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Shakespeare loved dick jokes.
They’re all over the place in “Measure for Measure.” I propose a “Measure for Measure” drinking game in which participants take a drink every time a character grabs his own penis.
Despite a pronounced interest in Mr. Willy S., I’ve never seen “Measure for Measure” performed before — though now I believe I know why.
The best word to describe “Measure for Measure” is baffling.
The Vortex production, as part of its fourth annual summer Shakespeare festival, is not “bad” exactly. Most of the issues come from a script that can be called (with comic understatement) “not one of Shakespeare’s best.”
The set is immediately striking: a thumping industrial concrete squalor. There’s some pre-show mingling of modern day hookers passing out Vegas-style escort cards to the audience while the hooker madam seems to improv lines about the various hookers in a not-at-all-Shakespearean manner.
It’s cool to watch, but perhaps tries a little too hard to show how sexy and edgy Shakespeare can be.
The improv is immediately missed when the play actually begins and all the personality so proudly displayed is immediately vacuumed off the stage, to be replaced by drab, flavorless exposition and dreary monotones.
“Measure for Measure” tries too hard at first, but then doesn’t try hard enough. This fits in with much of the play’s baffling dichotomy in tone: slapstick and lowbrow humor mixed with death, tragedy, violence and melodrama.
But how, you ask?
Open to Vienna, where the duke of the city, played by David James, is leaving to go on a diplomatic mission of some kind and places Angelo (played by Rafael Gallegos), who is apparently virtuous but is mostly a big dick, in charge. The mission, strangely enough, is ostensibly a ruse for the duke to disguise himself Shakespeare-style to observe the city and see if Angelo is, in fact, a big dick.
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Answer: he is.
Yet the duke spends a bafflingly long time in his disguise, even though returning would seemingly solve basically the entire conflict of the plot. But no matter.
One of the new laws that Angelo enacts is to punish premarital sex by death. Ouch. And good-natured Claudio, played by Grey Blanco, is imprisoned and set to die the next day — though time seems to move rather slowly, as there are innumerable angsty exchanges while the audience waits for him to die.
Claudio’s sister, a nun played by Rhiannon Frazier, is asked to intervene; Angelo will save her brother only if the nun lets him bang her. There’s some proselytizing about morality and law, and then the duke spends a lengthy space using his disguise and a somewhat impotent reveal of his true identity to show everyone that Angelo is, without a doubt, a big dick. The ending has the duke then pardoning Claudio, despite a ghoulish bait-and-switch with a severed head, and then the duke creepily proposes to the nun.
And while all this is going on, a baffling comedic subplot occurs with characters that have nothing to do with anything.
Don’t be fooled into thinking Claudio a major role. “Much Ado About Nothing” this ain’t. Poor Blanco does receive ample stage time, though he simply remains onstage constantly lying about and doing nothing while the action takes place a few feet from him.
The character of Claudio has fewer lines than fingers despite his “imminent” execution’s being the essential lynchpin for the entire plot.
All the dramatic stakes of the plot revolve around his execution, yet his part is one of the smallest in the entire show. Most of the driving factors of the story come down to his sister running about being nunly. On paper, the duke seems to do the most, yet all of the play’s problems seem to have been created by him and then subsequently solved by him — problems that might have been fixed in about five minutes.
But they are not. This is made abundantly clear by the play’s two-and-a-half-hour running time. Pacing is definitely an issue for the show, particularly in the longest scenes, such as the tiresome plot wrap-up at the end with the whole cast standing around onstage smiling, but I’m not exactly clear on why. James’ breathy Shatnerian pauses don’t exactly help things, either.
The show is not devoid of good performance. Although contributing nothing to the plot whatsoever, Pompey, played by Vincent Marcus, is the most entertaining part of the show with his well-tuned physical comedy. And despite his character’s baffling lack of motivation, Tino Brokaw is an enjoyable nasty scumbag as Lucio, a character who gets some of the plot moving, then doesn’t do much else beyond just hanging around for the rest of the play and being a dick to people. Fazier’s nun is a solid performance as well, though the character suffers from being the dramatic hold on the play surrounded by the penis-juggling tomfoolery. Neil Faulconbridge is fun to watch when his executioner sounds like a pirate.
Overall the cast is huge, in which every character seems minor and takes a little piece of the stage-time pie. The script is divided and thin, doing too many things and none of them well.
Baffling.
