The inherent danger in legislating morality is as universal a literary theme as love and betrayal. Pick your time and place. Hypocrisy is sure to ensue.
Shakespeare wrote “Measure for Measure” at the troubled start of the plague-ravaged reign of England’s James I. Denver Center Theatre Company artistic director Kent Thompson moves his new staging from 1604 to 1900s Vienna, when Freud was coming to prominence, brothels flourished and the Hapsburg Empire was crumbling.
In the play, as is often the case in real life, governments respond to anything widespread – sexual freedom, epidemics, terrorism, fear – by cracking down on personal behaviors and eroding individual privacy, often by invoking the name of decency or God. A rise in religious fundamentalism and a resulting climate of fear are sure to follow.
Should anyone see that play out onstage and then think wiretapping, Roe vs. Wade, the Patriot Act, Focus on the Family, the narrowing gap between church and state, said
Thompson, so much the better.
“I do hope that in setting a 1604 play in 1900s Vienna you will see 2006 America,” he said. “I really believe you want to give the audience a lens to look through, but I think you trivialize it if you try to turn these characters into George Bush or Ralph Reed. It’s more complex than that, and it’s not as clean as that. I am hopefully allowing audiences to draw from it some of their own ideas about the world today.”
“Measure” is a high-profile event for Thompson, who arrived from the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, and the company. This is the DCTC’s first Shakespeare in two years. All eyes will be on “Measure” for the insights Thompson brings to the canon.
“Shakespeare is important to do because his plays are a repository of Western culture,” he said. “Everybody has an association of some kind with Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear. They seem to be almost Jungian archetypes that have become deeply embedded not only in our culture but all over the world.”
In “Measure,” a weak Duke is troubled by the lax observance of his laws but does not have the fortitude to crack down himself; he goes into hiding and becomes, in effect, his own spy. First he charges a self-righteous deputy, Angelo, with enforcing existing edicts such as death for anyone having premarital sex. An example will be made of Claudio, whose intended marriage to pregnant Juliet has been delayed only by government bureaucracy.
It is a complicating factor that Angelo, one of the play’s two fundamentalists, offers to spare Claudio’s life if the other, a cloistered nun named Isabella, will sleep with him. She refuses, for to do so would be a mortal sin.
The play’s moral context has reversed itself over 400 years. In 1604, audiences were furious Claudio would selfishly beg his sister, a chaste symbol of the puritanic backlash from the plague, for his life. Today audiences condemn Isabella for choosing her own misguided virtue over her brother, and yet begging instead for Angelo to be spared.
These are among the reasons “Measure,” labeled a tragicomedy but really neither tragedy nor comedy, is considered one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays.” And why Thompson was drawn to it.
“I think the hardest thing for the modern audience is to understand Isabella’s refusal to have sex to save her brother’s life,”
Thompson said. “My job is to create a world where her decision makes a certain kind of sense. I think it does today, with the rapid evangelical rise in young people. There are people who are choosing the life of morality, religious devotion and a strict set of behaviors because they believe the world is on the wrong path.”
But while Thompson is the son of a Southern Baptist minister, he is not the son of a fundamentalist. And that’s where things get complicated.
“You can’t stop the needs of human sexuality unless you stop eating and drinking,” he said. “Every church my dad was in, it seemed one of the associate pastors left every two or three years because of sexual misconduct.
“Does that mean I think ministers are hypocrites? No. I think ministers are human beings and there is more to human sexuality, to human politics, to the human psyche, than is simply admitted by a strict set of rules. It requires thought.
“I just feel the reason we have religion in a larger sense is that we know that human beings are imperfect. And there is a striving for perfection I don’t think any rule book will ever get us to.”
But because those in charge can dole out either mercy or mortality, it’s troubling when one person, Thompson said, “sets themselves up as God’s judge. God’s standard-bearer. God’s general. Human nature is too fallible. When someone builds their life invoking family values and saying, ‘I am a person of rectitude who can make judgments about other people,’ it’s easy to become angry and intolerant. And it’s very hard to remain humble.”
He quoted from former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart’s book, “God and Caesar”: “Faith in God does not guarantee special insights on governance in the secular world, especially when those claiming the faith act contrary to history and experience.”
Angelo’s actions have solved some problems but brought suffering without enforcing the same moral rigor in himself.
The lesson, Thompson said, is to mind the dangers of religion- driven politics. “Life is messy, and it’s even messier when you get into the issues of privacy, personal and public morality, and who is legislating that.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“Measure for Measure”
SHAKESPEARE|Denver Center Theatre Company|Directed by Kent Thompson|Starring John Hutton, Ruth Eglsaer, Brent Harris and Stafford Clark-Price|Stage Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex, 14th and Curtis streets|THROUGH FEB. 25|6:30 p.m. Monday-Wednesday, 8 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 1:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday|$29-$45| 303-893- 4100, denvercenter.org, King Soopers stores or TicketsWest, 866-464-2626
