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.