Director’s Note for Measure for Measure at Actors Shakespeare Project
January 2015
By Megan Sandberg-Zakian
To whom should I complain? Did I tell this,
Who would believe me? Oh perilous mouths,
That bear in them one and the self-same tongue,
Either of condemnation or approof,
Bidding the law make curtsy to their will…
-Isabella, Measure for Measure
That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.
-Langston Hughes
The first night of rehearsal for Measure for Measure, sitting around the table in heated conversation about this complex text, we made a list of some of the play’s big questions. Questions like:
How do people in power get there?
How do those in power decide what laws to enforce and how to enforce them?
What leads to the same law being enforced differently on different people?
Do law-enforcers need to admit their own fallibility before they can understand mercy?
Is mankind qualified to enforce God’s law?
As we sat making our list, thousands of Americans were asking these same questions as they sang, shouted, and marched - in front of statehouses and courthouses, in malls and on highways, from St. Louis to Boston, from New York to Oakland. For many young Americans, like Claudio and Isabella, these are not literary questions, but urgent daily matters of life and death.
Measure for Measure is often called a “problem play” – unclassifiable as either comedy or tragedy, lacking a satisfying explanation for its central premise, and boasting a bizarre and deeply unsettling “happy” ending. Ironically, these “problems” lend the play a striking resemblance to the stories of law enforcement we’ve been reading in the news. For me, it is a problem play because it is a play about problems, the same problems we humans have always faced and will always face when trying to enforce life-and-death justice on each other. We are fallible, we are biased, we are irrational, and we are scared.
At the end of the play, what are we to believe about justice in Vienna going forward? Measure for Measure does not give us a kind of leadership or law enforcement we can believe in. What it does give us are many moments of human compassion. Escalus may not be effective, but he is a good listener; the Provost may not be a risk-taker, but she deeply feels the plight of her prisoners. Even the strict Isabella ultimately kneels on the side of mercy and a second chance. Yet none of these characters are able to change the system - represented by the Duke - which, even when it appears to cede power, still lies in the shadows, waiting. Sometimes in rehearsing this play, I felt angry and hopeless - will the problems of justice, mercy, and the law always be the same? why doesn’t Shakespeare give us a solution, a model for just leadership, a way of healing a broken system? But then I remembered: it’s a problem play. It holds up a powerfully poetic mirror to show us our problems. What we will do about them is up to us.
January 2015
By Megan Sandberg-Zakian
To whom should I complain? Did I tell this,
Who would believe me? Oh perilous mouths,
That bear in them one and the self-same tongue,
Either of condemnation or approof,
Bidding the law make curtsy to their will…
-Isabella, Measure for Measure
That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.
-Langston Hughes
The first night of rehearsal for Measure for Measure, sitting around the table in heated conversation about this complex text, we made a list of some of the play’s big questions. Questions like:
How do people in power get there?
How do those in power decide what laws to enforce and how to enforce them?
What leads to the same law being enforced differently on different people?
Do law-enforcers need to admit their own fallibility before they can understand mercy?
Is mankind qualified to enforce God’s law?
As we sat making our list, thousands of Americans were asking these same questions as they sang, shouted, and marched - in front of statehouses and courthouses, in malls and on highways, from St. Louis to Boston, from New York to Oakland. For many young Americans, like Claudio and Isabella, these are not literary questions, but urgent daily matters of life and death.
Measure for Measure is often called a “problem play” – unclassifiable as either comedy or tragedy, lacking a satisfying explanation for its central premise, and boasting a bizarre and deeply unsettling “happy” ending. Ironically, these “problems” lend the play a striking resemblance to the stories of law enforcement we’ve been reading in the news. For me, it is a problem play because it is a play about problems, the same problems we humans have always faced and will always face when trying to enforce life-and-death justice on each other. We are fallible, we are biased, we are irrational, and we are scared.
At the end of the play, what are we to believe about justice in Vienna going forward? Measure for Measure does not give us a kind of leadership or law enforcement we can believe in. What it does give us are many moments of human compassion. Escalus may not be effective, but he is a good listener; the Provost may not be a risk-taker, but she deeply feels the plight of her prisoners. Even the strict Isabella ultimately kneels on the side of mercy and a second chance. Yet none of these characters are able to change the system - represented by the Duke - which, even when it appears to cede power, still lies in the shadows, waiting. Sometimes in rehearsing this play, I felt angry and hopeless - will the problems of justice, mercy, and the law always be the same? why doesn’t Shakespeare give us a solution, a model for just leadership, a way of healing a broken system? But then I remembered: it’s a problem play. It holds up a powerfully poetic mirror to show us our problems. What we will do about them is up to us.