When audience members trickle out of a performance, it is usually not a good sign. When you yourself want to leave really badly and fairly early on during the proceedings, it is definitely not a good sign. When you hang on and make it to the end, you lament the two hours of life lost. Well at least we celebrated October 17th as the 50th Anniversary of the Public Theater, which opened its doors for the first time with Hair.
Elevator Repair Service is a talented company I have seen twice. The improbably phenomenal Gatz in which every word of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was read and staged over a multi-part eight hour marathon. Then there was Arguendo, a dramatization of a Supreme Court hearing. The company has a way with words. Shakespeare has a way with words. Why the epic fail here?
Measure for Measure is a five act play. Here it is reduced to about 2:10 over one act. How is this accomplished? By speed performing nearly all of the text. What flows out of the actors mouths are mostly unintelligible words with not really enough time to convey any meaning or story. If you do not read the synopsis or know the play, I cannot imagine there would be any way to follow the action. Maybe they were going for farce? Slapstick? If that’s the case, buffoonery needed to happen way more frequently. And actually be funny. And also not crammed briefly at the end when our relentless boredom overtook any connection to the stage.
An unwatchable mess. A huge disappointment.
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