Word: angelo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Vincento, the Duke, can't bear to bring the law down on his citizens himself. So he appoints a deputy. Then he sticks around in disguise--he wants to see whether power will pervert the poor deputy. Angelo, the once-Puritan deputy, threatens Isabel: Either you sleep with me or I'll have your brother killed for sleeping with that girl. Isabel, the heroine, with majestic certitude: "More than our brother is our chastity." A cutup from an Ex bench: "Come off it, sistah...
Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare's sour comedies. It is a play about honor that is marked by the lack of it: the lovers are mostly lechers, and purity is mocked as pretense. Concerned about the state of public morals, the Duke of Vienna selects Angelo, a man of seemingly flinty virtues, to take full power over the state. He enforces the laws with undeviating severity while the Duke masquerades as a lowly friar. In a fury of purity, Angelo orders a young gentleman, Claudio, to be executed for fornication. Claudio's sister Isabella, a novice...
...Angelo, the inquisitor, arrives at the house of Agata, a widow who lives with her daughter and sister-in-law. Angelo claims to have been a constant companion to Agata's husband before his death, and he uses this claims to make Agata confide her loneliness and insecurity, thus propelling her ultimately to accept him and the freedom he represents...
...there is a conceptual failing in director Leland Moss's rendering of Goat Island, it is that he makes Angelo, and not Agata, the play's center. This leaves the three women on too much of an equal and collectively subordinate level. Moss has had to miscast himself as Angelo, which in large measure explains this shift in emphasis, since he plays the part with too little earthly charisma, and too much surface charm, to be merely an agent of anything. Angelo emerges as a likeable rather than loveable character, and his appeal reaches as much to the audience...
...strong character out of Agata. Only at the very end, when she is on stage alone, do we get a sense that all the forces of Goat Island should direct themselves on her. And this comes as something of an anticlimax, because Moss has made almost too much of Angelo, giving him a weight he can't sustain in the play's resolution...