Juliet isn’t there,” — that is, her role is cut from the ensemble’s performance — partly because the beloved of Claudio has just a few lines and the ensemble determined she wasn’t necessary to present the play that Shakespeare wrote and make it work. Fiasco also some rearranged scenes and speeches, and dropped minor courtiers and other characters.
“The question we always ask ourselves is: What did Shakespeare intend? [And] how it landed on his audience … and how on us?” Brody said. “We’re not trying to impress purists, but have the play land with an audience. We will alter words, and they will never know. We don’t want a word to alienate an audience.”
True Ensemble
Brody said the company chooses its plays — past productions have included Cymbeline, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Stephen Sondheims’s Into the Woods — so that everyone has a role.
“We’re all actors. We choose our plays in part because we want roles for all of us. We’re not going to go for a play where one of us just carries a spear,” he said.
In Measure for Measure, all the characters weigh in with ideas, nobody seems to be definitely right or wrong, more moral or less. That’s how the company plays the play, Brody said.
“The different sides of the argument are expressed through the worldviews of the characters. We don’t always do the right thing. We do it wrong because we can call it right in the moment. We want to hear all sides of Isabella [and the other characters], secular law versus spiritual law … Shakespeare has taken a complex set of questions and deals with them complexly,” Brody said.
And yet the company’s conception of this is all within a comedy, with even the most seemingly serious speeches, like Angelo’s dissertation to Claudio on how he should look on the bright side of death, are treated in this play with what Brody described as a kind of comic irony or gallows humor.
As for those bordello fruits, Brody recalled that he and the crew debated the great stewed prune question for months. “We argued about substitutes: pie, cherry pie, nuts, salty nuts. One day Paul [Coffey, who plays Angelo and Elbow] said, ‘I’d like to put in a word for stewed prunes. Ultimately we went with stewed prunes, and it’s landing well,” he said.
The Fiasco Theater’s production of Measure for Measure runs through Dec. 20 at Long Wharf Theater. For more information, click here — and keep an eye out for the Indy’s review.
