Pig Iron Theatre's "Isabella' (1st review)

Bare Bard

LEWIS WHITTINGTON

Pig Iron Theatre doesn’t hedge its theatrical bets with Isabella, a spare 70-minute version of Measure for Measure that sets Shakespeare’s tragicomedy in a morgue and performing it in the nude. Their reason to dare so disabuse the Bard is actually simple: The players are conceived as re-animated corpses.

Zombies doing iambic pentameter is the sort of notion hat could implode quicker than a “Saturday Night Live” sketch. But, once again, Pig Iron’s theatrical inventions are not only experimental— and in this case risky in the extreme— but vital theater. This is certainly not for everybody but it represents what the LiveArts-Philly Fringe Festivals could and should be. For Pig Iron, it’s an instant dark classic.

A TV drama with a deeper purpose

Pig Iron, already a centerpiece show at the festival, could be the only legitimate theater company with the legitimate balls to carry it off. All those real balls as well as the allegorically ones were on display before a sold-out crowd at a creepy converted meat packing plant in Northern Liberties. The nudity is a fiting element that reveals the darker threads of Shakespeare’s comedy within this ghastly setting. Ostensibly it’s a comic story of pre-marital sex, false identity and a missing person— sort of like a forensic TV drama. But fear not: Pig Iron has a deeper purpose in mind.

Surgical lighting slams on the set like a horror film, and The Mortician (Charles Conwell) comes in to spend his boring work day moving corpses around the autopsy room. He moves from the steel gurney to the dead body of a woman who appears to have been seizing at the time of death and is now in rigor. He touches her, begins to move other gurneys out of the cold storage and finds himself wondering if the undraped bodies could act out the characters from the play. He starts to move their mouths and limbs, slowly animating them. While the audience struggles to figure out if this ghoulish puppetry is abuse of a corpse, the bodies reanimate and start to perform the play.

Because the characters are mutilated in various ways, acting the drama in an undead state, their mumbles and vocal distortions are simultaneously comic and tragic. The script (created by the whole cast) draws out the marrow of the language, adding a layer of understanding of Shakespearean verse drama, and the framework busts open the visceral power of the soliloquies. Pig Iron is known for its physical/theater prowess, and here, the choreography (by Headlong Dance Theater’s David Brick) becomes this work’s stunning subtext.

The beautiful body electric

Whether the actors are required to look as if they were in rigor mortis or breaking into an undead minuet, it’s almost a gift to the audience in the message that the body electric is always beautiful. The cast is no less courageous in allowing their bodies to appear so completely flaccid and even grotesque.

Dan Rothenberg’s masterful direction sets up movement narratives and dialogue pacing that make this another engrossing ensemble pieces, with the actors not only resuscitating a difficult Shakespeare play but rendering their respective roles dead on arrivals. Most haunting is Birgit Happuch as Isabella, majestic as a Tudor queen and as chilling as Carrie. Gabriel Quinn Bauriedel’s Claudio, keeping to postmortem commedia, nonetheless does a great deal of plot heavy-lifting. Dito van Reigersberg’s Angelo might be prone most of most of the time but delivers an engrossing vocal performance.

By the time pieces of Elizabethan garb are distributed unstrategically on the actors’ bodies, it’s not only comic relief but also a profound point: Decoration of the body is essentially meaningless to the human condition.



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