Measure for Measure: 4 Stars

By Adam Feldman

Elevator Repair Service’s wacky Measure for Measure is constantly and deliberately off-balance. According to director John Collins, the company was inspired to try Shakespeare’s problem play at highly varying speeds after a happy experiment with a glacially slow version of one of its key scenes: a tense prison dialogue between Claudio (Greig Sargeant), sentenced to die for impregnating his fiancée, and his sister, Isabella (the finely understated Rinne Groff), who refuses to give up her chastity to save him. A different company might have slowed the rest of the play to match; instead, ERS perversely speeds it up. The actors, reading from teleprompters, race through their lines at a breakneck pace, sometimes barking them into candlestick telephones in the style of a 1930s screwball comedy.

Excerpt from “Measure for Measure: 4 Stars” by Adam Feldman. Read the full article here.