Elevator Repair Service, the Obie-winning company behind Gatz — “the most remarkable achievement in theater of this decade” (The New York Times) — returns to The Public to celebrate their 25th season with a dynamic new production of Shakespeare’s MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

With athletic theatricality and Marx-Brothers-inspired slapstick, the ERS ensemble brings exciting new life to this story of impossible moral choices in 17th-century Vienna. Radical experiments with speed set the play’s combination of the comically absurd and the tragically serious in stark relief, and deliver a remarkable new show that marries the company’s unique performance style with the Bard’s exquisitely lyrical language. ERS Founder and Artistic Director John Collins directs.

For their first foray into Shakespeare, Elevator Repair Service, New York’s stalwarts of experimental theatre, tackle Measure for Measure at the Public Theatre. ERS delivers a screwball, slapstick rendering of the Bard’s problem play that is in turns hilarious, bizarre and inscrutable — entirely inscrutable, I might venture, for someone who isn’t familiar with the text. To crib the comment of a fellow audience member: “I wouldn’t want this to be the only Measure for Measure I ever saw.” But anyone who’s familiar with the company’s take on The Sound and the Fury, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and others knows that you can’t expect a straightforward rendering from artistic director John Collins and co.; they find a unique way into each text they interpret. At The Public’s LuEsther Theater, the text of the play has a near constant physical presence, scrolling up and down and sideways along the walls throughout — in part as a way to set the actors’ pace, director Collins writes. And the pace of the two-hour, no intermission run is often break-neck. To achieve this tight performance, the company frequently speeds unintelligibly through chunks of monologue and dialogue alike. Mea …Read more