Arts Ideas David Cooper
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SUPERBAD Placing ‘Measure for Measure’ in East Los Angeles is among the OSF’s successful gambits this year.
Beyond Measure Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’ undergo repair at Oregon Shakespeare Festival BY DAVID TEMPLETON
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easure for Measure is stupid.
OK. There. I’ve said it. Measure for Measure, William Shakespeare’s odd seriotragic comedy about sex, politics and severed heads has long been lumped among the playwright’s awkward “problem plays,� that common descriptive term used for Shakespeare’s more difficult— i.e., impossible to produce—works for the stage.
Chief among the troubles lurking in Measure’s treacherous text is the primary plot conceit, in which everything could be resolved with one man standing up and revealing his true identity instead of plotting unnecessarily tenuous alternatives. And then there’s the unfathomable ending in which . . . well, few of Shakespeare’s stories have conclusions that are more absurd, or more unsettling, than the one that concludes Measure for Measure. Like I said, it’s stupid.
If it seems that I am building toward a massive critical rebuke of Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s recently opened production of Measure (playing now through November at the Angus Bowmer Theatre in Ashland), nothing could be further from the truth. As directed by Bill Rauch, OSF’s increasingly bold artistic director, Measure for Measure’s considerable faults are met headon, pounding them so skillfully from all directions that, in the end, the play—and I say this in hushed
reverence—now actually works. Moreover, it’s easily one of the best adaptations of one of Shakespeare’s problem plays since, well, 2009, when the festival staged All’s Well That Ends Well—and somehow ďŹ gured out how to make it actually end well. What’s become clear over the 76 years that the OSF has been in operation—and this is surely part of the reason that thousands of North Bay residents make the annual six-hour trek over the Siskiyou Pass—is that OSF loves Shakespeare’s underdogs. Though the company does a ďŹ ne enough job with its Hamlets and Midsummer Night’s Dreams and all those Romeo and Juliets, it is what they do with the oddballs—King John, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, Cymbeline—that makes them special. One of the only festivals in the world committed to staging every single one of the Bard’s plays, the company clearly heaps a bit of extra artistic attention on the problem plays, committed, it would seem, to solving those “problemsâ€? once and for all. In Rauch’s Measure, the story has been moved from Vienna to East L.A., “narrated,â€? in a way, by a trio of female mariachis who ďŹ rst appear as Latina cleaning women (and then reappear at various times to sing transitional Spanish tunes with translations projected onto the wall high above their heads). Duke Vincentio (Anthony Heald), a good-hearted leader but a tad eccentric, intends to learn about his countrymen by disguising himself as one of them, but the ďŹ rst thing he learns is that Angelo (RenĂŠ MillĂĄn), the highly moral judge he’s put in charge of the city, did not take long to become a tyrannical villain. Citing strict laws against fornication, Angelo has sentenced young Claudio (Frankie Alvarez)