Measure For Measure

Measure for Measure, if you parsed it and diagrammed it, might turn out to be a neat and a deep play. At one sitting, however, it is a mess of moral contradictions sitting uneasily in a shaky plot. Shakespeare was a notoriously profound asker of questions and he asks some big ones in Measure for Measure: What price Chastity? Do the ends justify the means? Is one man fit to judge another?

Unfortunately, he cops out on the answers, leaving us with one handful of medieval cant and another of contrived happy endings. Shakespeare ends the play, but he never really resolves it. To Shakespeare's sophistry, Timothy Mayer has added gimmickry and faddistry, carefully avoiding the problem of how to clarify and dramatize the play's hard theological core. Putting the play and the characters in modern dress has its dividends. Angelo gets a laugh when he says "Call him hither" into an intercom, and Lucio gets one when he lights his cigarette with a votive lamp. In short, Mayer has filled his ample trickbag with modern props to use when things get slow, which is very often.

What Mayer sees in Measure for Measure is the Duke of Vienna parading vainly before television cameras, police brutality, and hippies -- the Johnsonian equivalent of Elizabethan fops. For his text, he seems to have taken the Duke's line, "This news is old enough, yet it is every day's news." In the program note, he dwells on the fact that the summer of 1604, when the play was produced, was a long hot summer of bad government and bad times.

But Measure for Measure is fundamentally a medieval inquistion into the nature of sin. Watching Mayer tone down the medieval and bring out the modern social comment is something like seeing Luis Set redecorate Chartres. This is not to say that it is without good moments, full of insight into the deepest insides of the play. But they are only moments.

The main thread of the play, which could pull it all together, has eluded Mayer as it has eluded so many before him. Perhaps it no longer exists; or perhaps only a devout Tomist could discover it.

As to the performances, let me just say that two-week Shakespeare is insanity, as Mayer must know, having barely escaped unscathed from a three-week attack on The Tempest last year. By dashing off Shakespeare, the amateur forfeits his main advantage over the professional -- the unlimited time for rehearsals that can make performances almost second nature to an actor. Under the circumstances, the cast has done quite well. There are very few bad readings, but many indifferent ones. And the pace is much too slow.

However, there are at least three outstanding jobs. Dan Deitch plays his sour, self-righteous Angelo with a sibilant "S" that makes every word he utters sound selfish and mean. Susan Channing has the part of Isabella to deal with -- one of the most ambiguous roles ever written. Yet she manages to be both touching and priggish, and she is always believable. And Paul Schmidt, though he may not show the power and the glory of the Duke, does do a creditable job with a part that goes on forever and ever.

The most exciting effects of the evening are produced by that mixture of set designers, lighting men and hangers-on billed as the "Brattle Street Trust." The scenery, which is a blend of lighting and well-chosen props, makes a fascinating, fluid background to the strange play that jerks enigimatically along in the foreground.