Gents Can’t Measure
Summary
Two plays, both alike in complexity, in fair Vienna where we lay our scene. Two Gentlemen of Verona and Measure for Measure end with words left unsaid by once outspoken women. Gents Can’t Measure imagines what happens when the women are given the chance to speak, as they move to recapture their community from an insidious and unforgiving ruler.
Why These Plays?
What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent.
— "King Lear", Act I Scene i
Gents Can’t Measure reimagines the worlds of Two Gentlemen of Verona and Measure for Measure, set in present day Vienna. We have interwoven their plotlines and adapted key aspects of both plays as we have found they reveal unexpected parallels. In their union emerge both familiar and new questions that are resonant with our current sociopolitical climate.
We were drawn to these plays because of their complexities and contradictions, and specifically how Shakespeare chooses to resolve these elements at the end of each play. With marriage proposals at the conclusion of each text, the women are forced to concede their independence and disturbingly fall silent in the face of their new fates. Modern adaptations have grappled with these unsatisfying endings where women are scapegoated for the sake of the story. In Gents Can’t Measure, we dared to imagine a scenario where none of these concessions existed, and in doing so, asked the question: what happens if the women do not concede?
In Gents Can’t Measure, what drives the plot is the outspoken nature of these women, and the resolution comes from their refusal of silence in the face of tyranny and injustice.
Archive of our first staged reading
October 7th 2023 - The Tank, NYC
