Text Size:
A|
A|
A
Email
Print Mark Rylance as Vincentio in "Measure for Measure" at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in 2005.  Where: Pittsburgh Public Theater's O'Reilly Theater, 627 Penn Ave., Downtown.When: Tues. through Dec. 16; Tues.-Sun. 7:30 p.m. ; Sat-Sun. 1 p.m.Tickets: $25-$75; 412-456-6666.
Why Shakespeare still measures up as relevant |
Mark Rylance is in transition. And not surprisingly for this thoughtful actor, the play he is bringing to Pittsburgh by the most protean of playwrights tells a similar story.
The play is Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure" (at Pittsburgh Public Theater from Tuesday through Dec. 18), usually categorized as a dark comedy about justice and mercy, human corruption and self-knowledge. The company is Shakespeare's Globe from London. And Rylance is the company's star and the only artistic director in its 10-year existence.
But all that is changing.
Advance word is that the Globe's "Measure for Measure," done with the same "original practices" as the luminous "Twelfth Night" Rylance and company brought here two years ago, is a brighter, more comic take than the play usually gets.
Rylance remains the company's leading man, playing Duke Vincentio, who turns his dukedom of Vienna over to a subordinate and goes underground for enigmatic reasons. But the Globe itself is changing, because this American tour is Rylance's last gasp as artistic director. A year ago he announced his resignation at the end of this season, and his successor is already at work.
The acting company doing "Measure for Measure" is also in transition. Much of it may emerge next year -- not with the Globe at all, but working with Rylance on other projects.
You could say that Shakespeare is changing, too, because doubts over the authorship of the plays continue to boil and bubble. Rylance himself is such a doubter, and he continues as chair of the Shakespearean Authorship Trust, which he calls "agnostic" on the authorship issue.
In another sense, "Measure for Measure" doesn't change at all, but as Rylance says in his essay written for the Post-Gazette, it has a chameleon quality. Like all Shakespeare's plays, it chooses to reflect the concerns of our times.
Pittsburgh welcomes Globe for the second time Pittsburgh first met Mark Rylance as a pajama-clad, querulous, intensely moving Hamlet at the Pittsburgh Public Theater in 1991, reprising a role that had given him and director Ron Daniels success at the Royal Shakespeare Company. That happy experience played some part, along with assiduous wooing by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, in making Pittsburgh one of just five American cities to host the Globe's 2003 tour of "Twelfth Night." |
|
The Duke is tired of leadership. And so is Rylance. Asked why he gave up the artistic directorship in which he has had such success, Rylance touches on many things that also apply to the Duke.
"At the heart of it is a kind of dissatisfaction with my own leadership. ... Some of the powers-that-be were getting used to me. ... It just felt like the wind had changed and it was time for me to go. ... I got into a large despondency, thinking I can't do this any more. ... Primarily, it's the clash between being an actor and artistic director."
Rylance came to miss the playful camaraderie among actors. "For example, while preparing to be the Duke, I may have just made some announcement to the company, and that leaves me feeling somewhat distant and lonely. As much as I am their colleague on stage, I also have a responsibility and power" -- the power to hire and fire, which shadows the relationship, just as it shadows the Duke's life in Vienna.
Being simultaneously artistic director and actor was also "full of positive things. You are there at the front line, between actor and audience." If that isn't alive, all the artistic directing in the world can't compensate.
But "to be an actor, you're trying always to be present, to convince people it's happening for the first time -- spontaneous and playful. As artistic director, you're separate from the group -- you have to climb up a hill, look ahead and think where there'll be food 12 months ahead. It's quite a divisive thing in your soul or psyche.
"After a while, buildings and projects grow and, like bones or ligaments, become stiffer, with more need for health and safety. I'm not the best leader for that period. ... Sometimes like a tree that has been fruiting and flowering for quite a while, you have to stand fallow. I felt I was getting a bit dry in the earth of me. I had to go back into the shade a bit."
Resignation certainly wasn't pressed on him. Rylance is credited with a near-miracle, taking a theater that was expected to be a touristy theme park and filling its stage with some of the most adventuresome theater in London. He reports "terrible difficulty in getting artists to come and explore" an open-air stage without the control that stage lighting gives, but audiences have loved it, and the Globe is in the black.
But now, "for the kind of moves I want to make out in the ocean, I wanted to come down to a smaller boat." He hopes a core group of Globe actors will stay with him, his music director (and wife) Claire van Kampen and costumer Jenny Tiramani as they revive his small touring company, Phoebus Cart, that pre-dates the Globe.
Without backing away from the classics he finds nurturing, Rylance is particularly interested in new writing. During his Globe tenure he worked collaboratively (as did Shakespeare and his contemporaries) with playwright Peter Oswald, staging three of his new plays. It excites him to think of new writers to be discovered, "breaking through the culturally accepted ways of seeing things."
Most immediately, he is committed to Oswald's "Frick and Carnegie," a play about an "incredible time in Pittsburgh."
"It has such Shakespearean characters," says Rylance, "particularly when you add Emma Goldman and [would-be assassin] Alexander Berkman. It wasn't quite ready for my final Globe season, [but] we're into our fifth draft." When he stages it, he hopes also "to take it to some steel towns, like Sheffield and certainly Pittsburgh" -- assuming there's a theater here to bid him welcome.
But first, when they return to England in the new year, "at the ripe old age of 45, 46, I'll have a few months of archiving." He laughs at that -- everything's been going so fast. He and van Kampen remain on a Globe committee concerned with the evolving knowledge of its original architecture. The Shakespeare Authorship Trust will mount a biographical exhibition about the various contenders advanced as writers of the plays. There will also be three months for travel, "to try to stop completely."
Then, he will be able to take freelance acting jobs. This past year, Rylance played Dr. David Kelly in a British TV drama about the arms inspector who died in suspicious circumstances as part of the Iraq intelligence scandal. In 2001 he starred in Yasmina Reza's wonderful "Life X 3." And there have been movies.
But now he will be more available. He hopes to return to the Globe to do more Shakespeare when things settle down under new artistic director Dominic Dromgoole. And Minneapolis' Guthrie Theatre has a new translation of "Peer Gynt" he'd like to do. "To be part of an acting group and not be their boss would be very good for me."
