Measure for Measure

The origin story of David and Stephanie has its biggest roots in a couple scenes we performed together in our college Shakespeare class. I had no acting experience, but I saw no shortage of inspiration and devilry from the role I was working on--Angelo from Measure for Measure; soon, the "strong and swelling evil / Of my conception," and the exhilaration of performing, was just like any other kind of flirting--energetic, presumptive, sly.

Angelo is given charge of Vienna by its duke, who wants to crack the whip on a city of sin but is himself too soft and friendly to do it. Perhaps the need to give Vienna a cold shower is a necessary one, given how Italian it had all been getting there (all those Austrians named Claudio, Angelo, Lucio and Vincentio?). Angelo, though, is described as having urine of "congealed ice," and has no such problem, immediately sentencing a man to death for extra-marital relations. The condemned man's sister comes to Angelo to plead for her brother's life, and though Isabella is nearing vows of the sisterhood and though Angelo has been unyielding in matters of sex and love, he discovers a little spark, and finds himself telling Isabella leniency can be earned.

It's stunning and wildly grotesque, because the story is over 400 years old and fictional and yet not nearly fantastical enough. At the time we performed the scenes, the Clarence Thomas / Anita Hill story was just a couple years old. I was aware of the political charge of our play, but also of the scent of Stephanie's hair as I stepped behind her to whisper at her ear, "Plainly conceive, I love you."

Last Wednesday night, Stephanie I went to see Seattle Shakespeare Company put on a performance of Measure for Measure. We had last seen an interpretation in 1992 with the college class, an unfunny, sober performance with a screeching rape scene that had only reinforced my sense that the play deserved its lesser accolades. We had been looking forward all these years later to going back to those resonant lines and discordant intimacies that put us together.

And it was amazing--one of the best performances I've seen out of this production company. And it put my one-note, sanctimonious college-y interpretation to shame. I wrote a letter to this week's Angelo, and he wrote a deeply satisfying and thoughtful response back. I include the letters below.

Watching the play with Stephanie two dozen years after our show was more satisfying and rich than I thought it could be; discussing performance decisions afterwards was delicious. Shakespeare doesn't have much in the way of successful marriages (who's his most united couple, the Macbeths?)--he mostly likes the getting there; but my partnership with Stephanie, these many years later, has as much the energy, joy and desire as it ever had.


Sent: Friday, January 30, 2015 10:26 AM
To: Grosskopf, David
Subject: Re: Your Angelo was outstanding

David,

I can’t express how much I appreciate this letter. Like you, I have had an attachment to this role and play since I was in training, and to hear that an audience member, especially one so familiar with the play and character, saw and appreciated my journey though thrills me. 

When I was twenty, I saw Angelo much the same as you did….as a grotesque mustache twirler, yet as I studied him over the years I saw that there was so much more there. My first thoughts that he wasn’t two dimensional came when I realized that the way he is portrayed relies more on the plays journey than his. 

The simple fact of the matter is that if he is played to be unredeemable, then Marina and Isabel just look foolish in the end. He must be forgivable (one of the hardest things for us humans to do for the play to work. Forgiveness is a knot I believe Shakespeare tried to understand for most of his later plays, Winters Tale becoming his greatest treatise on the matter…in my opinion. Ironic that in one of the last speeches Marina refers to a "marble monument”. The interdependence of the characters to tell the story is the key here. 

Once I understood this, Shakespeare’s road map burst from the page and I saw the intense struggles that Angelo faced. The opposites he uses from couplet to couplet , and the antithesis he uses even in the same lines. Like all of Shakespeare late characters he lives in a moment in time, struggling with thoughts he has difficulty understanding. He in in an emergency room, looking only at what is in front of him.  Experiencing emotions he has no skills to conquer. Washing over him like a tsunami. 

God it is fun to play.

So thanks again for this. If you run into me at some point please introduce yourself. I’d like to put a face to the letter.

All the best

Brad

Dear Mr,

                My wife and I went to last night’s show of Measure for Measure and were thrilled by the performance. D. Chiang’s direction was so insightful and creative, lighting up the undertones and overtones of a play I thought I understood before; and your interpretation, in particular, gave me the illusion that no other interpretation of Angelo was possible.

                I am a Shakespeare teacher at Roosevelt High School, and I usually refer to this play when I’m talking about opportunities stage-direction-less texts present: I give the plot of Measure for Measure (but how did I forget the bed trick?), and I lead up to the moment the duke asks for Isabella’s hand, explaining that she has no more words in the script: does she take his hand, slap him, look quizzically at her rosary beads (loved it!), what?

                But the play also has special meaning for me because, twenty years ago in college, I performed a couple scenes as Angelo and ended up going home with my Isabel—last night was the first time we’d seen the play since all those years ago.

                I had played Angelo as a straight up hypocritical sleazebag. My performance journal is attached (ignore it, or just read the first paragraph), and you can hear my Sophomoric confidence as well as my stupid interpretation—one that held up for me until last night.

                Your Angelo is consistently principled, or tries to be; and when you launch into the “Plainly conceive, I love you” scene, Angelo continues to wrestle with himself much longer than mine did; I did not pick up the hypothetical cues in the scene well, though so clear in your performance; and so your Angelo, as he presents Isabella with what-if’s, does not seem merely to be trying to manipulate Isabel’s moral reasoning: he’s still wrestling somehow—until he goes for it.

                The smallness of your Angelo, the space he takes up on the stage especially when the duke is there, and then the slight puffing—pretty desk, Mao jacket—made Angelo so familiar, and even sympathetic: a middle manager who believes in the company he works for.

                Your acting was nuanced and thoughtful, and gave complexity and tragedy to a character I’d just seen as exploitative and villainous. He is as surprised by his downfall as anyone.

                The play really came together for me in a way that it never had before with Mariana’s lines, which your Mariana so powerfully belted out: “They say, best men are moulded out of faults; / And, for the most, become much more the better / For being a little bad.” I just saw this play as melodrama before; but with these lines, everything Chiang had done, everything you had done, really began to sing for me, and the play became a real play, and one certainly worth doing: our dogma and our righteousness is stupid in the face of our faults, and we should be led by our humanity above all else.

                In any event, I thought you were brilliant, and I thank you.

David Grosskopf