Pig Iron's "Isabella' (2nd review)

Understanding (and appreciating) Isabella

STEVE COHEN

Pig Iron Theatre’s Isabella is a gripping theatrical event. My colleague Lew Whittington’s praise doesn’t go far enough. For me, Isabella is one of the most exciting plays of the past few years.

Most exciting to me— and overlooked by most critics— is Isabella’s remarkable faithfulness to Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure. How, you ask, can a 70-minute play set in a 21st-Century morgue be faithful to a full-length comedy set in Vienna at the turn of the 17th Century?

In fact, almost every syllable in Isabella was written by Shakespeare. And Pig Iron has remarkably captured the original’s essence and themes.

Bear in mind that Measure For Measure has long been considered a problem play, labeled a comedy but a very dark one, about death and sexual obsession. And for good reason: This was one of Shakespeare’s last works. (He wrote only five plays after Measure For Measure: King Lear, A Winter’s Tale, Macbeth, Cymbeline and The Tempest.) He wasn’t writing about adolescent love any more, he was thinking about the end of life.

After we die, what?

"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,” begins one speech from Measure For Measure, “To lie in cold obstruction and to rot." That soliloquy is preoccupied with what happens physically to corpses. Shakespeare makes many other references in the play to flesh, sex and death.

So Pig Iron’s artistic directors— Dan Rothenberg, Quinn Bauriedel and Dito van Reigersberg— picked up on this perception and set their version in a morgue. They created a mortician as their central character. Just as Angelo in Measure For Measure feels sexual desire for Isabella, a virtuous and chaste nun, so does the mortician find himself lusting after a corpse in his care. The Duke, Angelo’s superior in the original, also is fixated on Isabella’s body and wants to marry her. So the mortician is a counterpart of both the Duke and Angelo as he plays out his fantasies of sexual desire.

My fascination with Measure for Measure stems partly from the religious rigidity, combined with hypocrisy, of the political leaders. Isabella’s brother, you may recall, is sentenced to death for having sex with his fiancée. The Duke denounces prostitution and premarital sex but lacks the courage to enforce his own laws against them. He delegates his power to a subordinate, Angelo, who demands that Isabella have sex with him in exchange for her brother's life. He preaches against sexuality, and then is caught in a sexually predatory act himself. Sound familiar? This misuse of government, law and power is quite contemporary. In Isabella the misuse of power is transferred to the authority who handles our bodies and the bodies of our loved ones, with an impact that’s even stronger than what occurs when the miscreants are politicians.

A mortician alone with his corpses

We in the audience find ourselves in a brightly lit, modern morgue. Cadavers lie on gurneys. The mortician, in blue scrubs, removes the cover from one corpse, and it’s an attractive young woman. He begins his professional examination and note taking but soon, distracted, he peels off his rubber gloves and begins to run his hands over her body. Recoiling from his own action, he remembers the parallel in Measure For Measure and begins to prop up the bodies and manipulate them so they can recite Shakespeare’s lines.

To the credit of Pig Iron’s production, this chain of events emerges so naturally that the audience accepts the conceit. Perhaps the bodies move and talk only in the mortician’s imagination, but we easily suspend disbelief and accept every word.

One of this production’s strengths is the actors’ method of talking that suggests rigor mortis yet preserves Shakespeare’s thrust. Another is the players’ individually differentiated facial and body expression. Some of the men, for instance, have vacant or zombie-like gazes. Juliet maintains a sweet, pleasant visage, and Isabella’s look is the most unusual of all: She looks outraged, and appropriately so.

A word about nudity

By now you must have heard that the all cadavers are nude, and the mortician strips later in the play so he can fondle Isabella a second time. Forget the days when actors showed nudity very briefly, in dim light (in Hair), and when the directors of The Full Monty exploded strobes in the face of the audience so you couldn’t see the quick exposure of the male strippers. Isabella shows full nudity in bright light for more than an hour. The remarkable thing is that it’s not sexually provocative. And no one can say that the nudity is superfluous.

The actors deserve the highest praise, both for their guts in revealing their bodies and for their convincing portrayals. Co-artistic directors Bauriedel and van Riegersberg are Claudio and Angelo, Randy Rand is Lucio, Corinna Burns is Juliet and Charles Conwell is the nuanced, understated mortician. Birgit Huppuch combines the rage mentioned above with a beatific radiance that makes the characterization memorable. Dan Rothenberg directs the ensemble effort.

Isabella's Fringe run has finished. Pig Iron often takes its productions on worldwide tours but does not present enough hometown performances. Philadelphians deserve a chance to see this work in an extended engagement during the regular season.



To view a response, click here.
To view Lewis Whittington’s review, click here.