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STC Board of Trustees Board of Trustees W. Mike House Emeritus Trustees Michael R. Klein, Chair Jerry J. Jasinowski R. Robert Linowes*, Robert E. Falb, Vice Chair Norman D. Jemal Founding Chairman John Hill, Treasurer Scott Kaufmann James B. Adler Pauline Schneider, Secretary Abbe D. Lowell Heidi L. Berry* Michael Kahn, Artistic Director Eleanor Merrill David A. Brody* Melissa A. Moss Melvin S. Cohen* Trustees Robert S. Osborne Ralph P. Davidson Nicholas W. Allard Stephen M. Ryan James F. Fitzpatrick Ashley M. Allen George P. Stamas Dr. Sidney Harman* Stephen E. Allis Bill Walton Lady Manning Anita M. Antenucci Lady Westmacott Kathleen Matthews Jeffrey D. Bauman Rob Wilder William F. McSweeny Afsaneh Beschloss Suzanne S. Youngkin V. Sue Molina Landon Butler Walter Pincus Dr. Paul Carter Ex-Officio Eden Rafshoon Chelsea Clinton Chris Jennings, Emily Malino Scheuer* Dr. Mark Epstein Managing Director Lady Sheinwald Andrew C. Florance Mrs. Louis Sullivan Miles Gilburne Daniel W. Toohey Barbara Harman Sarah Valente John R. Hauge Lady Wright Stephen A. Hopkins Lawrence A. Hough * Deceased 2 Dear Friend, Table of Contents Welcome to the first mainstage show of our 2013-2014 The Invention of Sex season, Measure for Measure. by Drew Lichtenberg 6 I am thrilled that Jonathan Title Page 9 Munby has returned to direct William Shakespeare’s About the Playwright 10 bracingly modern and human Synopsis 11 play after his excellent work on The Dog in the Manger here in 2009. By placing this story in a Cast 13 decadent 1930s Vienna, in an Austria on the brink Cast Biographies 14 of Fascist annexation, Jonathan brings enduring Direction and questions to the forefront of his production: Design Biographies 18 How do you reign in a society of excess while preserving justice? How far does the responsibility About STC 20 of our leadership extend into social life? What is Support 22 the role of government and religion in policing sexuality? All of these debates are very much alive For STC 30 in Washington, D.C. today. STC Staff 34 For this production, Scott Parkinson will play Audience Services 35 Angelo and Kurt Rhoads will play the Duke. You may remember Scott from Julius Caesar as well as his work in An Iliad at Studio Theatre and Kurt from The Merry Wives of Windsor. In addition to a brilliant cast, Jonathan has also brought an expert Cover photos by Scott Suchman. team of designers and artists to this production. As you take in the richly imagined world Jonathan has created in this production, keep this in mind: every person in the play, as in life, feels a strain between who they are and who they are perceived to be. This tension between the public and the private runs through many of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as other masterpieces of the dramatic form. This November, Yaël Farber’s Mies Julie, a smoldering South African adaptation of August Strindberg’s play, comes to STC, and we premiere our first ever musical, Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, directed by our Associate Director Alan Paul. We look forward to sharing these stories with you and hope you will join us again soon. Warm regards, Michael Kahn Artistic Director Shakespeare Theatre Company 3 Located steps away from Shakespeare Theatre Company at 915 E Street NW 202.629.9355 ASIAN FUSION RESTAURANT | LOUNGE The one-stop restaurant for all lovers of Asian food. “Tom yum soup, Japanese dumplings, hoisin-glazed ribs—the dozens of choices make sure no Asian appetite goes unmet.” The Washington Post Happy Hour: $4 draft beers, $5 wines, $6.50 mixed drinks Monday–Friday: 4:30–8pm, Saturday: Noon–7pm, Sunday: All Day MONDAY | Draft Beer Night all for $3 TUESDAY | Martini Night all for $6 WEDNESDAY | Mixed Drink Night all for $5 THURSDAY | Second drink 50% off FRIDAY | Party Time complimentary shot SATURDAY & SUNDAY | $12 pitchers of beer BRUNCH SPECIAL Your choice of 3 brunch menu items, dessert, soft drink: $25 Bloody Marys and Mimosas: $1 SHAKESPEARE STARS—show your Bard Card and receive 15% off! Located steps away from Shakespeare Theatre Company at 915 E Street NW 202.629.9355 ASIAN FUSION RESTAURANT | LOUNGE The one-stop restaurant for all lovers of Asian food. “Tom yum soup, Japanese dumplings, hoisin-glazed ribs—the dozens of choices make sure no Asian appetite goes unmet.” The Washington Post Happy Hour: $4 draft beers, $5 wines, $6.50 mixed drinks Monday–Friday: 4:30–8pm, Saturday: Noon–7pm, Sunday: All Day MONDAY | Draft Beer Night all for $3 TUESDAY | Martini Night all for $6 WEDNESDAY | Mixed Drink Night all for $5 THURSDAY | Second drink 50% off FRIDAY | Party Time complimentary shot Guastavino tile vaulting in New York’s former Vanderbilt Hotel (Warren & Wetmore), 1913. Photo by Michael Freeman. SATURDAY & SUNDAY | $12 pitchers of beer A major exhibition celebrating one of America’s greatest BRUNCH SPECIAL yet least-known builders of iconic public spaces. Your choice of 3 brunch menu items, dessert, soft drink: $25 Bloody Marys and Mimosas: $1 401 F Street NW Washington, DC 20001 | 202.272.2448 www.nbm.org | Red Line Metro, Judiciary Square SHAKESPEARE STARS—show your Bard Card and receive 15% off! The InvenTIon of sex In 1929’s Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund mischief. Most of the scenes take place at Freud tried to organize a chaotic age within a night, casting a dark fog over even the scenes theoretical framework. Human beings, Freud of comic clowning. Bed-tricks and head-tricks argued, are torn between two psychological abound, as Shakespeare finds dark humor forces: eros, or the “pleasure principle,” the in the substitution of bodies and body parts. desire to create art and make love, and thanatos, Religion is everywhere: no other Shakespeare or the “death drive” toward conformity, play features so many friars and nuns. Religion repression and war. Decades earlier, Freud is also nowhere, as no other Shakespeare had ushered in an age of increasing sexual play features religious figures doing such liberality by helping to introduce key terms frankly blasphemous things. The only private such as “homosexual” and “heterosexual” commerce Shakespeare depicts is Vienna’s into the worldwide lexicon. Now, as Europe roaring sex trade, which is supplanted halfway seemed to be backsliding toward world through the action by the executioner’s axe. war, Freud depicted the internal struggle of Shakespeare’s thoughts in this play are never humankind as an apocalyptic drama, animated far from sex and death. by the deep-seated desires and tensions of the human condition. The play is concerned on a surface level with the intersection of the law, religion and Freud was writing more than three hundred sexuality, but more importantly it calls into years after the composition of Measure for question the very idea of the psychological Measure, but Freud’s interwar Vienna makes self. The word “seemers” appears in this play a suggestive bedfellow for Shakespeare’s for the first time in the English language, masterpiece of sexual liberty, personal stricture and linguistic variations on the idea of and metaphysical questing. In perhaps no other “seeming” appear 21 times, more than in play does Shakespeare ask us to scrutinize the any other Shakespeare play. The play also distinction between the inner and the outer features Shakespeare’s only two uses of the man more. And no other play of Shakespeare’s word “shy,” in reference to both the Duke has remained so radically modern in its and Angelo. Is Shakespeare saying that all outlook, so alive to the interpretive possibilities of us are shy seemers, actors in our own of the stage, or so ambiguously suspended skin? That certainly seems to be the case, between eros and thanatos, between comedy as substitutions and disguises abound. and tragedy. Along with the aforementioned bed and head tricks, the play begins with the Duke One of the many enigmas of Measure for appointing Angelo as his deputy, “one that Measure is its setting in Vienna. The play is can my part in him advertise” (Act 1, scene Shakespeare’s only one to be set there, and his 1). He spends the rest of the play in disguise treatment of the capital of the Holy Roman as a friar, picking through the shards of his Empire is unique in the canon. Unlike his shadowy persona. Angelo, modeled on the Mediterranean plays, Shakespeare’s Vienna puritanical zealots of Shakespeare’s era, is is not a land of sunshine and light romantic quickly revealed to be harboring a rapacious 6 Shakespeare canon. “Were I under the terms of death,” she tells Angelo: The impression of keen whips I’d wear as rubies, And strip myself to death, as to a bed That longing have been sick for, ere I’d yield My body up to shame. (Act 2, scene 4) In Isabella’s language, the death-drive and the sex-drive are one and the same. Her desire for spiritual transcendence is transfigured, in typically dark Shakespearean irony, into longing for a fatal climax. Similarly, Angelo’s post-coital speech, delivered after he has had sex with who he believes is Isabella, is also laced with sexual imagery: This deed unshapes me quite, makes me unpregnant Ferdinand Freiherr von Řezníček, Morality Commission And dull to all proceedings. (Act 4, scene 3) inner lust, in stark contrast to his “outward- sainted” appearance and name. The object of Angelo is literally withered, “unshaped” his desires, the beautiful Isabella, also comes by the consummated sexual act. The Duke, cloaked in a mask: a nun’s habit, which proves performing his fatherly functions, fumbles similarly deceptive on the character’s path to about the stage until Isabella’s dilemma enlightenment.