MEASURE FOR MEASURE, David Geffen School of Drama, January 2024

E R U S MEA URE FOR MEAS

2023–24 SEASON SHAKESPEARE REPERTORY PROJECTS

JANUARY 26–27, 2024 DAVID GEFFEN SCHOOL OF DRAMA AT YALE James Bundy, Elizabeth Parker Ware Dean Florie Seery, Associate Dean Chantal Rodriguez, Associate Dean Carla L. Jackson, Assistant Dean

PRESENTS

Measure for Measure

By William Shakespeare

Adapted by Alexis Kulani Woodard and Sophia Carey Directed by Alexis Kulani Woodard

Creative Team Music Director

Jill Brunelle

Scenic Designer

Patrick Blanchard Costume Designer

Micah Ohno

Lighting Designer

Gib Gibney

Sound Designer and Composer

Tojo Rasedoara

Cast

in alphabetical order Duke

Claudio

Provost

Lucio

Escalus

Isabella

Angelo

Mistress Overdone/Francisca/ Mariana

Mariah Copeland Messiah Cristine Sufiyan Farmer Malik James

Ariyan Kassam Max Monnig Chinna Palmer

Amelia Windom

Projection Designer

Ein Kim

Production Dramaturg

Sophia Carey

Technical Director

Nickie Dubick

Fight and Intimacy Director

Content Guidance

This production includes depictions of sex and sexual assault, as well as the use of fog, haze, and incense.

Kelsey Rainwater

Measure for Measure is performed without an intermission.

Stage Manager

This production is supported by The Benjamin Mordecai III Production Fund.

Adam Taylor Foster

Artistic

Management Assistant

Assistant Projection Designer

Kavya Shetty

Assistant Costume Designer

Jacob Santos

Lighting Design Advisor

Maza Rey

Assistant Sound Designer and Engineer

David Geffen School of Drama productions are supported by the work of more than 200 faculty and staff members throughout the year.

Music Captain

Special Thanks

John Horzen

Amani Jaramoga Kyle Stamm

Robert Salerno

Mariah Copeland Assistant Stage Manager

Rosemary Lisa Jones

Production Associate Safety Advisors

Cian Jaspar Freeman, Luanna Jubsee

Associate Production Manager

Kino Alvarez

Production Electrician

T Morris Thompson Projection Programmer

Ke Xu

Projection Engineer

Jason Dixon

Properties Manager

Steph Lo Run Crew

Nakia Shalice Avila, Aholibama Castañeda González, Hannah Louise Jones, Allison Morgan

Administration Associate Managing Director

A.J. Roy

Assistant Managing Director

Jeremy Landes

House Manager Production Photographer

Charlie Lovejoy, Nat Lopez, Aura Michelle, Chloe Xiaonan Liu, Kirsten Williams.

Yale acknowledges that indigenous peoples and nations, including Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples, have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut. We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land.

We also acknowledge the legacy of slavery in our region and the enslaved African people whose labor was exploited for generations to help establish the business of Yale University as well as the economy of Connecticut and the United States.

The Shakepeare Repertory Projects are designed to be learning experiences that complement classroom work, providing a medium for students at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale to combine their individual talents and energies toward the staging of collaboratively created works. Your attendance meaningfully completes this process.

THE BENJAMIN MORDECAI III PRODUCTION FUND, established by a graduate of the School, honors the memory of the Tony Award-winning producer who served as Managing Director of Yale Repertory Theatre, 1982– 1993, and as Associate Dean and Chair of the Theater Management Program from 1993 until his death in 2005.

Front illustration by Maggie Elliott.

And Measure Still for Measure…

The Duke and Her Doubles Before leaving them to the authority of her lieutenant general, Queen Elizabeth I declared to the English troops assembled at Tilbury, “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure in 1603 between the death of the Queen and the coronation of her successor, King James I. These were months in which Shakespeare’s audience, ruled for the last forty-four years by a woman who called herself a prince, were forced to adjust to once again being subjects of a man. The audience of Measure for Measure is then beset by a kind of double vision, born of the uneasy intersections between queen and king, tragedy and comedy, justice and revenge.

This production “digs deep,” to use bell hooks’ phrase, into the problems of Shakespeare’s problem play, exploring what it means to be a Black woman in power in 2024. Rumors about the Duke are spreading through Vienna like the plague, locking her in a double bind: enforce the city’s long-dormant laws and be called a tyrant, or don’t enforce them and be accused of sleeping on the job. Desperate for the safety of her subjects’ good opinion, the Duke puts Angelo in charge and retreats to the margins of the city disguised as a friar. The margins provide a kind of funhouse mirror through which the Duke views herself and the matrix of power she inhabits, accentuating her double consciousness—her sense of, in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, “always looking at one’s self

through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

Things are never only what they seem. Measure for Measure, from its title on, is a play of doubles—a play on words—its dialogue rich with double entendres that layer the bawdiest sex joke with the loftiest moral rhetoric. Uniting these seeming opposites is the erotic. Theorized by Audre Lorde, the erotic is “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.” Pleasure and desire in this play operate not just in the body, but also through language and spirituality. Isabella, nearly a novice nun, uses the erotic as a torch to light her way through impenetrable double-talk and duplicitous double crosses.

Without the erotic, says Lorde, women run the risk of perpetuating the patriarchal system that oppresses them, forsaking restorative justice and imposing the very double standards we dream of using our power to take down. Ironic, then, that it’s only after the Duke steps down from power and dons her disguise that she finds she has become The Man. —Sophia Carey, Production Dramaturg and Co-Adaptor