Word: brustein
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ACCORDINGLY, The Changeling doesn't look or sound like a Jacobean tragedy about love, murder and intrigue. The metallic scaffolding and leather jumpsuits that comprise Michael H. Yeargan's sets and costumes could have been borrowed from an episode of "Battlestar Galactica." Brustein's characters speak their lines at breakneck speed and with near-feverish emotion to give Middleton's rhyming text the language and feel of everyday speech. No stuffy parlor play this...
Even the text itself has undergone significant alteration at Brustein's hands. To highlight Middleton's thoroughly contemporary theme of oppressed womanhood, one third of the original text has been excised--including the entire subplot written by Middleton's collaborator William Rowley, dealing with feigned madness and giving the play its title character...
...Brustein's Changeling is thus about passion and virginity--though not of the Hail Mary, controversially-Catholic variety that recently has been thrust into the headlines. Here the reputation of virginity--protagonist Beatrice-Joanna Vermandero's (Diane D'Aquila) obsession to keep her honor intact--leads to doom and destruction. Female chastity is the ideal that justifies the most heinous atrocities...
...STORY TURNS on Beatrice-Joanna's revolt against her father's attempt to marry her to a man she detests, by arranging for his murder. As Brustein painstakingly pointed out in his program notes, contemporary (ie. post-Woman's Lib) theatregoers should be deeply moved to witness a woman destroyed at the hands of her domineering father. True enough: Beatrice-Joanna's undoing ought to give this play its resonance; we should sympathize with her dilemma while simultaneously celebrating the fact that it could not happen in the 1980s...
...this strategy backfires. Brustein's carefully planned theoretical blueprint of the play is sabotaged by shoddy acting in several key roles. The chief blame rests with D'Aquila, whose mannish, histrionic performance never musters an ounce of sympathy. Her love affair with Alsemero (Harry S. Murphy) is discarded too early; and she changes into an evil murderess with only the slightest provocation, gushing at one point, "I am forced to love thee now for thou provides so well for mine honor...