T. Charles Erickson Photos
The cast of Women Beware Women.
When we are first introduced to the Duke of Florence in Women Beware Women, on at Yale’s Iseman Theater now through Jan. 29, he’s not the Elizabethan character the audience might expect from Thomas Middleton’s 17th-century morality tale — best known for exposing the slimy, hypocrisy-riddled underbelly of conservative governance. Yes, there are the customary furs and preponderance of red, a nod to the lush cochineal dye that wooed well-to-do Italians during the period. There’s the expected cupped-hand wave and ducal glide into the public sphere. But this Duke also sports serious 21st century bling. His red comes in the form of a leather jacket and bright pants, he rocks a dazzling faux-diamond knuckle ring, and a few dance moves leave no doubt that he can pop, lock, and drop it like it’s hot as he pleases.
The incongruity lasts only moments. As the Duke catches sight of the stunning and already-married Bianca, who has been locked away with her mother-in-law while her husband is away on business, a certain timelessness settles over the play. The moment stills; a calm before the storm is almost palpable. And indeed, that glance introduces the themes that will play out in Women Beware Women: what it means to look and be looked upon, to lust and be lusted after, and how far the economy of flesh — the way that bodies are traded for power — will take each of our 12 characters before the end of the night.
In director Leora Morris’ thoughtful hands, Women Beware Women isn’t a play about hypocrisy, or about the Duke of Florence and his indiscretions, as Middleton imagined and Howard Barker upgraded in 1986. It’s a play about Bianca, and the five women with whom she explores, with equal parts humor and bitter realization, what one character calls an “impulsive sisterhood” — the extremely fine, compulsion-driven line women walk between caring for each other and stabbing each other in the back.
Shaunette Renée Wilson.
For those who know not Barker’s Women Beware Women, which draws upon but changes the Middleton, it’s a Florentine drama that has withstood the test of time. Poor, smitten Leantio has brought his new bride, Bianca, from her native Venice; they are secretly married, the knowledge of which he shares with only his mother, a widow in whose modest abode the three of them live. As Leantio departs for a business trip, he orders Bianca locked up so that none in Florence may see her. That’s fine, until Bianca stands at an open window (whoops!) and the Duke falls for her because she is young, very beautiful, and oozing purity.
In another household, twice-married aristocrat Livia revels in plotting illegitimate and ill-fated relationships. She convinces her niece Isabella that her brother, Isabella’s uncle Hippolito, is in fact not a blood relative, and the two should go ahead and boink before Isabella is married off to an immature and dull-witted heir. Livia’s just getting started. Soon she and the heir’s guardian plot — in their own pursuit of power — to get Bianca with the Duke, and the play’s disastrous chain of events is set in motion. High on the havoc she has wreaked, Livia falls for Leantio at his most vulnerable, and the two embark on a sexual journey that thrives on want and jealousy. Plots intersect in that deliciously tight way that is characteristic of Elizabethan dramas. Sexual violence is conflated with sexual liberation, and not everyone lives happily ever after, because that would defeat the point.
Galen Kane and Baize Buzan.
In adapting Barker’s script, Morris has really, really thought about what it means to own and to use (and abuse) a human body, and the result is enthralling. If it starts with that aforementioned glance between the Duke and Bianca, it doesn’t end until the final scene, when audience members are left with a mess of bodies, in varied states of dress and duress, fleeing the stage. In one scene, viewers must wrestle and squirm with the intense, but forbidden, pleasure that Isabella (a compelling if underused Shaunette Renée Wilson) and Hippolito (Niall Powderly) take in each other as they waltz, skin touching skin touching skin. In another, the use of Livia and Leantio’s nudity is so well-played that is does not feel shocking but totally organic. The body stripped bare becomes a symbol — like every other outfit, accoutrement, or set detail in the show — of everything that is at stake.
That’s owing in part to the help of an outstanding cast and creative team. Annie Hägg is a spectacularly vindictive Livia. Leantio’s Sean Patrick Higgins gives one of his strongest performances yet, and Baize Buzan takes never being satisfied to a whole other level as Bianca. The set too becomes a character itself: Contemporary, clean light projections bounce between an outline of Florence and the inside of the ducal apartments; more complex ones jolt audience members into a decidedly more experimental moment. Those who attended Morris’ Love Holds A Lamp in A Little Room will recognize a certain artistic bent whose boldness is meant to not just match the script, but to visually convey the conventions in which it was both written and adapted.
Which, ultimately, allows for the most satisfying part of the show: a near-seamless confluence of Elizabethan and modern worlds that is as exciting as is it unexpected, and finds relevance in today’s sociopolitical landscape. It’s not done to jar, although it does at times. Instead, it’s to make us wonder: What power have I yearned for? And what have I given of myself to make it happen?
