People may think Shakespeare wrote “for the ages,” but it’s not true. In every century since his, dramaturgs and directors have had to adapt the surviving texts to make it easier for audiences to understand what he put on stage. Nowadays, after 400 years, most people have no ear for the cadences of his poetic dialog, little patience with his loquacious expositions, and only the barest grasp of allusions, symbolism, and character types for which Shakespeare’s contemporaries did not need Cliff notes.

It takes work to bring Shakespeare’s plays to the stage now. And a very clever approach is the one taken by the Renaissance Now Theater & Film troupe led by Kathy Curtiss and Steven Rimke. At key points, they insert original speeches they call “now speak,” that mix modern English with pastiche Shakespeare. These interpolations gently, almost seamlessly, lead the audience into the play.

A short run at the Chain Theater in early July gave New Yorkers the opportunity to see how “now speak” works.

Angelo (Kolby Jenkins) and Isabella (Sasha Hayden) argue over law and justice, virtue and compassion, while her brother Claudio (Seth Johnson) faces imminent execution.

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure opens with the Duke of Vienna conferring absolute authority for law enforcement on his deputy Angelo. Rimke makes the duke a duchess (Yulissa Torres) and her city present-day Philadelphia. And he precedes the opening scene with a “now speak” exchange between Angelo (Kolby Jenkins) and Isabella (Sasha Hayden), a novice nun.

ISABELLA: How does one get into heaven? By following a strict set of rules?

ANGELO: By enforcing the rules?

ISABELLA: Is it contextual? Is it simply obedience that makes you worthy? Moral or unproductive, is the law always the end all be all? Or rather, is it circumstantial? The law of men can’t always be the word of God. And what then? What power can you trust? When is submission virtuous?

ANGELO: My country is in shambles. The people, lost; drugs and prostitution pollute my city. They are lost without the firm hand of the law.

ISABELLA: Does the law forgive those people, Angelo? Teach them to do better? Or does it always just punish them. Guilt them. Trap them.

Because the plot is relatively simple, the “now speak” prologue launches the real purpose of the play, which is to raise those thorny legal and moral issues. Rimke’s dialog is consistent with the intellectual and philosophical sparring they will do later, when they are fully in character. 

Isabella’s brother Claudio (Seth Johnson) is condemned to be executed for fornication: he impregnated his fiancée Juliet (Grace Fillmore) outside the sanctity of marriage. When Isabella pleads for her brother’s life, Angelo insists on following the law. But he is obsessed with her and offers to commute the death sentence if Isabella will let him take her virginity. Meanwhile, the duchess, disguised as a nun, is going around town to see for herself how her laws are being enforced. In the end, she will expose Angelo’s hypocrisy by having his own jilted fiancée Mariana take Isabella’s place in the tryst.

Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare’s so-called “problem” plays: an unsettling comedy with a shadow of tragedy or (in this case) menace. Hence, the play is a stew of fun and fear, with Claudio’s goofy friend Lucio (Ethan Freestone) and the whorehouse madam Mistress Overdone (Oliver Estrada Brown in drag) providing the comedy, while Claudio’s allies, the nobleman Escalus (Carter McEwan) and the Provost of the prison (Joel Applegate), supply the pathos. 

A ship’s passengers and crew are tossed left and right as the sorcerer Prospero (Marvin Payne) conjures up a storm.

Curtiss’s version of The Tempest opens, as Shakespeare’s does, with a storm at sea. But she has the sorcerer Prospero (Marvin Payne) onstage, silently orchestrating the storm’s fury with a magical quarterstaff. Prospero’s daughter Miranda (Sonja Hugo) has seen this; so Curtiss has her ask in “now talk”:

MIRANDA: Why does my father raise his staff against them? I’ve seen his darker side…how he treats the strange creatures of the island, but he’s never raised ungentle hand to me. Then why? Why does he not save them? 

For seventeen years Prospero has declined to tell her their family history, until she confronts him:

MIRANDA: Dad, Dad. I’ve been on this island since I was a child, and never even seen neither man nor woman, excepting in the pages of your books.

So he tells her that he is the Duke of Milan, but he preferred studying the occult to governing the city. So his brother Antonio (Houston Baker) seized power with the help of Alonso, the King of Naples (Joel Applegate).

MIRANDA: Wait…you lost your job, because you chose to better your mind?

Those men were all on the ship, which Prospero has made them believe was wrecked in the storm. Also aboard, and similarly deluded by Prospero, were Alonso’s drunken butler Stephano (Carter McEwan) and his jester Trinculo (Ethan Freestone), along with Gonzalo (Kolby Jenkins), an honest nobleman who had helped Prospero and Miranda to escape the usurpation.

Alonso’s son Ferdinand (Seth Johnson) has also washed ashore, believing himself shipwrecked and orphaned. He falls in love with Miranda the moment he meets her; and she, who has never seen any man but her father, immediately falls in love with Ferdinand.

Prospero’s daughter Miranda (Sonja Hugo) falls in love with Ferdinand (Seth Johnson), the son of Prospero’s arch-enemy.

Prospero is empowered not only by the spells he learned from books, but through the agency of the island’s “airy spirit” Ariel (Sasha Hayden), who owes him allegiance because he freed her from a witch’s curse when he arrived. Ariel can also summon other spirits such as Iris (Grace Fillmore) and Juno (Abigail Desyr), when Prospero needs them to beguile the shipwrecked men.

The grunt work on the island, however, is performed by Caliban (Oliver Estrada Brown), whom Shakespeare describes as “a savage and deformed slave.” Although he is the witch’s son and rightly believes he should rule the island, Caliban drinks wine that Stephano has smuggled ashore, mistakes the drunkard for a god, and begs to serve him.

Music called forth by the sprite Ariel (Sasha Hayden) bewilders the drunkard Stephano (Carter McEwan, holding a bottle), the hapless Caliban (Oliver Estrada Brown) and the jester Trinculo (Ethan Freestone).

In the end, Prospero confronts his usurping brother, discharges Ariel from her fealty to him, and departs for Europe to resume the responsibilities of his dukedom, leaving the island to the wised-up Caliban.

Curtiss says the purpose of “now speak” is “to sharpen the play’s themes for the modern audience; to highlight social issues, including political and moral themes, from the viewpoint of characters in the plays.

“In The Tempest,” she says, “these are the vice of obsession and the corruption inherent in the wielding of power.” Her adaptation “also confronts the value of knowledge and deep study in approaching any topic, and ultimately, how we can redeem time lost, which is the penalty of being vulnerable to human error.”

In his Measure for Measure, Rimke says he changed Shakespeare’s duke to a duchess “to create a dynamic comparison of male and female power [in a] clash of culture between those who ignore the rule of law and those who would enforce it.”

Doing Shakespeare in repertory requires actors to keep more than just one play in memory, and nearly every cast member has a role in both, either on or off stage. Sonja Hugo is Miranda in The Tempest, directed by Curtiss; but she’s the director of Rimke’s Measure for Measure. Marvin Payne not only plays Prospero; he worked with composer Sasha Hayden, who’s Ariel, to develop new-age music that’s performed live, by the cast.

Mya Odom is stage manager for both plays. The seventeenth-century Tempest costumes are by Jenny Thornton; the modern-dress Measure for Measure costumes are by Asriel Jensen. The single set, designed by Rychard Curtiss, has painted flats and simple risers that, with bars, are Claudio’s prison cell, and with drapery and furs, are Prospero’s “cell,” where he studies.

Curtiss has taught acting and film directing in BFA programs at several universities. Her “now speak” production Macbeth-Redux was mounted off-Broadway on Theatre Row in 2023, and her Hamlet Speak and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Chain Theatre last year.

Rimke has been a professor at Penn State and the University of Cincinnati, and has recently joined Utah Valley University to teach accents and dialects as well as acting fundamentals.

In Shakespeare, as in life, we cheer the heroes, hiss the villains, laugh at clowns, shed tears for lovers both in joy and despair, and ponder what it all means. Shakespeare didn’t write “for the ages,” but his plays endure because his dramas transcend time, the emotions he evokes are omnipotent, and the basic humanity of his characters is immortal. “Now speak” aims to keep that momentum going.

All photos by Jonathan Slaff
In the opening photo, Mariana (Grace Fillmore), Claudio’s friend Lucio (Ethan Freestone), and the prison Provost (Joel Applegate) look on as the duchess (Yulissa Torres), disguised as a nun, confronts her deputy Angelo (Kolby Jenkins)

For more information: Renaissance Now