A Conversation with Matthew DeCostanza
Director and Actor Matthew DeCostanza discusses his latest production of ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL at Highside Workshop
Matthew DeCostanza: Hey, Josh.
Josh Feye: Hey, Matthew. How are you doing?
MD: Oh, I’m doing good. I got dumped over text yesterday, so I’m ready for our interview. I’m ready to talk about how hellacious it is to love other people.
JF: That’s perfect for us. I saw your production of All’s Well That Ends Well last Friday. I quite enjoyed it. I think the way you use the garage space is very effective. How’d you find Highside Workshop?
MD: Well, the credit goes to my producer Tatienne Hendricks-Tellefsen, who also plays Helena in the production. I told her that as we look for a space for the show, we should look at non-traditional theatre spaces. In the milieu of DIY theatre, you’re sort of lucky if you have costumes and often you have no set. You might have a chair. We are lucky enough to have two chairs. But the way I direct with no money often necessitates that costumes and voices and faces add a lot of color on stage, the scenery is what takes the hit. This is a modern dress production and we’re hoping to invoke a sense of urban dilapidation, especially in the Florence scenes. We were looking at basements, garages, and makeshift spaces and Highside seemed right. Yeah, I’ll leave it there.
JF: Yes, because there are scenes where you thrust the audience right in the middle of the action. Like when the guys open the garage behind us. Your production isn’t technically immersive, but the way the actors are placed in space makes it feel that way.
MD: Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, I’m not crazy about action being staged behind the audience when I see theatre but I kind of broke my rule at that moment because we’re dealing with abrasive sounds and unpleasant ideas and rough imagery in this production. So to hear the screech of the garage door and turn around and see four guys in mismatched clothing illuminated by a red light bulb was something I couldn’t resist.
JF: Your production has a lot of striking imagery. The major one is the staging of the consummation scene between Bertram (Michael DeFilippis) and Helena. Which traditionally isn’t staged, right?
MD: Yeah. Shakespeare never depicts sex on stage just as the Greeks never depicted death on stage. These were concepts that were a little too hot to handle in public spaces in their time. Something that I knew I wanted to do in this production and something that convinced me this was to be my first staging of a Shakespeare play is that we have an incredible opportunity to stage the bed trick scene. I think that Helena is Shakespeare’s greatest female lead. She’s sort of on the level of Hamlet. In her intelligence, in the variety of what she goes through and experiences, and in the sophistication, beauty, wisdom of her dialogue and her ideas, and the dangerous situations she puts herself in. Tatienne and I made a special point to watch Fatal Attraction before we began rehearsals. What’s so wonderful about it and Shakespeare’s Helena as written is that these women do things that are so off-the-wall nuts but the incredible nature of their respective pieces is that you stick with them and we believe at least in some way in their right to do what they’re doing. And in that way, All’s Well That Ends Well is a magic trick. We learn that Helena essentially rapes Bertram. In the original, we’re only made to understand, but in this production we see it. This violation of consent and this act of coercion. The play is so sophisticated to let us be repulsed by that, but also thrilled by that.
JF: Right! Well, from the moment you sit down at the Highside Workshop, and you look at your program something is unsettling. The font title says “All is Well” and it’s fading. Why do you think All’s Well That Ends Well isn’t performed too often?
MD: It’s a very challenging play. I can think of several Shakespeare companies that I won’t name who don’t engage with Shakespeare’s more challenging stories. If they do, they’ll kind of do it in a safe and conservative way. They’ll pick out one scene in which they allow a bit of darkness to come in. But the only way to do All’s Well That Ends Well and have it make sense is to understand that at its core it’s morally ambiguous and dark and troubling, but on top of that sort of edgy, sexy, and thrilling. There’s still time for this to change but a Shakespeare play I don’t very much like is Measure for Measure. It has always seemed to me very dreary. That’s not All’s Well That Ends Well. It’s terrifically challenging and extremely funny. I mean, you have this thread of zany humor running through every act with Parolles and Lafeu. There are also incredible wells of sweetness, warmth, and humanity throughout the play. Bernard Shaw called the Countess of Roussillon the greatest part for an older woman in all of Shakespeare and it’s an incredibly gorgeous part. The Countess does not have a mean bone in her body. She’s just all love and giving and empathy. The part is depicted beautifully by Danielle Augustine who is far too young for the role, but sort of makes us forget that with her incredible stage presence. So, this is a very long way of answering your question, but it’s a play that doesn’t offer easy answers to its challenging questions. It’s sort of weird and genre-less. But that too was one of Shakespeare’s greatest achievements. He wrote plays that were essentially genre-less and that depicted life in its variety.
JF: I think I read this correctly in one of your promotions, you were heavily influenced by Brecht for this production.
MD: Yeah. There are a lot of influences of German art on this production. I would put Brecht and Weill high up on that list of influences. I would put the films of Fassbinder high up on that list of influences as well as the experimental industrial music that derived from Germany in the 70’s and 80’s. The similarity that the artists in those movements share is they present an incredibly lively dialectic of love and hate. We feature and interpose a song by Brecht and Weill in the play. Their song “Surabaya Johnny” from Happy End.
JF: I was wondering what that karaoke song was that Helena sings. Wow.
MD: Yeah, that’s a Brecht and Weill song I’ve always loved. It’s a song that has clear parallels to All’s Well That Ends Well. It’s incredible how true a song like “Surabaya Johnny” can feel in a moment where there’s this vast shadow of a person cast over your life and what can you feel but both love and hate?
JF: I also love the way Tatienne performs that number. She uses the song like a knife against Bertram. It’s great.
MD: We found that moment late in rehearsal.
JF: Do you like karaoke?
MD: I love karaoke! I kick myself that I don’t sing karaoke in this production, despite playing the Queen’s advisor character, Lafeu. What I love about karaoke is there are so few opportunities in everyday life to sing. It’s almost too obvious to say but singing is a deeply cathartic act. It’s possible our world would be a little less emotionally constipated if people had more opportunities to sing in everyday life.
JF: Oh, my god! Yes, you’re singing my song. Do you have a go-to karaoke song?
MD: I usually warm up with Everybody’s Talking by Fred Neil. Harry Nilsson made it famous in the movie Midnight Cowboy. I like to stay in a sort of country adjacent lane with some winners like Gordon Lightfoot and Tom T. Hall. I brought the house down with a performance of The Pretender by Jackson Brown a couple of months back.
JF: I love that. Well, and going back to love and hate. Have you been following the resurgence of Romeo and Juliet that is upon us?
MD: I didn’t know there was a resurgence. What is this resurgence?
JF: There’s going to be a production in London with Tom Holland. Then this Fall, there’s going to be a revival on Broadway with Rachel Ziegler and Jack Antonoff doing the music.
MD: Oh, wow! I’m a little too busy and broke to be attending the top-ticket events. But Romeo and Juliet is essentially a perfect work of art. I mean, there’s a reason why everybody does it and it just works no matter who’s doing it.
JF: That’s what is so fascinating about Shakespeare, especially in Romeo and Juliet, and you also see it in All’s Well That Ends Well– the eruption and brutality of the Dionysian and how difficult that can be to reckon. It’s partially why the French don’t like Shakespeare.
MD: Yeah, Shakespeare’s work predates psychology as a scientific field. That has led some people to say that there is no subtext in Shakespeare and that Shakespearean characters are always completely honest, especially when they are looking at us in the audience and soliloquizing. I find that to be so untrue. In what he presents as a proto-psychology, I think Shakespeare recognized that one of the most crucial components of the desire object is that you can’t have it. That’s one of the things so thrillingly depicted in All’s Well That Ends Well. Helena is told she can’t have Bertram and she says, “But you see I will have him.”
JF: That’s so in line with Western personality, too. It’s always about pushing forward.
MD: And in the West, the individual is characteristically Shakespearean. In every Shakespeare play, there are at least a dozen of the loudest, weirdest personalities that you’ve ever seen. It’s kind of a miracle that his plays work at all when you consider every play has like two or three comic relief parts and the King or the Queen share scenes with ridiculous drooling clowns. If we’re speaking strictly about Renaissance art, Shakespeare has a lot in common with Peter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch who did those vast landscapes with 100 figures depicted. They’re all fighting, fucking, pranking, and kicking each other in the ass. It’s this maximalist appreciation for humanity in its variety that was part of his artistic project.
All’s Well That Ends Well runs at Highside Workshop April 11th-21st.
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