Measure For Measure
Opening Night: October 10, 2017
Closing: November 5, 2017
Theater: Public Theater
Elevator Repair Service, the Obie-winning company behind Gatz — “the most remarkable achievement in theater of this decade” (The New York Times) — returns to The Public to celebrate their 25th season with a dynamic new production of Shakespeare’s MEASURE FOR MEASURE. With athletic theatricality and Marx-Brothers-inspired slapstick, the ERS ensemble brings exciting new life to this story of impossible moral choices in 17th-century Vienna. Radical experiments with speed set the play’s combination of the comically absurd and the tragically serious in stark relief, and deliver a remarkable new show that marries the company’s unique performance style with the Bard’s exquisitely lyrical language. ERS Founder and Artistic Director John Collins directs.
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October 10, 2017
In recent years, Elevator Repair Service has achieved the unexpected distinction of being the troupe that a discerning theatergoer would most like to read a book with. In its stage adaptations of classic American literature, this endlessly exploratory company has plied theatrical inventiveness to simulate the Every Reader experience of falling into — and in love with — a self-contained universe of words. The company’s interpretations of Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury,” Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” and, above all, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” — rendered in “Gatz” as a word-for-word, six-hour marathon — seemed to pulse dynamically in that fecund space between the written narrative and a reader’s imagination. So there was every reason to rejoice in the prospect of this company finally venturing into the land of William Shakespeare, where words have the quicksilver shimmer of thought itself. Yet its frantic interpretation of Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure,” which opened on Tuesday night at the Public Theater, calls to mind Hamlet’s immortally jaded literary critique: “Words, words, words.”
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