Inventing Isabel

Pig Iron Theatre Company (Re)Imagines Measure for Measure

Authors

Rebecca Steffy Villanova University

Abstract

Pig Iron Theatre Company premiered their original performance work Isabella as part of the 2007 Live Arts Festival in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Their adaptation of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, featuring a mortician and the small troupe of cadavers under his care, shifts attention away from the issues of governance so central to Measure for Measure and towards the moral ambiguities of desire and invention. With additional influences from the Pygmalion myth and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Isabella performs its ambiguities on and through bodies, tracing the alternating potential for bodies to gain or lose control over particular uses. Isabella rifles through the dead to bring something new to life.

Author Biography

Rebecca Steffy, Villanova University

Rebecca Steffy is a poet, scholar, and community builder with a broad range of experience in non-profit administration. Her poetry has appeared in New Orleans Review, and she has contributed her prose writing to local educational and community organizations in the Philadelphia area. She is completing her M.A. thesis at Villanova University on Jorie Graham?s Overlord and will pursue her Ph.D. in Literary Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Fall of 2009, with research interests in contemporary American poetry and poetics, genre studies and adaptation, performance, and sustainability.