“The play is about juicy and uncomfortable things,” said Leora Morris, third-year director at the Yale School of Drama.
She was speaking about her thesis show, Howard Barker’s Women Beware Women, which runs Jan. 23 to 29 at the Iseman Theater on Chapel Street. The play is a late-1980s adaptation by the British playwright of a Jacobean play by Thomas Middleton, dating from the mid-17th century and set in Medici Florence in 1621.
Barker retains Middleton’s text, mostly, for the first act. Then he rewrites the ending with a decidedly more modern, though no less mannered, idiom. For Morris and her team, this presented three challenges.
The first challenge, Morris said, was determining if the play is “one or two periods and settings.” The second challenge was getting her cast of YSD students, who are all mostly the same age, to play characters “in a range of ages and in two different sets of language, and to crack the code of each.” On the one hand, there’s Middleton’s iambic verse, on the other “the contemporary gritty poetry” of Barker’s language. Example: Middleton’s play opens thus: “Thy sight was never yet more precious to me / Welcome, with all the affection of a mother, / That comfort can express from natural love.” And Barker’s: “We fuck the day to death. And suffocate the night with tossing. Time stands still. She says so.”
The third challenge has much to do with Morris’s choice of Barker’s play: “Can it support a feminist reading?” The play’s politics are progressive, but does that mean the same for women as for men?
“Middleton wrote about women in a man’s world, where the only triumph was to succeed in that world” according to male dictates of success. Barker, writing in the era of Thatcherism and commissioned to produce a play about money and the stock exchange, looked to the Jacobean as a way to express the contemporary lust for wealth and the power of money. Combining the two eras, Morris said, is “incendiary and provocative,” with the incest, rape, and bloodbath for which Jacobean tragedy is infamous exposing the “slinky, corrupt underbelly” of ultra-conservatism.
Morris and her team took some inspiration from British film auteur Peter Greenaway’s highly artistic and somewhat scandalous film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), which likewise merges periods, pairing the brutality of petty criminals of the 1980s with the décor and trappings of the 17th century. Like Greenaway, Morris and her designers strived to find a single setting that could encompass both visions, making the two eras one. The oppressive Duke in Middleton’s play might stand for Tory conservatism in Barker’s hands. To Morris, today, the kind of crisis of values that drove Barker is just as germane, just as unresolved. “It feels like a delicious act of defiance in and of itself to take the reins of this impolite, bodily, irreverent, ugly, dangerous piece,” she said.
With a cast of six women and six men, Morris spoke enthusiastically of getting to direct scenes where women interact significantly with other women, rather than as the secondary or solitary characters they often are. In creating that parity of parts, she made a few changes to the script, with a female actor playing a male cardinal, as male, and another female actor playing a character — a political ladder-climber — written as male but played as female here.
During the preparation of Women, one of Morris’s advisors, Tim Vasen, died suddenly. The show is dedicated to him for his invaluable insights, inspirations, and support. Having viewed a “stumble-through” of the play (i.e., a very early rehearsal) back in December, Vasen called the show “the least pandering piece of theater in a very long time.” Morris agreed, because Barker’s play refuses to talk down to its audience. It places a series of confusing and perplexing events on the stage and “lets you make up your mind” regarding how to evaluate what you’ve seen.
Which brings us back to Morris’s sense of the play, which she saw as “a ruthless exposure of the world as it is.” Taking it on was a way of doing battle with the limits on imagination, to show the transformative possibilities of theater. “After spending the first half of the play trying to run the system that oppresses them, the characters — one by one — become aware of the system and work to destroy it,” she said.
This is a view of society that takes its sense of humor “from deep suffering.” But “it should be funny,” Morris added. “If not, something is wrong.”
Women Beware Women runs Jan. 26 to 29 at the Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel St. Click here for more information.
