The director Jesse Berger fell in love with the 17th century Jacobean playwrights years ago and founded the Red Bull Theater company to stage productions of these often neglected classics. “I wanted a home for plays where language was the primary focus,” he says.

The company’s staged readings, and critically acclaimed productions, of such lyrically gory works as The Revenger’s Tragedy, Edward the Second, and Women Beware Women have introduced contemporary New York audiences to works that, Berger says, “were written to take the audience on the full gamut of emotion from laughter to horror.”

The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster, is one of the period’s most famous works, and was a natural choice for Red Bull.  Berger describes it as “romantic love tragedy,” in which the Duchess, a willful aristocratic widow, secretly marries her own steward, Antonio, a man well below her social station, with nightmarish consequences.  Christina Rouner, who plays the Duchess, says this was unheard in a period in which women had few rights:  “It’s essentially an impossibility in her time, and she goes and does it anyway, which speaks to her strength of character, that she chooses her own terms.”  

Rouner  relishes the way plays of this period give actors “access to the kind of verse, images, metaphors to express the specificity of what you feel.”  This sometimes requires a leap of faith for naturalistic American actors, she says.  “There is definitely a kind of commitment that needs to happen when you give yourself over to the language and then trust that it will become your truth.” 

It has to become truth for the audience, too, notes Rouner’s real-life husband Matthew Greer, who plays Antonio.  “When doing plays of heightened language, how do you use the richness and the poetry inherent in the language and yet still have it feel like these are two people to whom we can relate?” 

Berger, Rouner, and Greer came in to the WNYC studios to talk about the play and the company; and to give us a taste of the production in a reading of the crucial early wooing scene. 

At the conclusion of the scene, the Duchess claims her man, declaring “Bless heaven, this sacred Gordian [knot], which let violence Never untwine…we are now one.”  In the bloody aftermath, we learn, Berger says, “what is the inherent value of a human being?  Does it come with what’s inside you, what you do in the world, or your status?”  Nearly 400 years after Webster finished his powerful play, we are still looking for an answer.

Listen to the wooing scene from The Duchess of Malfi here

Click onthe link above to listen to a roundtable discussion with Jesse Berger, Matthew Greer, and Christina Rouner.