Starting Monday William Shakespeare returns to Central Park, and once again the Public has decided to do two shows in repertory with Measure for Measure, directed by David Esbjornson, running off-and-on with All’s Well That Ends Well, directed by Daniel Sullivan, between June 6 and July 30 (you can see which runs when here). And of course, the shows are free to the public. Last week, before Measure got into the Delacorte Theater for final tech rehearsals, we chatted with David Esbjornson (who has previously directed the world premiere of Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, the first public presentation of Perestroika, The Play About the Baby and many more) about directing a show with a double-booked cast (which happens to include actors like Tonya Pinkins, Annie Parisse and Michael Hayden), how you train actors to deal with wild animals, solving a "problem" Shakespeare play, and putting the Bard of Avon's lesser-known works into context.
Hi, thanks so much for talking with us. How are rehearsals going? They're going great! They're sparse. I don't see [the cast] for a while. I haven't seen the actors now for eight days and I won't see them until Tuesday. That's the whole thing about rep, is that you have these big gaps in between the time you rehearse the company and when they're with the other play, so it's very interesting. I haven't experience that before.
So this is the first time you've worked on a repertory production like this? Yeah, I've been asked to before but because of the time commitment I've often not been able to. But what's so great about this, of course, is that I live here in New York and I can be home, I can be living my life at the same time. It's actually kind of fun. It's very different in terms of rhythm. You get used to a certain directorial process, that includes certain signposts as you go, and you have to throw that out the window and just be there in the moment, which is fun. It's different.
Is it just the actors who are in repertory? Not the technical team? [All's Well That Ends Well director] Dan [Sullivan] and I share—we created the set in a sense together—with the set designer, Scott. We share a lighting designer. But costumes and sound are separate, because they have more to do with the specific worlds we're trying to create, and also the work load is just enormous if one individual had to do both shows. So we split it that way. There is both a connection to each other and an individuality.
You have your first performance in the Park is just around the corner. Yeah. [Laughs] I started tech Tuesday which was my first time in the Park with the company. And this Monday is the first preview. Then I do one more preview on Tuesday, and then Dan takes over again. You can see, it's pretty interesting, what it does to you.
I can't imagine. But it does completely go with the spirit of the Park, it's so rock n' roll out there, with the planes and the weather and the animals and 2,000 people a night. Just that whole experience is so...just, so unlike anything else. It just has such surprises and nuances that sort of creep in as a result of real life intersecting with the theater, because there is no boundary there.
Did you find in your last experience that the audience is different because it's the free theater in the park versus the paid theater in the actual theater? I remember going to Portland to The Oregon Shakespeare Festival and that's a destination theater where people drive a long way to see plays. So they are really pumped up when they get there and they really want it to be good, and there's a sense of, 'We're going to meet this more than halfway.' And I feel that way in the park. It's such a celebration of theater, of the culture of New York, it's always had a feeling of generosity in both directions.
How do you prepare the actors for the weather and the planes and the animals? Well, you know, you don't! They're pretty great about that stuff. In fact, I think they're probably a little bit more open to it than directors are. [Laughs] We tend to want our worlds to be very specific and controlled in some ways. They really celebrate being out there in front of people who are appreciating them. There's a part of them that reacts just like the audience does to something unexpected. Most of the time—there might be exceptions—most of the time, everyone's really cool about it.
What would you say the exceptions were? I haven't had them, but I imagine they exist. I imagine there are people who get freaked out. It's hard work, I guess, because you're out in the beating sun all day. Lots of sunscreen. You have to use microphones because you would lose your voice the first day of rehearsal because you can't compete with the outdoors in that respect. That's different. So there's a little disembodied feeling there. It can be pretty brutal when it's 95 degrees and 80 percent humidity or something. Especially if you have to put on a period costume!
You're doing your production in period? Yes, in a sense. The design is meant to bridge...I mean, it doesn't have that authentic Masterpiece Theatre sort of thing. It has a silhouette of that period in some cases very specifically, and in other cases referencing modern clothing. The fashion often uses a lot of English and Elizabethan influences, and we're trying to find that line where it's both historical and also recognizable in terms of modern fashion. It's mostly to create a sense of being in the world that Shakespeare wrote this play from.
I mean Measure for Measure is referred to as a problem play, and it means there are lots of challenges that Shakespeare presents with the material, things that are questions, things that you have to solve, histories, in a sense. He gives you one big dramaturgical challenge right from the beginning, which is the Duke is there for a scene, says, 'I'm the Duke, I'm leaving.' And you don't even get a chance to understand anything about his reaction, what his reaction is about. You get a sense that he's become disillusioned with leadership and that sort of thing. Traditionally, Shakespeare was probably thinking that the role would be played by an older wise man who then becomes a playwright who then becomes a God on Earth, and to some extent that was probably a response to living in the world of James and James feeling that he was ordained by God to do God's will—sound familiar?
And so, I think a lot of agenda is going on in the play. Political agendas on top of everything else. But what I decided to do was make the Duke a younger man, someone who hadn't formulated his leadership style or his ability to really go forward with a plan. He hadn't thought things through. He's more of a young man who hasn't matured yet and wakes up one day realizing that the culture has really gone to hell, and perhaps this is the time to step up and figure himself out. And so, I'm looking at it as a kind of maturation voyage in a sense, or a man who has a lot to learn, and that he's self-possessed enough to know that he has to put himself into the world in order to understand both the world and himself better. And that I think is always the issue, when you talk to someone about it, they go, 'Oh no, not the Duke—I can figure out a lot of tough Shakespeare roles but not that one.' [Laughs] So I really wanted to find a way to approach that, and to see if I could make some sense of it.
There's a lot of erratic behavior, a lot of unformed behavior, it's very improvisational at times. I didn't want it to be foolish, but I wanted it to be understood. You know, a young person who's making it up as they go, there are tons of celebrities that show us that kind of behavior every day. And Isabella—I felt it was very important for a modern audience to understand why she could be so devoted to her religion that she could sacrifice her brother for her virginity, and that's a hard one for modern audiences to grasp. So I wanted to put it in a period of time where there's no question that God existed, and that devils existed, and demons and witches. Those are all the things that the world of James...he believed completely in witches, and he believed in evil on Earth. And Isabella is really struggling for her immortal soul, and for that of her brother. She believes that they will be damned, and that she's trying to save them for the better life. And I think that's a hard leap sometimes for an audience to make. But if you put it in a period of time where all these things were the world view, I think it becomes a little bit more understandable.
Wait, is this your first time directing Measure? It is! Yeah.
A model of the set (Nella Vera).
Is it a spoiler to say how you solve the ending? I probably should leave that out right now. I'm just going to say that I'm not sure my version accepts the notion that the Duke is God on Earth. How's that? Is that enough of a teaser?
I think that's a perfectly good teaser. What's been the biggest surprise in terms of this time in the Park versus the last time you were in the Park? Right now it's just business as usual. It's not until you get out and connect with the stage that things become different enough to talk about. That's when all the things you have in your head get...and you realize, 'Oh my god, no one is going to be able to make that cross in that amount of time, it takes too long.' You have to think things through, see what works in front of the audience. You have to see what works in daylight. Some of the things I want to do typically—you know, like be under the guise of some kind of very evocative lighting, mood lighting or something like that—don't always work because you're sitting there starting the play in broad daylight. So you have to see how those things work. I'm trying to do something very abstract with the beginning of the play, and I'm very curious about it. Because I want to see if that works without it being in half-light or not. These are the kinds of things, some of the tools, that you are accustomed to having but are not necessarily available to you in that environment. You have to compromise a bit in that way, but something else happens that's always interesting.
Did The Public present you with Measure for Measure? Or did you present this as what you wanted to direct? It was a conversation but I remember them saying, 'We're kind of thinking about doing Measure for Measure because we think it's a really wonderful play, and we've moved past the greatest hits pieces now and we're looking to go into the more complex plays, and thus the slightly lesser known plays.' Of course, Measure is sort of cusp-y in that way. It is a pretty well-known play—even though it's considered a problem play—it's themes and all of that are better known to people than a lot of other pieces. But, they had said, we'll talk about anything you want to do, and we did. But I got hooked on that idea. And Dan was going to do something else that I can't remember, and then that changed, but Measure still stuck. And then we thought, these two plays are interesting together because they both revolve around bed tricks, so they both function off of that plot device and maybe it would be interesting to put them back-to-back. They couldn't be more different in their moods or their quality; one is sort of open and outdoors, the other is sort of dark and closed down. And that was my only concern initially. I think they're going to be ok, though.
Anyway, it was always on the table and I was intrigued by it initially, so I didn't veer too far. I did read some other things and tested some other ideas, but sometimes it had to do with whether they ahd recently done it, or if somebody else in town was doing it, that kind of thing. It just kept coming back to Measure and I thought, 'This is just—it's meant to be.' So I really embraced it.
In terms of working on a show like this—you've worked with a bunch of contemporary playwrights—do you find it's easier to work with a locked-in text like Shakespeare or do you like working with someone like Tony Kushner, who is writing constantly? I like both processes a lot. It's very important to me in my career in the theater that I've had the opportunity to do both. I wouldn't want to be locked into either thing all the time. There are amazing things that happen when you're working on a new play, it's all in front of you, it's a world that hasn't been defined yet. You and, to some extent, the playwright as well, are in the dark. The playwright of course has a stronger sense of what he or she has in their mind and you have a sense of how you would bring that to life, but you really don't know what it is yet. So that's very exciting.
With a classic play, you've had hundreds of thousands of interpretations. How do you make that world as specific to you as a new play feels? And what choices can you make that make it feel as contemporary and as important for now as a new play? I think that, it's trying to occupy the same universe...not the same universe, the same play, in either situation. You're just coming at it differently. With a classic play, you're trying to find your clues from historical information, from what people wrote. And so you are in a sense piecing it together. What I started to think about when approaching Measure for Measure, what were the circumstances? What was the backdrop in which he was writing this? You have to acknowledge that this is a time of religious upheaval. It was a time when theaters were being closed down because of the bubonic plague. Jesuits and other political and religious people were being persecuted on a daily basis. Hangings, heads on spikes. You had the coffers emptied because of foreign war. People were being dragged from their farms to fight in those wars. There was a lot of homelessness. When you think of all of that, you can see how a play like Measure for Measure might emerge from that chaos.
Do you do your own dramaturgy? I guess! [Laughs]
You're well versed is all. Well, yeah, and a lot of this has to do with working on other plays and trying to be aware of what was going on in Shakespeare's life. I did Hamlet a couple years ago, and Hamlet and Lear and MacBeth, they all kind of occupied this same period of time, and it's a very, very rich time for Shakespeare, and a very sad time—I think he lost his son that year, too. There's a lot of deepening of his material at this particular point, and resonances that exist in Hamlet exist in this play. Claudio's lines in prison about death resonate very strongly with Hamlet. I think it has to do with what you're reading and reading people's thinking about the play, but often just about doing other plays and piecing it together, finding your own way at it, and understanding what was going on at that particular moment in history, and what might have been going on with the playwright.
