Shakespeare’s late comedies have been called dark and problematic. Moral ambiguity reigns. While goodness ultimately prevails, and things work out in the end–on a more or less festive note–cruelties occur along the way.

The current Frog and Peach production of Measure for Measure wrings the maximum sport out of the grimmest, most sardonic materials. Period jazz heightens the atmosphere of entertaining debauchery. The company’s talents and gusto make light of the evils.

Amy Frances Quint energetically takes over the role of Isabella, playing the not-yet-professed nun to the hilt. She first appears in white nun’s habit, but for the rest of the action she’s costumed in boots, black velvet doublet and hose. In this transformation, she brings to life a familiar Shakespearean role, the enchanting, salty-tongued, boyish girl who harangues the system, prancing and charging around the stage like a high-spirited pony.

Frog and Peach, known for its innovative costuming on a tight budget, creates for the cast the look of a decadent, dandified, vaguely Austro-Hungarian era, garbing the actors in blazers and uniforms decked in shiny black vinyl epaulettes, ruffs and cuffs. The spare staging sends its own message in economical style: a gray stone wall paved with Reichsmarks.

As the play opens on this funky Vienna, morality has hit rock bottom, Uniformed officers can get lap-dances from Mistress Overdone’s girls. Can-can cuties in tatty finery posture in attitudes that suggest something between a music hall and a strip club.

Such  promiscuous behavior can’t be tolerated. As an antidote, the city’s  most biting laws are revived, notably an old law sentencing fornicators to execution by beheading.

Angelo is the villain of Vienna. He pounces on poor Claudio, who hasn’t yet been able to wed his pregnant sobbing girlfriend. He orders Claudio’s beheading for tomorrow. Nine a.m. This suddenness drives  the action with the urgency of a ticking clock. But Angelo–played by Eric Doss (ass-eared Bottom in the company’s Midsummer Night’s Dream last season)–enacts a chilling deputy in black with a shaved Mussolini-like skull. Bent on killing Claudio, he’s equally determined to seduce the nun Isabella. Shakespeare describes this hypocrite as a false coin. The play’s clowns comment that he’s snow-broth and his urine is congealed ice.

The stage manager of this sadistic plot is the skulking Duke of dark corners played by the versatile Erick Gonzalez. Masquerading as a friar, with wagging eyebrows and malicious grins, he  invents games to guarantee his subjects’ suffering before he surprises them all with the weddings they deserve. Shakespeare doesn’t give Isabella a chance to reply to the Duke’s public proposal of marriage, so Frog and Peach writes her a made-up speech to please the audience.

Buy tickets at FrogAndPeach.org

The season is a cold, snowy spring, between bleak winter and summer’s far-off promises of hope and a longed-for journey to the family farm. “I think about summer,” someone says. “Getting back home out of this dreadful city.” It’s a city where neighbors spy and pry, and rats scuttle out of cellars. Lenora, descanting on trees and birds, makes her odd, sweet efforts to guide the others to a wavering optimism.

Through her, the play’s movement progresses in a single uninterrupted flow, discreetly following the pattern of its original three-act structure: Maundy Tursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, “the eve of Easter’s Resurrection”–as Lenora observes.

“Easter-girl” was the name Swedish playwright Strindberg gave to his sister, whom he loved “like my twin” and called his “poetic figure of light in a world heavy with bitterness.” She is the model for Lenora, the play’s central and most appealing figure.

This production of Easter (1901) forms a companion piece to Strindberg’s Pling with Fire (1893), written about the same family, and presented last May by the recently founded August Strindberg Repertory Theatre.

The company’s charismatic Ley Smith plays Lenora, an unpredictable sixteen-year-old who seems like a wide-eyed innocent but who nevertheless claims, “I was born old.” Long acquainted with her own sufferings, she serves as the family’s uncomplaining lamb, who bears their burdens with understanding. For much of the action, Lenora shares the scene with Benjamin, a schoolboy boarder played by the talented DeSean Stokes. In real life, Ley Smith and DeSean Stokes, shown above, were student actors together, and happily re-connect in the play’s mutually sympathetic roles.

To the family, Lenora is an ambiguous blessing. When she enters bearing a flowerpot of lilies in glorious Easter bloom, she could be an angelic messenger of grace.

Not so. Her gesture creates anxiety. The deranged Lenora has been furloughed or has walked away from a mental institution, and has probably reverted to her usual crime of stealing. Her jittery mother guesses this will mean the police and prison, or the girl’s being sent back to Bellevue, where, Lenora recalls, “one is tortured worse than prison, where the damned live, where despair keeps watch day and night.”

Lenora’s actions coincide with the hardships that have beset this family all along.

The Morgan family is cast as black, and lives in 1958 Harlem. For the most part the Morgans behave and talk as any middle-class American family would in a similar plight. Just once, Lenora does a funky little language riff that thrusts the play briefly into the theatrical mode of American playwright August Wilson. Mainly, the world of Easter presents one family’s troubles in a style that could be any family’s.

Father is in prison for embezzling funds from an orphanage. Mother denies his guilt, but as her son becomes chillingly aware, her complicity could send her to prison too, The son Ellis is a Latin teacher, and the breadwinner. Fearing bankruptcy, Ellis has to put off his wedding to Christine. Compulsively, Christine hems lace curtains that look like endless yards of bridal veil. These unfinished curtains are about as close as the couple gets to a future home of their own. Nor does Ellis have the money to defend his thesis. A colleague, supposedly a friend, has plagiarized Ellis’s work. The so-called friend threatens to steal fiançée Christine as well. She in fact seems to be slipping away, for she accepts an invitation to dine at the treacherous friend’s house. One more misfortune: young Benjamin comes home crying after he fails an exam. He’s the bright student the family has taken in, one of the orphans robbed by their Father.

For everyone, daily life means a struggle against desperation. With pointless, misspent energy Ellis rants against his insoluble problems, pacing the family living room where all the action takes place.

Together, the Morgans wait for calamity to descend. They continually peer through huge imaginary windows sketched across the set. Out there, danger looms. It could be the police. It could be the vicious creditor who’s moved in across the street and lurks like a spider ready to pounce and devour these wretched flies. The creditor will surely cart off all they’ve got. Mother already laments their imminent life without furniture. But the creditor waits until the final scene to stomp in with rubber boots and sinister jollity, bringing a revelation and a surprise.

Throughout, Lenora forms a bond with Benjamin. He’s entranced by her skewed, exalted utterances. To Benjamin, Lenora’s wayward perceptions attain the status of wisdom, however veiled. “You understand everything,” he marvels. He knows Kant and Schopenhauer, she knows the Bible, or her versions of it. Lenora’s language tends toward the mystic and the magic, counteracting the hard realism that saps the family’s hope. “I know what the birds say. I can see stars in daylight with my magnifying eyes.” She makes time fly, twirling the clock’s hands, tearing pages from the calendar to hasten the coming of Summer. Her lyricism gives her a legendary quality. At times she sounds like a self-appointed sybil of the Scriptures. She’s a mythic Persephone, back home on a vacation from hell. With her dreaming words and strange poetry, her flower lore and personal affinity for the secret lives of plants, Lenora also sounds like Hamlet‘s Ophelia, if only Shakespeare had made Ophelia a figure of strength rather than mere pathos.

The August Strindberg Rep has the Swedish playwright’s ideal New York interpreter in the fervent Robert Greer. The versatile, animated, fast-talking director learned Swedish in his dedication to the saturnine August Strindberg (1849-1912). Faithful to the spirituality of the text, and to the Haydn music indicated by the playwright, the production offers fleeting measures of Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross.

            Easter runs from March 8 through Easter Sunday, March 31. Easter is performed in the intimate Gene Frankel Theatre space on 24 Bond Street. Tickets are available from Smarttix.

Powder Her Face portrays the eccentric, nearly penniless Duchess, sung by mezzo-soprano Allison Cook. In attendance are her last remaining courtiers–her maid, an electrician/waiter and the manager of the hotel where she resides as a non-paying guest.

In her heyday, slim, fragile Margaret was fêted as a world-class beauty. At seventeen she was engaged to Aly Khan, who later married Rita Hayworth. Margaret saw him as a handsome boy in a white suit and an emerald. At twenty she married good-looking young American tycoon Charles Sweeny, described as a JFK lookalike. The year was 1933, and Hitler had just come to power. The world was changing.

Cole Porter’s popular “You’re the Top” was revised to memorialize Margaret Whigham Sweeny before her duchess days, as an exorbitant metaphor: You’re Mussolini/You’re Mrs. Sweeny/You’re Camembert.

Throughout her life (December 1, 1912-July 26 1993) Margaret was hounded by scandal, ill health and mishap. Deathly ill at one point, she revived only after a priest administered last rites. Swimming in the Hamptons, she was swept out to sea where she almost drowned. She fell forty feet down an elevator shaft, breaking her fall by clinging to the cables and tearing off her fingernails, terrified of being crushed by the next descending car. She was hospitalized for three months, needing thirty stitches in her scalp. In her young life, she wrote, she suffered eight miscarriages; near the end her biographer tells of her six strokes.

Married and divorced twice, Margaret complained about both her husbands. She embarked on her naughty-duchess role when husband Charlie Sweeny began having affairs. He only wanted her to be “a pretty, brainless doll,” she wrote, and she flew from her “not so gilded cage.”

With her second husband, Ian, the duke of Argyll, she didn’t like being stuck in the clammy Scottish castle of Inveraray. “You and your old castle! I couldn’t live there and I told you so!”

One evening the Duke needed to borrow a comb from Margaret’s bedroom, and he happened to see her red leather date-book on her dressing table. Naturally he read it. There she had inscribed her lovers, among them a German ambassador. The duke was foggily aware of some of these goings-on, but here was ocular proof. Margaret’s diaries were idiosyncratic. Each covered a four-year period so she could compare what she’d been doing on the same day in earlier years. She kept bundles of letters, diaries, and photos of herself–shocking, nude photos, with a man in the same condition; in fact, she had albums of men in the buff snapped in a Paris hotel with a Polaroid instamatic.

As one judge declared, she wasn’t only immoral, she was promiscuous. Or was it the other way around?

Delectable, disagreeable, and disreputable, Margaret was called many unflattering things: a heartless liar, a rude, mean, impudent, “dirty duchess.” She didn’t respect anybody, and she didn’t care about the law. She wrote poison-pen letters. She framed forgeries saying her husband’s sons were illegitimate. With all her dreadful bad-mouthing of people, no wonder she was forced to pay out small fortunes to settle claims of libel and slander brought against her.

Reading between the lines of Margaret’s detractors, can’t we see that Margaret was a wretched little rich girl? Despite her furs and jewels and title, despite the yachting cruises and Atlantic crossings, the caviar and champagne lunches, the benzedrine–despite her circle of stylish acquaintances that included the Duchess of Windsor and Helena Rubinstein, the Ray Millands and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., she was not a happy post-debutante. She suffered insecurities from her neglected childhood. She felt betrayed when her father got re-married to a woman slightly younger than herself. Her beauty and her money were just not enough.

Born in Scotland, Margaret was brought to New York by her parents. She didn’t get into Brearley, so she attended Miss Hewitt’s classes. She left America at thirteen, but always wanted to come back. Early in 1939, she and husband Charlie returned to New York. They saw “Hellzapoppin” on Broadway, and the shows at Radio City. They partied at the Colony, the Stork Club, El Morocco and “21.” They took the Florida Special night train to the sultry mugginess of Palm Beach. Every night there were parties of forty to fifty people in palatial little homes. Nights ended at the Everglades Club, with dancing to Paul Whiteman’s orchestra–dancing under the stars. Shades of a sad, fraying, latter-day F. Scott FitzGerald world.

All that year the coming war in Europe cast its shadow.

Back in New York for the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in March 1939, Margaret remarked on the distant echoes of Hitler’s troops tramping through Czechoslovakia. She and Charlie sailed back to Europe on the Queen Mary.

In Monte Carlo, where Margaret and Charlie were guests of Norma Shearer and George Raft, they all listened to the news about the “German-Polish crisis.” Margaret and Charlie encountered friends who’d just come back from Venice, where the friends related how they had run into Josef Goebbels, the new Propaganda Minister in Hitler’s government. Darkly, Goebbels assured the friends: “I’ll be seeing you in New York.”

In London she dined with American ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, future father of President JFK. Gloomily the ambassador predicted of England, “This country is finished. It will be overrun by Germans in a matter of weeks. All the roads will be blocked with refugees just as they are now in France.” He warned Margaret and Charlie as Americans to get out fast. They’d be crazy to stay. Margaret’s father, on the other hand, told her if she left Britain he’d never speak to her again.

Margaret packed her two children to board with a friend in Wales, while she stayed in London serving as a uniformed volunteer with the Red Cross. She waited tables at the Beaver Club, which was run for Commonwealth troops. When she was photographed in her good pearls, she stirred the rancor of a senior officer who growled, “Who the hell is that dame wearing pearls with her uniform?”

For the coronation of Elizabeth, Margaret didn’t have a proper coronet and had to borrow one from a duchess friend who owned two. During the ceremony she and husband Ian chewed supplies of Horlicks Malted Milk tablets to keep their energy going. She worried that the paparazzi would photograph her with munching jaws.

Apart from widespread media reports of her sensational frolics, Margaret’s life is documented in her autobiography Forget Not (1975), and by authorized biographer Charles Castle in The Duchess who Dared: The Life of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll (1995). Both lives are peppered with anecdotes and vignettes that illuminate her chaotic personality, as well as the bygone era in which she scandalized the world.

To buy tickets for the opera go to BAM.

In case you’re not driving to the beach or the mountains this holiday weekend, consider cooling and chilling with some polar–i.e., French crime and police flicks. Catch the climactic holiday windup of French hardboiled/noir thrillers, ranging from the ’40′s to 2011, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Série Noire on Saturday at 2pm from Jim Thompson’s novel “Hell of a Woman,” deals with a murder plotted by a seductive babe and a straying husband. Followed by 36th Precinct at 4:30 with Gérard Depardieu, where police and criminals do their thing, moral or not, and A Gang Story at 7:30. On Sunday September 2, the show kicks off at 2:30 with a very young Natalie Portman in The Professional. At 5:30 there’s Point Blank, a fast-paced thriller. Monday gives us A Gang Story again at 4:30, and 36th Precinct at 7:30.

Tuesday’s Crimson Rivers screens at 4:30, where two detectives investigate a pair of crimes–a murder and a disappearance–that could be connected.

By 7:30, be ready for The Murderer Lives at 21. “L’assassin habite au 21″ was the feature debut of Henri-Georges Clouzot (Les Diaboliques), a 1942 comedy thriller made for a Nazi-run outfit and meant to replace banned American cinema. Afterwards, relax with a glass of good wine at the adjacent Museum restaurant/bar, the Modern. MOMA.org.