Eno River Players' MEASURE FOR MEASURE

(2/15/25—3/1/25, at the Doxsee Theater, 232 52^nd Street in Brooklyn)

I’ve just come from some of the best Shakespeare I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen quite a bit. Measure for Measure is a hard play to mount, and they crushed it (in the good sense). Director Leo Egger builds a frame story that contains the show, a device Shakespeare might’ve smiled at, given his love of metatheater (Hamlet’s Mousetrap, Midsummer’s Pyramus and Thisbe; Brutus’ “How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport…”, etc.). The conceit is that this play’s actually being put on in a psychiatric hospital, where patients, staff, and doctors daily cope with trauma, physical and otherwise. Early on, we’re given Brian Linden—who shines as the Duke and his alter ego Friar, those two faces of one kindly, privileged asshole—janitorially mopping up a streak of blood. “You should have gloves on,” he is told, by one who passes him a pair. We groundlings, too, are about take on the several agonies of M for M, and this frame story helps us handle them, as gloves help vulnerable hands.

 

The first thing we see is Richard Brundage as Hospital Security Guard, passing the time in ecstatic enjoyment of operatic music. A love of the performing arts—the real thing, this love, and not a pose, since nobody’s watching this guy’s graveyard shift, and the watchman is himself—is found in this hospital. That makes it plausible that they would purge themselves of pity and terror by “producing” drama for a change, instead of just enduring it night and day. Periodically throughout the show, the fourth wall breaks—but not the whole fourth wall: it’s still a hospital, so when Brian Linden’s Duke-Friar-Janitor asks the front-row for a program, we’re an audience in a psych ward. This whole device works like a dimmer on a lamp in the Director’s hands, to raise and lower the immediacy of pain the tragedy supplies us with, till sweet relief comes at the end of Shakespeare’s just-so story. And as you’ll see, this time its sweetness isn’t saccharine; it’s bittersweet. It smarts.

 

I’d never heard of the Eno River Players. A third are Equity already, and I reckon the rest will get there too, if they so choose. It’s rare that a whole cast can handle blank verse well, and rare for everyone to have the acting chops to use it in. These people do. There’s no weak link. If anyone steals this near-unstealable production, it’s Chani Reese in the small role of Mariana, Angelo’s jilted bride. I was in tears just a few lines into her performance, and she sustained what she achieved. Reese is a powerhouse up there. 

 

Natasha Portnoy’s Isabella had my face wet more than once, not least with the brilliant choice to stay morose under the thumb of patriarchy’s choices as she resigns herself to marriage with the Duke. Most directors wrap the ending in the broadest joy they can; their Isabellas are delighted with their noble savior’s offer of his golden handcuffs. Not this Isabella, whose religious vocation is genuine—which is much of why she’s not despicable (if indeed she’s not, and I’m rather pleased to find I can’t decide) for refusing to save her brother’s life by “going through Hell” like Jennifer Connolly in Requiem for A Dream. Only with heartbroken reluctance does she doff her wimple and let down her hair, all but marrying the Duke already in that gesture. Her misery is like St. Mary’s in the best of all those paintings from the 15^th Century, where the holy girl seems none too pleased to be the vessel of a child her husband didn’t sire, and raise him to perish in a destiny she never chose. The same appalled chagrin on the face of Ms. Portnoy’s Isabella says that same futile aversion, and still-incomplete surrender. 

 

Angelo is a hard role to master, mastered here by Alex Roe. The character’s arc has him become such a shit of a human being that a big part of the job is keeping him as sympathetic as possible, for as long as you can. This, Roe and Director Leo Egger have pulled off, and in sharp focus. The result is worlds apart from a simple villain like Don John in Much Ado, or a complex but evil villain, like Iago. Angelo’s not evil, till he crumbles: he’s too militantly virtuous to be good. Real goodness doesn’t work that way—a timely theme!—and Shakespeare knows this best. 

 

Given power’s dangerous excess of freedom to do damn near anything to anybody, Angelo’s load of iron principles are too much to sustainably uphold. Virtue like his is brittle iron, not the steel he thought it was, because it is unmixed with any crucial pinch of sooty carbon—ordinary human lust—to forge resilient wisdom from useful experience. As Mao Zedong learned in his “Great Leap Forward,” iron principles alone just ain’t the recipe. Angelo’s rigid temperance has never properly been tempered; like iron and unlike steel (stick with me now), it has compression-strength aplenty, but no tensile strength, and amorous desire is the tension that undoes him. When he falls for Sister Isabella, a crush and its lust are overwhelming and disarming, as all the feelings seem entirely new to him. If that doesn’t make his conduct any less despicable, it sure does make his slide to villainy more interesting. 

 

I’ll be watching this company. You should, too.

 

Nicholas Wade's "The Faith Instinct" (2009): A Good Writer's Bad Book

Of the several thousand books I’ve read, one of my favorites is a summary of then-current knowledge about the Paleolithic by science journalist Nicholas Wade, called Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (Penguin, 2006). So I am reluctant to write this rather sour review of his next book, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures (Penguin, 2009). 

I’m doing so anyway, because The Faith Instinct is a particular kind of unhandsome volume that I consider bad for the public because it encourages people to think they know what they don’t know at all. In the opening pages, Wade quite helpfully admits “That the mind has been prepared by evolution to believe in gods neither proves nor disproves their existence” (p. 5), and “Religious behavior can be studied for its own sake, regardless of whether or not a deity exists” (p. 6). While this is welcome circumspection, the book repeatedly opposes “the supernatural world” to what it calls “the real world” (e.g., pp. 94, 109, 117, 127, etc.), begging the question of whether the rites of the devout have any actual referents outside their own minds. It continually suggests that they do not.

“The existence of special neural circuitry in the brain dedicated to moral decisions is further evidence that morality is an evolved faculty with a genetic basis” (p. 22), writes Wade, with the vague implication that no evolved faculty can disclose eternal verities. Well... the existence of special neural circuitry in the brain dedicated to arithmetic is evidence that mathematics is an evolved faculty with a genetic basis—but numbers are nevertheless an indestructible part of reality. Though mathematicians differ as to whether the integers are invented or discovered, our evolved capacity to calculate is valuable because it connects us to essential features of the universe, features whose physical embodiments are just one aspect of their ultimate nature. 

Wade repeatedly throws out bogus generalizations as if no reasonable person would question them. Several examples follow. 

The dubious “conflict theory” of the Neanderthal extinction is cited as an obvious truism: “But the people of the Upper Paleolithic were hardly pacifists. They would not have been in Europe in the first place had they not wrested it from the grip of the fearsome Neanderthals and driven them to extinction” (p. 50). But Clive Finlayson’s superbly humane reconsideration of that story showed what an open question it really is, in The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived (Oxford, 2009). 

Wade writes about the brutal male dominance hierarchy of chimpanzees of the species pan troglodytes, to draw inferences about humans’ differentiation from a common ancestor we surely share with them. Very well, but he ignores the other chimpanzee species, whose social habits are markedly different, and far less conducive to Wade’s inferences. This was already popularized in Jared Diamonds 1991 bestseller, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (Hutchinson Radius, 1991). 

On p. 95 we hear of “the brain’s outer cortex, the seat of consciousness…” Fairness to Wade’s 2009 book restrains me from citing Mark Solms’ great work The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2021), which only appeared a dozen years later, and discredited this “cortical fallacy.” Consciousness is not the exclusive possession of the mammalian neocortex, and is enjoyed by all vertebrates by virtue of a much older evolutionary achievement we call the brainstem. 

  

The Faith Instinct is primarily about religion, not primatology or neuroscience, but it makes several big errors there, too: “Modern religions like Judaism or Christianity emphasize creeds and intellectual belief over rituals and emotional engagement” (p. 87). Millions of Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, Quakers, and Chassidic Jews can be properly offended by this silly claim about emotional engagement. But the glib conflation of “Judaism or Christianity” as interchangeably emphasizing “creeds and intellectual belief over rituals” is appalling ignorance. Ritual and right conduct are the heart of Jewish piety, grounded in a covenantal relationship with the God that chose the Hebrew people to receive the Torah which enumerates His commandments. A great gulf separates this religion of deeds from Luther’s religion of “faith alone,” which explicitly disavowed the importance of “outer works” and “the law,” sweeping them away with an almost gleeful contempt. 

And Wade steps in this same pothole elsewhere: “Christianity promises admission to heaven for obeying divine law, eternal damnation for defying it” (p. 54). No one who has read any theological work of the Protestant Reformation could hold such a view, and Lutheran theology—firmly based on the ancient Letters of Paul—is the precise opposite of what Wade says here. 

“In advanced societies, control of religion often rests with a religious hierarchy which monopolizes access to the supernatural” (p. 40). Can anyone name an example of this? Jews and Catholics and Protestants and Muslims all have their mystics at the margins of the community, but they also have their mainstream practices designed to give common people firsthand experiences of the holy in their everyday lives. 

Sometimes Wade contradicts himself, as if he’d rushed to publication without time to reread the work. On page 32 he cites sociobiologist Richard Alexander thus: “Only in humans is the major hostile force of life composed of other groups in the same species.” But later on, we are told: “‘The greatest enemies of ants are other ants, just as the greatest enemies of men are other men,’ observed the Swiss myrmecologist Auguste Forel” (p. 52).

That is quite enough about The Faith Instinct.