License in the Park

By Timothy Foote

MEASURE FOR MEASURE by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Any casual stroller who would like to think of the world's greatest playwright as the bawd of Avon will find plenty of license at Joseph Papp's production of Measure for Measure in Manhattan's Central Park. "Hence shall we see . . .

what our seemers be," says Duke Vincentio (Sam Waterston) as he sets out, disguised as a friar, to play God like some sadistic schoolboy among the seamy souls who inhabit his city. Vincentio wants to re-establish law-and-order, but he leaves the governing to Angelo, a celebrated Puritan played like a young Robespierre by John Cazale. Angelo believes in absolute justice but soon declines into lechery and official murder. Meanwhile the city fathers can't even clear the streets of prostitutes. A black pimp, brilliantly played in high camp by Howard Rollins Jr., asks, "Does your worship mean to gold and splay all the youth of the city?" The production wisely lets such contemporary resonances ring for themselves. The cast concentrates on turning quirks of plot into confrontations of flesh and blood.

Meryl Streep slowly overcomes a role she was not meant for -- Isabella, the hysterical novice who is asked to sell her virtue to Angelo to save her brother's life. Lenny Baker is hilarious as Lucio, advocating lechery in the accents of Will Rogers. Director John Pasquin keeps the play moving, even through those last toyings with fate and shotgun marriages whereby the playwright pastes a sickly grin on this mask of tragedy and squa lor. Measure for Measure was Shakespeare's poison-pen letter to the world.

Its view of man, once regarded as intolerably bleak, now seems distressingly up-to-date.

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