Lost and Found and Lost
Again
By Debra Hilborn
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
By William Shakespeare
Theatre for a New Audience at
BAM Harvey Theatre (closed)
Three-quarters of the way through Shakespeare's
Pericles, the title character, suffering almost unto
death with unspeakable agony over the loss of his wife and daughter,
has a momentous reunion with the child he believed to be dead.
It is a tender and joyous scene, filled with all the wonder and
amazement of a man whose loved one has been resurrected, and who
is experiencing with incredulousness his own awakening to life
again as well. According to Gideon Lester, Associate Artistic
Director of the American Repertory Theater, there have been at
least seven major productions of Pericles in various
cities (including two in New York) within the past year and a
half. Pericles--a story about restoration, about the
retrieval of what seemed irrevocably lost (loved ones, happiness,
innocence)--offers a kind of solace that many of us, perhaps especially
in a city so intimate with bereavement, are yearning for. True
to the play's themes, Theater for a New Audience's production
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater creates a magical
world in which the things we mourn the loss of are returned to
us again.
Few would call Pericles an unequivocally
good play; it has a somewhat unbalanced and ineffective structure.
Most scholars believe that Shakespeare did not compose it in its
entirety. In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human,
Harold Bloom tells us that George Wilkins--a "lowlife hack" and
a "whoremonger"--was largely responsible for the beginning of
the play, and posits that Shakespeare handed Wilkins the skeleton
of a plot and sent him off to write the first two acts. This theory
underscores popular critical opinion that the beginning of Pericles
is far weaker than what follows, although Bloom remarks with perplexity
that those first two acts, while plodding and "dreadfully expressed,"
still play well. Regardless of authorship, character
development throughout the play is scant and it sorely lacks the
spiritual and philosophical dimensions of a Hamlet or
King Lear.
Recounting the plot is a bit like chasing
down a runaway train. The 14th-century poet John Gower is brought
in to narrate the tale, which begins with Pericles, Prince of
Tyre, in the land of Antioch, where he discovers that the King
has been committing incest with his beautiful daughter. Fearing
that the King will kill him because of his knowledge, Pericles
flees--first back to Tyre, and then, concerned about an attack
from Antioch, off to adventure on the seas. After saving the kingdom
of Tarsus from starvation, Pericles is shipwrecked in Pentapolis,
where he shows up at a feast of the goodly King Simonides and
marries his daughter Thaisa. But what the sea has given, it will
take away again--Thaisa apparently dies giving birth on the way
back to Tyre and her body is cast into the waters. Marina, his
daughter, is left in Tarsus to be raised by their rulers, but
the Queen, Dionyza, in a fairytale-like move, eventually plans
to kill the young girl, whose constant outshining of her own daughter
the Queen finds annoying. Fate steps in, and at the very moment
Marina is to be slain, she is kidnapped by pirates and taken to
be sold in a brothel in the kingdom of Mytilene. Through her virtuous
cunning, Marina avoids being deflowered and is rescued instead
by a rehabilitated customer, the Governor of Mytilene himself.
Pericles, even more abject after hearing from Dionyza of his daughter's
"death," finds her there by chance, and then in a dream is bidden
to go to Ephesus, where he finds Thaisa at the altar of Diana,
her casket having washed to shore fourteen years earlier with
her still breathing inside. Phew!
Yet the strength of Pericles lies
in its expansiveness and sense of adventure. In contrast to those
French and Italian Renaissance playwrights whom we now think of
as bound and suffocating within the stiff, unyielding strings
of neoclassicism's corset, Shakespeare--always shamelessly unconcerned
with the unities--here breathed even more deeply, and boldly carried
the spectator to so many locations that Gower is compelled to
assert: "By you being pardon'd, we commit no crime To use one
language in each several clime." The result, perhaps compounded
by the play's devil-may-care structure, is a sort of abandon that
is invigorating. The panorama of Elizabethan drama is believed
to have been in some ways a vestige of the medieval bible plays,
which did not shrink from undertaking a dramatization of no less
than the entire history of mankind. Another remnant of the medieval
theater that finds its way to the Elizabethan stage is the platea,
or undifferentiated playing space, in which the empty stage becomes
quite literally anywhere the play says it to be. This convention
is common in contemporary Shakespeare productions, but it is used
to particularly excellent effect by director Bartlett Sher in
his staging of Pericles.
Sher, along with set and lighting designer
Christopher Akerlind, does much with little, achieving a rich
and evocative minimalism. A yellow curtain becomes a palace wall;
lifted a few feet higher it is the wall of another structure in
a land across the sea. Dangling shards of glass reflect the light
and continually cast delicate shadows that evoke water. A long,
thin band of blue fluorescent light suspended above the characters
heads suggests the horizon, and also infuses the stage with an
aquamarine glow. Devoid of traditional set pieces, the actors
fill and demarcate the space with their bodies and voices. Four
actors with large staffs sway rhythmically, evoking a ship. Pericles
struggles to stand, and the actors' movements become more violent,
finally breaking off and swirling away as the ship is wrecked.
It's all simple, precise, and effective.
Often, Sher presents actions that are taking
place in two separate places at once. The direction then becomes
cinematic, like a split screen; the distance between characters
is blurred and the space and time separating them appears irrelevant.
Towards the end of the play, Thaisa is a constant presence upstage,
lighting candles at the altar of Diana--each one increasing our
anticipation of her reunion with Pericles. Along with the playful
reflections of the prisms, this growing light in the background
seems to be a steady, quiet harbinger of hope.
Sher also keeps his cast relatively small
with ingenious multiple casting (Christopher McCann as both the
corrupt father Antiochus and the older Pericles, Julyana Soelistyo
as the Daughter of Antiochus and the virginal Marina, Tim Hopper
as younger Pericles and the Governor of Mytilene, among others).
These choices illuminate the mirroring of relationships that occurs
within the play, securing a badly-needed foundation for the plot's
lop-sided structure. The multiple casting also serves to reinforce
the theme of restoration and the idea of Pericles as
a medieval morality tale in which all things are set right in
the end. Relationships become the measure against which the world
is judged. Antiochus and his daughter, like Adam and Eve, set
the world awry with their sin; but with the same actors later
playing the suffering Pericles and the pious Marina, a rightful
father/daughter relationship is restored. Enslaved in the brothel,
Marina runs and clings helplessly to the Bawd (a comically mercenary
Kristine Nielsen, who also plays the murderous Dionyza) for protection
against another of the brothel's proprietors, who is intent on
stealing the young girl's "maidenhead." When Marina
later runs into her mother's arms in joyous reunion, and holds
tightly in a similar fashion, another mirror effect is achieved.
Debased relationships have been elevated and things are again
how they were meant to be.
The highlight of the production is the
climactic moment when Pericles recognizes Marina as his daughter.
Within a strange and uneven play, it is a scene of unrivaled poignancy.
In Christopher McCann's moving performance, recognition begins
slowly; he thinks the gods are mocking him; he dares not believe
such a tremendous miracle could be true. But as the facts are
presented to him, his stricken, recumbent frame begins to stir
and a life begins to breathe again in his limbs. He moves closer
to Marina. But it is still too incredible, too unbelievable. Yet
he is excited--perhaps, just perhaps, it could be true.
Joy, giddiness, and sheer adrenaline take over. It is exhausting
to watch, this coming to life again, and it makes perfect sense
that once he is satisfied the young woman before him is indeed
his daughter, he should, as Shakespeare wrote, hear a heavenly
music and fall back into slumber.
For me, awaking from Theatre for a New
Audience's Pericles was painful. Like awaking from a
pleasant dream, I wanted to lie in bed and hold on to it for a
little while longer. But eventually, one must throw back the covers
and face the real world--a world in which what is lost most often
simply remains so.
print version