Measure for Measure is about brutal sexual coercion. But, in his adaptation, director Jivesh Parasram frames the play as broad comedy — and he thinks he’s doing abuse survivors a favour.
In the story, Duke Vincenzio is concerned about the number of brothels in Vienna and decides it’s time to start prosecuting morality laws that haven’t been enforced in years. But, because he’s the one who let things go slack, Vincenzio wants somebody else to do the enforcing. So, pretending to be heading off to Poland, he puts the moralistic Angelo in charge — but hangs around disguised as a monk to keep an eye on things. Although it’s not unusual in this Vienna for betrothed couples to have sex, Angelo immediately sentences a man named Claudio to death for impregnating his fiancée Juliet. When Claudio’s sister, a novice nun named Isabella, comes to plead for Claudio’s life, Angelo makes her a proposition: if she lets him have sex with her, Claudio will live.
Measure for Measure is famously a “problem play”, but that’s due largely to a specific system of categorization in which plays that culminate in marriage are thought to have happy endings and are considered comedies. Scripts that aren’t histories, and that contain elements of both comedy and tragedy are categorized as “problem plays”.
But, by any sane reckoning, Measure for Measure is not primarily comedic. It has some comic characters, including a pimp named Pompey and a ridiculous constable called Elbow, but the great majority of the script is a serious and high-stakes exploration of sexual morality in the context of a powerful patriarchy.
So Parasram’s assumption, in his director’s notes, that Measure for Measure is “putting Sexual Assault up front and centre as the subject of humour” betrays a fundamental — and, for this production, disastrous — misunderstanding of the script. In his adaptation, Parasram leans so heavily into comedy that the jokes — more accurately, attempted jokes — keep coming with sitcom regularity, including in scenes in which they have no business.
Parasram makes another fundamental error: he declines to frankly present the sexual coercion that is the play’s primary driver. Instead of premarital sex being banned in the director’s disco-inflected version, it’s premarital dancing. That choice makes everything ridiculous. I think it’s an eccentric character named Lucio who explains what’s going on with Claudio by saying, “He hath boogied down so hard his friend be now with child.” Yes, you might laugh because it’s absurd, but jokes like this — and there are scores of them — shred the much more interesting fabric of the play.
In his notes, Parasram justifies this dancing-for-sex substitution with the following rhetoric: “Who benefits from depicting Sexual Assault on stage? Likely people who don’t think of it that often, who are not acutely aware of its threat, who haven’t survived it. And so, to educate those who haven’t lived through it, should we subject those who have to becoming collateral damage?”
I don’t doubt this line of reasoning is well intentioned, but it strikes me as potentially condescending: Parasram has set himself up as the protector of the supposedly fragile victims of assault. And, by opting for a baseline of ridiculousness, he has created a world in which NOTHING MATTERS, including sexual coercion. When Angelo first meets Isabella and he’s attracted to her, there’s a lot of unfunny business in which he tries to hide his erection. In the scene in which he’s bullying Isabella into nonconsensual sex — and her brother’s life is at stake — Parasram’s version of Angelo says things like, “Come on! Get down! Get down with the jungle boogie.” And, at some point, Isabella refers to herself as, potentially, “a private dancer. A dancer for money.”
In this world, Isabella’s religion doesn’t matter, the threat to Claudio’s life doesn’t matter, and Juliet’s pregnancy doesn’t matter: in Parasram’s production, the heavily pregnant Julietta, as he calls her, does a death drop.
As a costume designer, Alaia Hamer’s job is to help the director realize his vision. Hamer does that here, so I’m not faulting her work, but the vision is so off. Isabella appears in a short-skirted novice’s dress made of bright pink satin. She’s wearing bright pink runners. This does nothing to emphasize the depth — or severity — of Isabella’s faith: let’s not forget that she would rather sacrifice her brother’s life than her virginity.
This relentless undermining of the script is a shame because Measure for Measure has substantial things to say about sexual abuse. Rejecting Angelo’s ultimatum, Isabella threatens to tell the world about his depravity. He replies, “Who will believe thee?” Citing his reputation and power, Angelo reminds Isabella that, “Say what you can, my false o’erweighs you’re true.” Mistress Overdone, a madam whose establishment has been razed, is well aware of the systemic nature of the power imbalance. “All men are bad,” she says, “and in their badness reign.”
The actors do what they can within Parasram’s ill-conceived attempt. They deliver energetic, sometimes inventive performances.
Although the director thinks he’s taking care of abuse survivors by not retraumatizing them, I know of at least one survivor who disagrees. Before seeing the show, I received an anonymous email from a woman who identified herself as a theatre worker and “a person who has experienced sexual harassment and sexual assault, sometimes from people working in theatre institutions.” She said that this production saddened — and clearly frustrated — her. “Undercutting sexual assault, turning harassment into comedy: these things are harmful,” she wrote. “They’re harmful to the audience members who are unfamiliar with the play and don’t consider what it means to talk about sexual assault in this light, and they’re harmful to the victims in the audience hearing everyone laugh around them.”
So. Not so helpful.
MEASURE FOR MEASURE by William Shakespeare. Adapted and directed by Jivesh Parasram. On Thursday, July 18. A Bard on the Beach production running in rep on the Howard Family Stage in the Douglas Campbell Theatre until September 20. Tickets and information
PHOTO CREDIT: A very pink Isabella in Measure for Measure. (Photo of Meaghan Chenosky by Tim Matheson. Costume by Alaia Hamer)
Your review is brave, poignant and accurate. We walked out in the intermission.