'Here’s a change indeed in the Commonwealth!': Segregation-era 'Measure for Measure' at Folger

Nathan Darrow (The Duke), Renea S. Brown (Isabella, center), and Holly Twyford (Escalus) in Measure for Measure, Folger Theatre. Photo: Erika Nizborski

Folger Theatre has opened its season with an intriguing production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Director Psalmayene 24, who won a Helen Hayes Award for his Africa-centered production of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses in 2024, has shifted the action from the court of Vienna to the American South under Jim Crow segregation law: the town of “Vye-enna” in what is clearly the Commonwealth of Virginia.

To underscore the point about the causes of injustice in that world, the play’s wronged parties are all played by black actors, while those in power are white. Nathan Darrow’s high-minded Duke becomes the mayor of the town, presiding with a genteel drawl in a courthouse building with two racially separated drinking fountains and a large sign pointing to a “Colored Waiting Room.” He appoints Lee Osorio’s uptight Angelo, a judge known for the rigorous enforcement of old laws, to rule the town in his absence.

The “fornication” laws that the Duke hopes Angelo will enforce, after some years of laxity, are read in the production as southern laws against racial intermarriage, recalling the legal struggles that led to the case of Loving v. Virginia. Dance once again features prominently in this production, in an opening all-cast number that depicts, among other things, the courtship of JaBen Early’s earnest Claudio with Maryanne Henderson’s beautiful Juliet. This adds poignant overtones to the idea that the couple, a black man and a white woman, were married in their own eyes but without the cover of the law.

Renea S. Brown, who acted in the director’s earlier Metamorphoses, played Claudio’s sister, Isabella, with both wide-eyed innocence and caustic moral indignation. She rebuffs the clumsy sexual advances of Angelo, given an extra air of menace by the different legal statuses implied by their racial identities. When Darrow’s Duke, disguised as a Franciscan friar, makes his own more honorable proposal, Isabella’s curious silence plays out with new resonance. The production leaves the conclusion open to interpretation, but Isabella seems ready to make her own way, neither in the convent she was planning to enter nor as a wife.

The supporting cast was equally talented, especially the wise-guy Lucio of Jonathan Feuer, who believes in his own infallible slickness even as he is insulting both the Duke and the Friar, actually the same person, to one another. Ryan Sellers hammed up Elbow, the hapless constable, as a country-bumpkin sheriff, to hilarious effect, and Holly Twyford’s cross-cast Escalus, costumed as a sort of executive secretary, bristled with authority.

The conceit of the production becomes overbearing to the original plot only at the end. As part of his declaration of love, the Duke tears down the signs of segregation on the set. While the element of racial discrimination may be offered as an explanation of why the Duke takes so long to reveal the truth to Isabella, this contrived idea seems like virtue-signaling, which may be why Isabella does not seem so impressed.

Measure for Measure runs through November 1. folger.edu