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.