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