The Idaho Shakespeare Festival’s Measure for Measure

By Guest Writer, 8-22-07

“Measure for Measure” has been characterized by English professors for generations as one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” meaning that academics who make a living by condescendingly making categories (for the supposedly less astute) need to leave their thumbprints on plays neither wholly comedic or tragic. Morally ambiguous, laughable, weepy literature can be called instead by a more straightforward term: “tragicomedy.” A perceptive Shakespeare theatergoer, in Boise or London, could probably correctly detect plentiful instances of tragedy and comedy intermingled throughout Shakespeare’s entire body of works. No problem, is there?

Why do categories matter when faced with any Shakespeare production?

They do because the best modern Shakespeare productions – and count our local festival among the best anywhere – draw contemporary directors who are continually testing the Bard’s text to see how elastically it can be interpreted to fit our era. And this creates a modern drama within the Shakespearian drama. That might be why the Shakespeare Festival’s program booklets often showcase longer explanations by the directors than play synopsis.

Truth be told, I didn’t know what to expect from director Risa Brainers’ direction of “Measure for Measure,” but immediately warmed to her willingness to share the director’s seat with actress Sara Bruner. Brainer’s earlier direction of “Julius Caesar” was so liberally larded by her ideological agenda, her love of tech-toys as props (more laptops on stage than Circuit City stocks on shelves), and her ham-fisted overdose of parading dark-suited politicos and their hired thugs in a post-Orwellian dystopia, that I felt the multi-dimensional poetry of Shakespeare’s drama was lost in too-obvious political homily.

While a few of these excesses were still evident in “Measure for Measure,” probably only irritating in a trivial way, like the cell-phone rings and the blaring, minimalist Third-Reich-Shattering-Glass (a triple pun for the alert) muzak, I think Brainer (with additional inspiration from Bruner) triumphs in doing justice to the Bard’s genius as both educator and entertainer.

In spite of the Director’s notes framing this complex drama as primarily a leadership drama, it is also a play about sexual politics, then and now. Strong women characters haunt stage center, and this production marks a milestone for Kathryn Cherasaro. She assumes the role of the proud nun confronting the crisis of whether to surrender her chastity to the steely dictator Angelo, played with exquisite duplicity by Andrew May, in order to save her brother Claudio from execution for the infelicity of fornication with his intended spouse. Cherasaro simultaneously balances fiery passion with prim restraint in a bravura performance. Her oscillation between propriety and wrathful indignation is wonderfully mirrored in Lynn Allison’s dual role of the dutifully submissive “ad min” to the head honcho and the bawdy madam Mistress Overdone.

An equally remarkable juggling act of psychological contraries is achieved by Richard Klautsch as the Duke of Vienna who disguises himself as a friar to spy on the infirm state of justice in his State and seeks a remedy. In shuffling between the poles of secular and sacred authority, Klautsch demonstrates agility in projecting multiple varieties of wise advisor to the vulnerable.

In a simpler vein, but no less spectacular dramatically, David Anthony Smith depicts the shallow, amoral hustler Lucio with an over-the-top, Euro-trash finesse and winning enthusiasm.

The end of the play is so audacious – of course I won’t give it away – that Shakespeare didn’t write it! Yet he might have fancied such a final act.

Bouquets for the cast, directors, and magicians behind the set. Criticisms? Dare Brainin to come back for another season if she will become a temporary Luddite and give up her tech-toys. Musically score as if Philip Glass had never composed. Publish a vastly more informative program book with more solid Shakespeare info in it, particularly about his bloody language and the bloody history that contextualizes his plays. It is laudatory that the Festival players generously shares their expertise with kids in school. Adult audiences here need education just as much. And in revamping the program booklet, please ask our politicians, intuitive experts in dramatic arts, to write introductions offering evidence that they actually have read Shakespeare, lest we be horrified that they someday might unconsciously, spontaneously, assume some of the ambiguous male roles in “Measure for Measure.”

—Norman Weinstein is a nationally-published journalist, jazz scholar and architecture aficionado who writes for The Christian Science Monitor and the Village Voice, among others. His latest book, “A Night in Tunisia – Imaginings of Africa in Jazz” is on the shelves now.  Weinstein lives in Boise.