M4M March 27, 2009

Somewhere in a city, a man waits in an empty store. A woman arrives. He inspects her. Money exchanges hands. They begin. What starts hesitatingly, and then tumbles out to startling effect, is the text of Shakespeare's 'Measure for Measure.' In this 50-minute adaptation, strangers in a room act out a bizarre fantasy of power and desire while the line between the S&M play and the Shakespeare play rapidly dissolves. The audience, in close proximity, is witness to extremely private acts of domination and submission. The production takes Shakespeare's most unpredictable play, which wrestles with the ideas of power, sex, morality and substitution, and makes it strange and dangerous again.