Review: A searing MEASURE FOR MEASURE at Burbage Theatre Co
Burbage offers a gripping production of Shakespeare's "problem play"
Burbage Theatre Co concludes its 14th season with William Shakespeare's "problem play" Measure for Measure, and this production shows how to take on the text's problems head-on. What emerges over two and a half hours is a Measure for Measure that treats the play as neither salvageable comedy nor failed tragedy but as something stranger and more contemporary: a study of surveillance, sexual coercion, and managed crisis that turns out to be uncomfortably relevant in 2026. It is the first professional production of the play in Rhode Island in more than three decades, and it is worth the wait.
The plot, briefly: Duke Vincentio announces plans to leave Vienna and hands power to Angelo, who immediately revives a dormant fornication law and sentences Claudio to death for impregnating his betrothed, Juliet. Claudio’s sister Isabella, about to enter a convent, pleads for mercy; Angelo offers her a bargain — her body for her brother's life — which she refuses. Meanwhile, the Duke has remained in Vienna disguised as a friar, gathering intelligence and arranging the substitutions that will expose Angelo. The play ends in a public trial, with forced marriages and pardons dispensed in roughly equal measure. The final beat is one of the most contested silences in Shakespeare, and audiences who do not know how it lands should discover it in the room.
Church stages the show traverse, with the audience seated on two sides of a rectangular playing lane, constantly seeing other audience members seeing. For a play so invested in observation, it is a perfect choice, and Trevor Elliott’s design sharpens the point: mirrors flank a central door on one wall, projections by Grey Rung haunt the brick opposite, and a simple stool becomes both the Duke’s throne and, with bars added, Claudio’s prison. The doubling is the production’s thesis in a single object: power and incarceration occupy the same seat. EJ Caraveo’s mid-century costumes and Church’s jazz-age soundscape complete a Vienna caught between appetite and control. The opening sequence establishes the setting with jitterbugging panache and remarkable economy.
Alison Russo's Isabella is the production's center of gravity, a study in religious composure stretched to its breaking point. Russo plays the early scenes with a near-monastic reserve — voice level, hands folded, certainty radiating outward — and then lets that composure crack inward, scene by scene. It is a performance of remarkable specificity, the kind that requires real Shakespearean discipline, and it builds toward a final image that will be argued about long after the run ends.
Mauro Hantman, making his Burbage debut after a quarter-century of leading roles at Trinity Rep, gives an Angelo whose collapse is genuinely earned. The hinge moment — Angelo's discovery of his own hypocrisy — is handled with admirable subtlety; Hantman lets the recognition arrive in stages, almost as a man watching himself from a distance and not liking what he sees. "Is this her fault or mine?" is delivered without performative agony, which makes the lines land harder. The whole performance is a portrait of self-knowledge arriving too late to be useful.
Steven Liebhauser's Vincentio is the production's most demanding performance, because the Duke has to remain genuinely likable while doing things that, on reflection, are really not likable at all. Liebhauser solves the problem through affability — a warm, slightly rumpled presence that makes the friar's confessional manipulations feel almost paternal. The audience laughs with him for most of the evening. And then, in the trial scene, the laughter stops; on the night I attended, the audience gasped audibly at a single line. That gasp is the achievement of the performance.
A standout in a smaller role: Julia Curtin, making her Burbage debut as the Provost (a jailer). The role is structurally pivotal — the Provost is the play's only morally unconflicted official, the one functionary who actually questions Angelo's orders — but it is easy to play as administrative and functional. Not Curtin. She brings physical energy and rhythmic precision to every scene she enters, and her quiet resistance to Angelo's death warrant carries genuine moral weight. It is the kind of performance that makes you check the program afterward to find out who that was.
The supporting ensemble is strong throughout. Victor Machado gives Claudio an earnest desperation that deepens the prison scene with Isabella, and Michaela Pendola-Machado makes Juliet’s brief stage time count. Andrew Stigler’s Escalus is a functionary with doubts flickering beneath the surface; Liam Roberts’ Lucio is a sleazy court hanger-on whose comeuppance cannot arrive soon enough. Rosa Nguyen’s Mariana is pivotal, and she makes her long-suppressed grief and longing felt.
One choice baffles in an otherwise carefully calibrated production. Church and Caraveo present Andrew David Scanlan’s Abhorson the executioner as a near-quotation of Death from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure — white face paint, black robes, squeaky Monty-Python delivery on every line. The audience laughed, but nervously. Abhorson is a small role, but a load-bearing one: he is the human face of the machinery Angelo has set in motion. Played as a sketch-comedy ghoul, he sits outside the production’s otherwise coherent argument about surveillance, mortality, and the state’s claim on the body.
Measure for Measure is the urtext of paranoid administration, a play in which the man at the top stages the crisis he then arrives to resolve. Church’s production understands that the Duke is not merely a comic manipulator but a ruler who turns confession into intelligence-gathering and mercy into discipline. The final tableau clinches it — a perfect staging that I will not describe, because it deserves to land in the room. Four centuries before the surveillance state had a name, Shakespeare had already sketched its operating manual. And at the Burbage, we are the Vienna being measured.
Highly recommended. This is what serious Shakespeare looks like in a small room with a sharp company and a director willing to trust the play's intelligence. Go in cold if you can. Don't miss it.
Measure for Measure, by William Shakespeare, directed by Jeff Church. Through June 7 at Burbage Theatre Co, 59 Blackstone Ave, Pawtucket. Tickets $35/$15 student, available at https://www.burbagetheatre.org/measure
Photo credit: Jesse Dufault
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