Measure for Measure
Court Theatre
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
As it happens, both shows are set in 1894. That’s the time director Barbara Gaines has chosen for her staging of Shakespeare’s 1604 study of sexual politics; it’s also the year Oscar Wilde wrote his famous satire of upper-class courtship. On the eve of a new century, this was a world of elegance masking debauchery, of impossibly rigid codes of conduct meant to restrain unstoppable eros, of class consciousness posturing as moral propriety. In this world people can go to jail for committing “indecent acts”–that is, for having sex in any way not approved by the powers that be. Measure for Measure’s Claudio, who impregnates his beloved Juliet before they are married, is condemned to death by the ducal deputy Angelo. Wilde, exposed as a homosexual, wasn’t sentenced to capital punishment, but he might as well have been (he died a broken man a few years after his prison term); and the threat of scandal stemming from a double life is the running joke in Earnest, about two insincere fellows who both adopt the alias “Ernest” to court a pair of pretty girls.
Wilde’s light, airy script was, its author said, “written by a butterfly for butterflies”–but though it floats like a butterfly, it sometimes stings like a bee. Its characters are caricatures, really, all attitude and epigram–George Bernard Shaw, a fan of Wilde’s earlier (and less durable) plays, rightly called this one “heartless” and “sinister”–and the plot’s farcical intrigues escalate to ludicrously contrived proportions as Wilde mocks the mannered comedies and melodramas of his day. But Earnest transcends its shallower aspects by delivering some of the funniest lines in literature–funniest not only because of what they say but because of what they don’t. Behind the stylish jokes about marriage, money, and morality lurk naughty hints of the desires, both erotic and economic, that color the prejudices of Wilde’s society. (Appropriately, Linda Buchanan’s set consists of a rigidly square-edged windowed wall, over and behind which hang red curtains.)
