If the Goodman Theater's shocker of a Measure for Measure in 2013, or the touring Pushkin Theater's Brechtian explication in 2016, weren't enough to convince audiences that autocratic munificence and compulsory matrimony do not a happy life-affirming ending make, Henry Godinez's adaptation for Chicago Shakespeare Theater makes a compelling case for further examination of Shakespeare's most unromantic and uncomic romantic comedy.
This "enhanced audioplay" locates us, not in 17th-century Vienna, but pre-revolutionary Havana in 1958—a city where men in positions of authority preach reform and benevolence, while practicing unethical policies bent on self-advancement, and would-be husbands choose prospective brides for the financial gain provided by the latter's dowries, only to sever their contracts if the money be not immediately forthcoming (profitless matches, meanwhile, are meted out as punishment). This culture of privileged patriarchy condemns women to loveless marriages as their sole refuge, their bodies and fortunes privy to masculine whim. In a corrupt universe such as this, the irony of an unrepentant convict and a cloistered nun emerging as the sole adherents of moral principle becomes manifest.
The "audioplay" designation doesn't mean that we are wholly bereft of visual stimulus. Video designer Rasean Davonte Johnson has devised panoramic views of the Cuban capital from authentic period photographs portray it as a sun-baked urban colonio where poor citizens loiter in the doorways of abandoned shops or houses with broken walls and peeling paint, while wealthy idlers in furs and diamonds gamble in casinos. Faces of the characters superimposed like ghostly transparencies thereon keep us apprised of the speakers' identities from moment to moment (a chronic hazard in this type of presentation) to make the most of the final scene connecting Shakespeare's fairytale fable with history's gritty progression so that even nortes who know Cuba only as a playground for Hemingway and his pals cannot help but leave enlightened.
