Would you know the devil if you saw her? Have you seen her lately? All sightings should be reported.

Measure For Measure is one of Shakespeare’s mature comedies, like Twelfth Night. Although it contains the usual Shakespearian comic devices, mistaken identities, people pretending to be someone they aren’t, clownish and drunken servants and idiots in office who mangle the English language, it also deals with mature content, in this case that most modern of mature content, sex. When is lust just a lot of fun and when is it a sin? And if it’s a sin, is it really deadly, or just kind of an “oops” moment?

Despite the numerous biographies on the subject, we know very little about the life of William Shakespeare. But we feel fairly assured that as a boy, Shakespeare must have been in the audience of the morality plays popular at the time. In these plays a fallible man (an Everyman character) would be tempted toward sin. Often there would be a devil and an angel on stage fighting for his soul. This tradition still exists in our age in such divers media as the movies Wall Street, The Natural, and Tom and Jerry cartoons. Certainly Shakespeare was remembering these plays when he created the characters of Angelo (hint, hint) and Isabella in Measure For Measure. (Scales? Balance? Good and evil?

As written, Angelo’s struggle with good and evil is internal. We have chosen in this production to make it more explicit and visual by putting the devil on stage and forcing Angelo to talk to the devil in person instead of his usual internal arguments, his soliloquies. The devil also moves throughout Vienna (the setting for the play) infecting every aspect of secular life. In our Vienna, the devil is palpable and real, sort of like Detroit. And let’s face it, if one is going to blame the devil for one’s mistakes, it’s much handier to have a real devil there to blame it on.

Also, because we have chosen to set our play in modern times, we have incorporated traditions from the film noir crime films of the late forties and early fifties. Film noir contains the same battle between good and evil, with its femme fatales and its antiheroes torn between the law and their own dark desires (Double Indemnity, LA Confidential). Our production makes use of the film noir feel created by the use of black and white, low light and shadow, and the employment of mood music. It is also the reason that we have chosen to interpret the devil as female, in keeping with the tradition of the film noir femme fatale. Think of it as Raymond Chandler’s love life.

For us, this film noir morality play vision yanks one of Shakespeare’s most morally complicated scripts out of its Elizabethan world and thrusts it into the moral complexity of our own time. If you find yourself giving way to nervous laughter in the discussions with the devil, we’ve succeeded. The devil is out there, tempting the powerful and the powerless alike. From Bill Clinton to Sam Adams, to Tiger Woods, they fall like bowling pins and wind up on the front pages.

Would you know the devil if you saw her? Have you seen her? Come see her at The Shoebox Theatre and find out just how much fun evil can be.