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Measured success
The ASP takes on the Bard’s ‘problem comedy’
BY STEVE VINEBERG

For its second-ever production, the Actors’ Shakespeare Project has taken on the considerable challenge of Measure for Measure. Rarely performed until the last quarter of the 20th century, this "problem comedy" has become popular because its treatment of sexual blackmail and hypocrisy resonates with our feminist age. Angelo, appointed by the Duke of Vienna to rule in his absence, condemns Claudio to death for fornication, reviving a law whose offenders have gone unprosecuted for decades. When Claudio’s sister, Isabella, who’s on the verge of taking her vows at a local convent, pleads for his life, Angelo agrees to lift the sentence if she will sleep with him.

The idea of Robert Walsh’s production is that the issues of the play are still relevant today, but that’s not a thesis worth proving. So his efforts — and those of the designer, Mark O’Maley — to convert the elegantly retro ballroom-like space at the Jorge Hernández Cultural Center into an edgy modern-day rock club feel superfluous. And the show is not at its best when it presses the point by making Angelo (Ken Cheeseman) a cold-blooded misogynist manhandling Isabella (Paula Langton) as he reminds her that she’s powerless against his advances because, pristine as his reputation is, no one would accept her version of events if she called him out. Cheeseman is used here for his gaunt, sinister looks, his ghost-story presence, so however intelligently he reads Angelo’s soliloquies, he’s never convincing in the struggle going on inside this puritan who, to his own amazement, finds himself aroused by Isabella’s purity. And it doesn’t seem that Walsh cares much about that struggle, since he believes he’s located the villain of the piece (who takes Isabella’s virginity — or so he thinks — and then orders Claudio’s death anyway). This approach doesn’t serve Langton well either — she plays Isabella as a weepy victim rather than discovering the reserves of strength that surprise even herself.

However, the production has many virtues. The ensemble — most of whose members play more than one role, slipping gamely and effectively from one to another — is attentive to the meaning of the verse (which ranks among Shakespeare’s most difficult), so the line readings have a gleaming clarity and literacy. Allyn Burrows brings both gentleness and sinew to the Duke, who sets Angelo’s appointment as a test of his character and, disguised as a friar, watches his conduct and manipulates his unmasking. The knots in Measure for Measure that have led Shakespeare scholars to categorize it as a problem play — the Duke’s treatment of Isabella, sometimes read as cruel (he rescues Claudio but allows her to believe, until the very end, that her brother has been executed) and sexist (he expects her to renounce her vows and marry him) — are loosed by Burrows’s approach to the Duke’s scenes with Isabella, where we see him falling in love with her. As in the famous 1984 Royal Shakespeare Company production, where Juliet Stephenson played Isabella to Daniel Massey’s Duke, his keeping the truth from her until the 11th hour seems to be a test of her character: if she knew her brother were alive, then it would be an easier act of Christian charity for her to beg for Angelo’s life on behalf of the woman who loves him, Mariana (Jennifer Lafleur, in a touching performance).

David Gullette is a solid, expressive Escalus (the Duke’s right-hand man). Although he lacks the subtlety and ambiguity that might make Lucio — Claudio’s gleefully decadent friend — more complex, John Kuntz is witty and entertaining in the part. As Claudio, Doug Lockwood is less skillful with the language than some of the others, but he’s still believable as an ordinary fellow who tries to act noble over his sister’s refusal to give up her chastity to save his life but can’t resist pleading with her that lechery is surely the least of the seven deadly ones. Paula Plum is excellent as both the Provost and — despite the grotesque wig and outfit she’s made to wear — Mistress Overdone, whose suburban brothel is "plucked down" by Angelo’s police. (The show has costume coordinators but no designer — no doubt an economy, but it could use one.) Whatever its conceptual faults, this Measure is a compelling show, and a very hopeful one for this newly formed company.


Issue Date: April 1 - 7, 2005
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