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theatre reviews 537
Bourne brought to the same role. Here, costuming was one of the biggest
unifying factors: each character in the play always wore the same, distinctly colored shirt with the appropriate name prominently embroidered
on the front. If anything, the multiple casting made visible one of the
central themes in Shakespeare’s play, which suggests that being a lover
is more a function of moving between different roles than of fixing one’s
heart on only one person. As Protheus (who not accidentally is named
after the shape-shifting god) says, to be a lover is to be “metamorphosed.”
n
Double Falsehood
Presented by Letter of Marque Theater Company at The Irondale Center,
Brooklyn, New York. March 5–April 9, 2016. Directed by Andrew BorthwickLeslie. Set and props by Steven Brenman. Costumes by Claire Townsend.
Lighting by Joe Doran. Music direction by Nolan Kennedy. Fight direction by
Michael C. Toomey. Dramaturgy by Lynde Rosario. Art installation by Jared
Deery. With Ariel Estrada (Don Bernardo), Tom Giordano (Camillo), Adam
Huff (Henriquez), Nolan Kennedy (The Duke/Master of the Flock), Montana
Lampert Hoover (Leonora), Zach Libresco ( Julio), Poppy Liu (Violante),
Scarlet Maressa Rivera (Citizen/Gerald), and Welland H. Scripps (Roderick).
1599
Presented by Irondale Ensemble at the The Irondale Center, Brooklyn,
New York. April 30–May 28, 2016. Conceived and directed by Jim Niesen.
Scenic design by Ken Rothchild. Costume design by Hilarie Blumenthal.
Lighting design by Nolan Kennedy. Stage management by Rivka Rivera.
With Joey Collins (Hamlet/Antony/Jaques/Chorus/Bardolph and others),
Michael-David Gordon (Brutus/Touchstone/Horatio/Exeter/Pistol/Player
King/Guildenstern and others), Terry Greiss (Claudius/Cassius/Duke Senior/
Duke Ferdinand/Silvius/Archbishop/Alice/Ghost and others), Sam Metzger
(Orlando/Oliver/Laertes/Fluellen/Dauphin/Casca/Rosencrantz and others),
Alex Spieth (Henry V/Celia/Polonia/Phoebe/Audrey/Portia/Calpurnia/
Soothsayer/the Gravedigger and others), and Katie Wieland (Rosalind/
Gertrude/Ophelia/Caesar/Katharine/ Montjoy/Ely and others).
Dan Venning, New York University
The Irondale Center is located in the historic Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The church, organized in
1857, was known as a “temple of abolition” and contains a spacious annex,
originally used for lectures and demonstrations by visiting luminaries such
538 shakespeare bulletin
as Frederick Douglass, Charles Dickens, and Alexander Graham Bell.
Since 2008, this annex has been used as the home of the Irondale Ensemble, as well as for other innovative performances and events. The cavernous, somewhat decrepit 5400-square-foot auditorium features 28-foot
ceilings and a 1900-square-foot balcony that extends above three sides of
the main space, allowing for a very flexible playing area. This past spring,
the Irondale Center hosted two ambitious Shakespearean experiments:
Double Falsehood, presented by Letter of Marque Theater Company, and
1599, presented by the Irondale Ensemble. These two productions both
utilized the space to highlight radically reworked Shakespearean texts,
creating unique theatrical experiences.
Letter of Marque’s program cover billed its production as “Shakespeare’s
Double Falsehood,” and atop the cast list the play was described as “By
William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, & Lewis Theobald.” But of course
this attribution is not certain. In his director’s note, Andrew BorthwickLeslie asserted that “I don’t want to wade too deep into the discussion
of whether or not any of the text you will hear tonight was written by
William Shakespeare,” but Borthwick-Leslie and dramaturg Lynde Rosario chose to approach the play as Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s, filtered
through Theobald’s eighteenth-century editorial sensibilities. Theobald
was an early eighteenth-century lawyer and Shakespearean editor who
claimed to have had direct contact with Shakespearean manuscripts for a
previously lost play. On December 13, 1727, he had this work produced
at the Drury Lane Theatre as Double Falshood; Or, The Distrest Lovers
[sic], publishing it the next month. Theobald’s Double Falsehood is an
adaptation of the Cardenio episode from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, with
the names changed but still distinctly Spanish-sounding. We know that
the Irish Catholic exile Thomas Shelton created an English translation
of Cervantes’s novel, which was published in 1612, and that in 1613 the
King’s Men staged a play by Shakespeare and Fletcher entitled The History of Cardenio, which is now presumed lost. Theobald’s Double Falsehood
may be a complete forgery or it may be a genuine adaptation of the lost
play, but that remains a topic of hot debate among scholars. Billing the
play as “Shakespeare’s” certainly could have served to bring in audiences,
but ultimately the authorship of the play was unimportant in Letter of
Marque’s production, which demonstrated how this drama could resonate
with today’s audiences in ways probably radically different from those its
author(s) may have intended.
Double Falsehood is an ensemble piece, but the central character is
Henriquez, the entitled younger son of the Duke. Henriquez commits the
theatre reviews 539
double falsehood of the title, abusing both his supposed friend Julio and
the maid Violante. Firstly, Henriquez has Julio summoned to court, so
that he can woo Julio’s fiancée, Leonora. Before trying to marry Leonora,
Henriquez attempts to complete his seduction of the commoner Violante.
She knows that as a nobleman he cannot marry her, so she rejects his
advances, after which he forces his way into her chamber, rapes her, and
then sends her a self-justifying letter suggesting that they both just forget
everything. Violante, afraid of bringing shame to her father’s house, runs
away to the wilderness. Meanwhile, Leonora’s father, Don Bernardo, is
only too happy to annul the engagement between his daughter and her
true love in order to secure a seemingly more favorable match. Julio returns in the nick of time to try to prevent the wedding, but is wounded
in a fight with Henriquez and flees to the country; Leonora faints and,
because a dagger and suicide note are discovered on her, is sent to a
nunnery. The scene then shifts to the country, where Julio has become a
madman, attacking the shepherds and their flocks. Violante is disguised
as a boy, but when the Master of the Flocks discovers this disguise, he
attempts to rape her and is only narrowly prevented by Roderick, the elder
son of the Duke. Roderick brings about the resolution by revealing his
younger brother’s falsehoods and bringing Leonora and Julio together.
Henriquez confesses his villainies, and the Duke, claiming he owes his
life to Violante’s father, orders that she and Henriquez be married.
Letter of Marque’s production emphasized the deeply troubling nature of this play not by playing against the text but by fully exploring its
depictions of entitlement, violence, and trauma. In the final moments of
the play, after ordering the marriage between Violante and her rapist,
the Duke asks the assembled company “Are you all pleas’d?” (5.3.274).
Brean Hammond, in his introduction to the Arden edition of Double
Falsehood, describes the play as one in which “all ends happily” (25), but
this is certainly no happy ending, although Theobald may have seen it
as such. In Bothwick-Leslie’s production, the final line was shouted by
Nolan Kennedy, who portrayed the Duke as enraged that his son had
been shamed. Notably, Kennedy also doubled as the Master of the Flock,
whose response to Violante’s pleading not to rape her is “No stories now”
(4.1.184). In this production, this line was accompanied by a brutal physical assault. The wild places of Double Falsehood are nothing like the Forest
of Arden: instead of presenting a respite from the danger of the city, they
simply replicate the same assaults. At the end of the production, Poppy
Liu’s Violante was left sobbing at her fate, while Welland H. Scripps’s
well-intentioned Roderick was visibly horrified at the resolution his father
540 shakespeare bulletin
Fig. 5. Poppy Liu as Violante and Adam Huff as Henriquez, with company
members, in Letter of Marque’s 2016 Production of Double Falsehood, directed
by Andrew Borthwick-Leslie. Photo courtesy of Amanda Hinkle.
had decreed. Henriquez, although he felt guilty (for whatever that was
worth), was untouchable because of his privilege.
Letter of Marque’s production highlighted this message, and its contemporary relevance, through exciting design choices and the superb
performances of the lead actors. The production was anchored by Adam
Huff ’s astounding performance as Henriquez. Costumed in a coat that
was part hoodie and wearing bright red sneakers, Huff portrayed Henriquez as a privileged predator, a young man who was aware that what
he was doing was wrong, felt really bad about it, yet refused to change
his behavior. Huff delivered his self-pitying speeches without judging the
character, instead letting the audience despise him. Claire Townsend’s
inspired costumes (which were period eighteenth-century for the older
generation of the Duke, Julio’s father Camillo, and Don Bernardo) highlighted how Henriquez saw himself, despite his own actions, as a lovable
playboy. Liu was superb as Violante, an intelligent young woman who
was smart enough to resist the seductions of Henriquez, but who, once
raped by him, was fully aware of her powerlessness. Liu was costumed in
hip, quasi-period dresses, but her hair, a stylish undercut, marked her as
a woman in today’s world, and her performance movingly depicted how
theatre reviews 541
sexual assault can traumatize a victim. She and Henriquez and the vicious
Master of the Flock could as easily have been characters on a modern-day
college campus as denizens of an eighteenth-century play (Fig. 5). Steven
Brenman created a fascinating set. A small structure, representative of the
town, with mirrors and windows, enclosed the first half of the play. This
was taken down at intermission, and the second half of the play, in the
wilds, used the entirety of the vast Irondale auditorium.
Letter of Marque’s mission is to produce dynamic and innovative
theater at little to no cost to audiences, and Double Falsehood was free
to all who reserved tickets in advance. The show was not perfect. Some
casting choices were strange, especially the fact that Scripps as Roderick
appeared older than Kennedy as his father the Duke; similarly, Estrada
and Giordano as Don Bernardo and Camillo seemed not much older than
their children. But these minor issues didn’t detract from the spectator’s
engagement with the play. Additionally, upon entering and exiting the
auditorium, audience members crossed through the gallery above the
playing space, where they could explore Jared Deery’s art installation,
inspired by the play. This served to remind us that Double Falsehood would
not disappear after a performance ended, just as Violante’s trauma was not
confined to the specific moments of her assault. Abusers like Henriquez
and the Master of the Flock remain a part of our society, as do those like
the Duke who enable and condone such behavior.
***
The Irondale Ensemble’s own 1599 had no art installation, but it used
the entirety of the space, including the gallery, in fascinating ways. 1599,
originally conceived as The 1599 Project and workshopped over the past
six years, was a four-and-a-half-hour-long production inspired by James
Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599. The production,
directed by Irondale’s Artistic Director Jim Niesen, consisted of abridged
versions of Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet, each only
a little over an hour in length, and all performed by the same six-actor
cast of Joey Collins, Michael-David Gordon, Terry Greiss, Sam Metzger,
Alex Spieth, and Katie Wieland. Four and a half hours in the theater have
rarely gone by so quickly.
Before the play began, the six actors milled about the main floor of the
annex, where seats were arranged to form a thrust stage, and bantered
with audience members. The show began with a reworked rendition of
the “Ages of Man” speech from As You Like It: Collins, who would later
542 shakespeare bulletin
play Jaques, told us that each actor would play many parts, such as Henry
(Spieth), Brutus (Gordon), Rosalind (Wieland), and Hamlet (Collins).
Then he effortlessly transitioned into the Chorus of Henry V, invoking
our imaginations. This Henry V was the most conventional of the four
pieces in its staging, albeit with a female actor playing Henry. Although,
as with all four productions, Shakespeare’s play was drastically streamlined, Niesen added Henry’s “I know thee not, old man” speech from
Henry IV, Part 2, at the point when Henry condemned Bardolph to death
for looting. The scenes between Katharine (Wieland) and Alice, who
was played with aplomb by the white-haired and bearded Greiss, were
especially uproarious. Henry V set the tone for the entire evening: the actors had to distinguish their many roles effectively in order for audiences
to follow the drastically reduced texts and they did this admirably. After
Collins delivered his final Chorus, Gordon appeared and delivered one
of Brutus’s lines, then the stage was darkened for an intermission. This
would set up another convention of the production: each abridged play,
except Hamlet, ended with a preview of the next.
For Julius Caesar, the audience moved up to the balcony, watching the
play unfold from groups of lounges with chairs, a couch, small tables,
and a bar. The scenes of Julius Caesar played out in these same lounges:
actors were often inches away from audience members, or had to ask us
to move so they could perform a scene. We were the Roman public, the
audience of Brutus’s speech of justification and Antony’s (Collins’s) funeral oration. The murder of Cinna the Poet, however, was staged below
us in the auditorium: we looked down as if watching a blood-sport in
Rome’s Coliseum. I wished all the battle scenes in Julius Caesar had also
been staged in this manner, but the tent and suicide scenes were staged
once again in the lounges on the balcony. One inspired choice was to
have Wieland play Caesar, Pindarus, and Strato. When Pindarus and
Strato assisted Cassius (Greiss) and Brutus in their suicides, Wieland,
using subtle facial and physical characteristics, transformed from these
soldiers back into Caesar: his ghost was literally meeting Brutus and
Cassius at Philippi.
After Antony lamented “the noblest Roman of them all” (JC 5.5.67),
there was a brief intermission and then we moved back down to the
auditorium for As You Like It, a picnic in the forest of Arden. Audience
members (who had purchased them in advance) were given vegetarian
box dinners as we watched the comedy while seated on carpets and pillows on the floor of the auditorium. When Orlando (Metzger) demanded
that no one eat until he had, we were feasting—and had to stop. One
theatre reviews 543
Fig. 6. Alex Spieth as King Henry with Terry Greiss, Sam Metzger, Joey Collins, Michael-David Gordon, and Katie Wieland in Irondale Ensemble’s 2016
Production of 1599, directed by Jim Niesen. Photo courtesy of Gerry Goodstein.
audience member gave Orlando a cookie from the dinner box. In As You
Like It the ensemble’s doubling was at its most raucous: Gordon doubled
Touchstone and Charles the wrestler; Greiss Duke Senior, Duke Frederick, and Silvius; Speith played Celia, Phoebe, and Audrey; and Metzger
both Orlando and a blustering, ’80s-movie-esque Oliver (with a leather
jacket slung over his back, the latter lacked only the shades to appear to be
a character from Top Gun). This doubling led to hilarious quick changes
involving only voice and physicality, for example as Metzger performed
a scene between his two characters. Wieland was luminous as Rosalind,
and Collins a hilariously out-of-place Jaques who used audience members
as his examples for his “Ages of Man” speech. Once Rosalind brought all
the characters together, the play finished not with revelations and marriages—since we all knew what was coming—but with a dance party, and
then a stark shift to a line from Collins as Hamlet.
Many audience members left in the brief interval before Hamlet, since
the show had already been over three hours long. Those of us who remained were treated to a breakneck, manic run through the play, staged in
the round with audience members again only inches from the actors, with
a long table as the only set piece and with Collins as a terrifyingly dis-
544 shakespeare bulletin
turbed Hamlet. Again, there was audience interaction: after his “Mousetrap” (a rap battle in which Hamlet himself played the faithless Queen),
Collins’s Hamlet asked audience members how they liked his play within
a play. When he asked me, “How like you this play” (3.2.209), I paused
and responded, “I liked it.” He leaned in close: “You stuttered,” he said.
“Did you mean that?” Then he asked another audience member, who said,
“Methinks the lady protests too much.” Collins’s Hamlet shouted at her:
“You stole the punchline! That was her line!” as he pointed to Gertrude.
The duel between Hamlet and Laertes (Metzger) was staged so close to
us that it was frightening. It was easily the most visceral Hamlet I have
ever seen, without any technological wizardry at all. When Hamlet said,
“The rest is silence,” he poured water on himself and the lights went to
blackout, ending our race through 1599.
The show featured some of the most intense and virtuosic acting I’ve
seen in Shakespearean performance, particularly from Wieland, whose
characterizations were unique and varied, and Collins. The performances
were a testament to the energy of the whole company and would have
made the four abridged plays clear and engaging even to audience members who had no background in Shakespeare (Fig. 6). One disappointment was the ending: by closing with “the rest is silence,” 1599 seemed
to suggest that this was the end. It would have been more in keeping
with the conventions set up by the performance to show that, in fact, it
wasn’t: Shakespeare had more to write after 1599, and audience members
will continue to engage with these works. I desperately wanted the lights
to have come up again and to have had the last line be, “If music be the
food of love, play on.”
Through radical new engagements with old plays, both 1599 and
Double Falsehood demonstrated the commitment of theater-makers like
Niesen, Borthwick-Leslie, their designers, and their actors to making
the extreme breadth of Shakespeare’s work (and that attributed to him)
relevant and entertaining to contemporary audiences. These productions
left me excited to go back to the versatile Irondale Center to see more
overlooked plays, mash-ups, and radical Shakespearean engagements for
the twenty-first century.
n