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Women Beware Women
NYC’s Red Bull Theater Company specializes in bloody, bawdy Jacobean plays
Red Bull Theater’s revival of Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women
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London’s original Red Bull Theater was a seventeenth-century outdoor contemporary of the Globe Theater. Its first production in 1607, Red Bull operated for four decades and was infamously rowdy. For the past five years, New York City’s Red Bull Theater has sought to produce plays from the same era as its namesake, focusing on the seldom-seen works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Red Bull’s previous productions, each a critical success, include Marlowe’s Edward II, Shakespeare’s Pericles and a play of disputed authorship, The Revenger’s Tragedy, a production steeped in blood and dark comedy (laughing at severed heads is timeless).
Red Bull favors Jacobean dramas as opposed to Elizabethan, and there is little moral certitude in the plays of this era. When James I took the throne after Elizabeth in 1603, early discoveries in astronomy were casting doubt on firmly held religious beliefs concerning the cosmos. Art turned from moral and religious high ground to human frailty. Divine retribution and ethics were out; corruption and violence were in. While theater affirmed the human dignity and honor of those suffering, those with money and power were viewed with great cynicism. And nothing begets a good satire like cynicism. It was the era after a Golden Age much like the world we now live in. It’s no wonder Red Bull has extended all of its runs.
This year, Red Bull is producing the Jacobean tragedy Women Beware Women by Thomas Middleton. Middleton wrote about sex and society with a creatively scathing eye. His plays include subjects like necrophilia, a wife forced by her husband to eat the corpse of her lover and a mother attempting to prostitute her daughter. Betrayal drives many plotlines, and greed corrupts, often with rotting results. Sins do not go unpunished, and, in the case of Women Beware Women, nobody comes out alive. Well, almost nobody.
Director Jesse Berger’s style is often described as wired. His productions move quickly and strike a modern chord. For Women Beware Women, Red Bull was awarded a $100,000 Tony Randall Theatrical Grant. The grant goes toward the production of classic plays, but Red Bull is not interested in traditional interpretations. Women Beware Women was written in an age where the lavishness of the court was under scrutiny, and theatergoers enjoyed laughing as the corrupt fell upon their own swords. From a script in which rape, incest, betrayal, greed and moral ambiguity abound, Red Bull has found tragicomedy. What better way to ride out the economic downturn than some seriously murderous laughs?