Exquisite Corpse

How Pig Iron got hooked up with Shakespeare — and retrofitted him with a necrophiliac mortician.


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Published: Aug 29, 2007

Jacques-Jean Tiziou/ www.jtiziou.com

Local theater fans would be hard-pressed to conjure up the name Shakespeare when thinking of experimental-dance-clown-everything group Pig Iron Theater. You wouldn't expect to find them in the same sentence, let alone on the same stage.

Yet this week, Pig Iron will present the world premiere of its Isabella, inspired by Measure for Measure.

"Actually, Dan [Rothenberg, Pig Iron co-founder] always was a Shakespeare nerd," says his artistic partner, Quinn Bauriedel. "Dan and I and Dito van Reigersberg were theater majors at Swarthmore in the early '90s and we used to do Shakespeare readings in the forest behind the school."

"The focus was on other things in the theater department, but we read a lot of Shakespeare in our English classes," Rothenberg says. "We loved his themes, but we didn't know if there was a way we could present him to today's audiences."

The group's reunion with Shakespeare came when New York's Public Theatre (which started as Joe Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival) invited Pig Iron to do a 2003 workshop on new ways to produce the Bard.

They took Measure for Measure as their inspiration but created an original work that includes only about 25 percent of Shakespeare's lines.

"It interested us because it's a problem play, labeled a comedy but very dark, about death and sexual obsession," says Bauriedel. "Because a character is going to be executed for having premarital sex, we thought of setting our version in Arabia and we used veils and sand, but it didn't work. Then Dan thought of setting it in a morgue."

"I remembered the speech of Claudio that starts: 'Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,'" says Rothenberg. Aside from its resemblance to Hamlet's "To be or not to be," Claudio's soliloquy is preoccupied with what happens physically to corpses. The partners point out many references in the play to flesh, sex and death. "This was one of Shakespeare's last plays," Rothenberg says. "He wasn't writing about adolescent love anymore. He was thinking about the end of his life."

So Rothenberg, Bauriedel and van Reigersberg created a central character who's a mortician. "Just like Angelo in Measure for Measure looks at Isabella, a virtuous young nun, and is wracked with sexual desire for her, breaking taboos and lusting after her, so does the mortician lust after bodies that are in his care," explains Rothenberg. The Duke, Angelo's superior in the original, also is fixated on Isabella's body and wants to marry her. Therefore, Pig Iron chose to center the play on Isabella — a part that was played by Meryl Streep for Joe Papp in 1976. The mortician, a counterpart of the Duke, plays out his fantasies of sexual desire and creating fear.

Isabella faces a difficult decision when her brother, Claudio, is sentenced to death for having sex with his fiancée. One of the reasons that Measure for Measure disturbs modern viewers and fascinates the Pig Iron group is this religious rigidity on the part of the nation's leaders. Religious rigidity plus hypocrisy: The ruler 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.

Angelo goes back on his word, sending a message to the prison that he wants to see Claudio's head. The Duke tries to play the good guy, up to a point, and arranges the execution of another prisoner whose head can be sent instead of Claudio's. "The misuse of government, law, power, hypocrisy — it's very contemporary," says Bauriedel.

Pig Iron's workshop of Isabella anticipated a revival of interest in the play over the last three years, with notable productions by England's National Theatre and the Globe, which brought its all-male production to the Annenberg in April 2006.

Bauriedel and van Reigersberg are in the cast while Rothenberg directs. UArts theater professor Charles Conwell plays the mortician. Birgit Huppuch, who was in Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival's Much Ado About Nothing, plays Isabella.

The site is a former fish-freezing warehouse turned into an art gallery. It's a concrete box, deliberately chosen because of its contrast to the normally elaborate settings for Shakespeare — white, sterile and medical, with bright fluorescent lights. There's full nudity in the production, which is not for children.

(s_cohen@citypaper.net)

Isabella by Pig Iron Theatre, Aug. 29-Sept. 15, $20, Ice Box Projects Space at the Crane Arts Building, 1400 N. American St. (between Second and Third streets, north of Girard).