[In the following review of Daniel Fish's 2003 California Shakespeare Theater staging of Measure for Measure, Hurwitt admires the setting, directorial innovations, and excellent performances and claims that the production effectively emphasized the complexities and enduring appeal of the drama.]

The condemned man, bound in duct tape, wears a red-and-white striped hot dog vendor's uniform and his visibly pregnant lover wanders forlornly across the stage singing a haunted “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” A jilted bride, left in the lurch five years earlier, hunkers in her long white gown, microwaving popcorn as she wails along with Johnny Cash on “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

Yes, this is Shakespeare. And very good Shakespeare, too. Daniel Fish's version of Measure for Measure plays loose with the text and even more ingeniously loose with its visual presentation. But the California Shakespeare Theater production that opened Saturday explores the essence of the play with a willfully irreverent modernity that makes Shakespeare's dark, difficult comedy wonderfully immediate, restlessly provocative and unusually touching and funny.

Fish, who made his festival debut two years ago with an equally bold if problematic Cymbeline—another exceptionally difficult play to bring off—outdoes that effort. The look is bold, stark and invigorating. The contemporary musical, political and consumer-culture references are pregnant and piquant. The performances are freshly conceived, arrestingly intelligent and executed with beautifully integrated expertise.

Using a setting as impersonal as an insurance office—Andrew Lieberman's striking set is a broad maze of wall-less cubicles, defined by metal strips and crosspieces hung with bare fluorescent tubes—Fish doesn't so much wrestle with the play's confounding problems as embrace them. Convenient plot devices and abrupt solutions are exploited for humor and innate moral questions. The oft-criticized hasty resolution becomes an asset when treated with bracing ambiguity.

Written on the verge of Shakespeare's dark period (just before Othello, King Lear and Macbeth), Measure has long been considered a comedy principally because it ends with multiple weddings rather than corpses. But two of the four grooms have been sentenced to marry, and a third match is unexpectedly peremptory. This isn't a comedy about love. It's partly a satire on licentiousness, but much more an attack on the fundamentalist Christian movement then flexing its political muscle—which closed the theaters when it took power a few decades later—in a tale of puritanical zeal cloaking corrupt hypocrisy.

Fearing Vienna is becoming too debauched, but not wanting to take the heat for a draconian morality campaign, Duke Vincentio (Gross Indecency star Michael Emerson) announces he's leaving town and puts his power in the hands of the super-righteous Angelo (Bruce McKenzie), hoping he'll crack down on the vice trade. Then Vincentio disguises himself as a friar and hangs around to see what happens.

Angelo immediately starts enforcing long dormant capital punishment laws against fornication. But when the nun Isabella (Carrie Preston) comes to plead for her condemned brother's life (that would be T. Edward Webster as Claudio, the hot-dog vendor), her religious fervor turns him on, disorienting him to the point that he offers to spare Claudio if she'll have sex with him—meanwhile planning to have Claudio executed as a cover-up.

All is resolved with a few convenient switches—a dead prisoner's head for Claudio's; Angelo's spurned bride Mariana (Jenny Lord, comically dispirited in her voluminous gown) slipped into bed in place of Isabella. But Fish isn't interested in such resolutions. As vividly as he portrays the central conflict between McKenzie's intensely self-righteous, then haplessly vicious Angelo and Preston's eloquently distressed Isabella, his focus is on the mysterious ambiguity of Vincentio—and the thought processes that occur between the lines.

Fish and dramaturge Luan Schooler have pared the text rigorously, eliminating minor characters and scenes and reassigning dialogue. He builds in long, pregnant pauses in which Emerson, Preston and McKenzie's expressive features betray the complexity of ideas and emotions rushing upon them. Orchestrating the performances, pauses and the provocative changes in Adam Silverman's soft, harsh, invigoratingly stark lighting, Fish creates a symphony of shifting ideas and loyalties.

He also addresses the text with a fertile sardonic humor signaled in the tawdry stage furnishings, Kate Voyce's wry costumes and the use of pop music—not to mention the disturbing presence of Natalie Rae Cressman as a compliant teen prostitute. Sex in the office and a chief executive's unholy record of frequent executions come into play.

Brilliant performances heighten the satire: Andy Murray's flip, heartily amoral Lucio; Michael Rudko's easygoing, self-assured pimp Pompey; Rod Gnapp's officious, malapropism-spouting Elbow; Gerald Hiken's wondrously woebegone old madame and drunkenly assertive prisoner. But Emerson's Vincentio is the key to the story. Thoughtful, impulsive, vain, soft-hearted, tortured with moral guilt and self-doubt. Emerson embodies the dilemma of the play's teetering theme: “Some rise by sin and some by virtue fall.”