Theater Review: Pericles at Pell Chafee Performance Center

Monday, March 02, 2015

Thom Bassett, GoLocalProv Contributor

 

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Not all Shakespeare plays are created equal and they therefore impose different demands in staging them. The greatest of his works — King Lear, Hamlet, Othello — force directors and actors to rise to the level of the plays’ themes and language. Other plays, the weaker ones, challenge performers to compensate for their flaws and failings.

A good deal of credit must go to director Dan Rogers for facing the latter problem head-on in Brown/Trinity Rep’s current production of Pericles. This work, a late collaboration by Shakespeare with the thoroughly pedestrian playwright George Wilkins, is in some ways simply a bad play. (It’s a fair question, in fact, whether Pericles would be more than a historical curiosity if Shakespeare’s name weren’t attached.) It depicts the king Pericles, who thinks he’s lost his wife and child, only to miraculously recover them in the end. That should sound familiar, since Shakespeare tells essentially the same story in The Winter’s Tale, only with infinitely more skill. 

For the results on stage to be worth an audience’s time, therefore, a company must bring a great deal of skill and ingenuity to Pericles. Rogers and his actors have talent that is undeniably on display here, but the results still are ultimately disappointing. The reason why is that they seem to have collectively lost sight of something very fundamental: Theater is, or should be, about telling stories that people sitting out there in the seats can care about.

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Again, the problem is not a lack of ability. The set design, for example, stands out: The Pell Chafee Performance Center’s huge open space transforms from scene to scene through the clever, lively movement of ladders and stacks of plain cardboard-brown boxes. Near the conclusion, silver and white helium balloons evoke an ethereally lovely temple of Diana. The hymn “Will the Circle be Unbroken” recurs throughout the play to good effect.

Also, several players deserve particular credit for their performances. Ian McNeely’s Simonides is a rich blend of dangerous bonhomie as he oversees a rowdy party and brings together in marriage his daughter Thaisa and Pericles.  Devon Caraway (Bawd) and Sophie Netanel (Pandar) together do a fine job in these greasily comic roles. Once he abandons the buffoonish slapstick in the opening scenes, Billy Finn’s portrayal of Pericles honors the sorrow and suffering of the character, while Finn, Shelley Fort (Thaisa) and Britt Faulkner (Marina) are actors obviously capable of creating what might have been a genuinely affecting reunion at the end.

But by that point the production had forfeited its claim on my involvement with the characters. I didn’t care what was happening to them. And that’s because those responsible for this production seem unaware that inventiveness is not self-justifying. There’s so much in this performance that has the effect—calculated or not—of simply putting its creators’ wit and intelligence at the forefront, for no other apparent purpose than to show off what they can do, or at least think they can do. 

That’s quite different than putting those qualities to work in service of the story one supposedly is trying to tell. The cumulative effect of many interpretive choices in this production was only to distance me from the experiences depicted on the stage. 

For one thing, a number of production elements are simply confusing. The costume design is certainly attention-grabbing but there’s no apparent rationale behind much of it. Why do multiple characters wear bright red plaid leggings? Converse high top sneakers? Why are others in greatcoats laden with stiff multicolored collars and piles of feathers reminiscent of a cabaret? Why does the narrator Gower wear the suit of a broken down 1930s jazzman and the goggles of a World War I aviator? I realize the company has limited production funds, but why seemingly choose to make the crowns and helmets look so obviously cheap and flimsy? What’s the intended effect of all this?

Similarly, even broad comedy has to have a larger purpose in the whole of the play, and that condition often isn’t met here. Just because it’s possible to make an obvious pun involving the city of Tyre doesn’t make it a good idea to throw some tires on the stage.  Also, in the text Pericles relieves the starving citizens of Tarsus with “corn” (which referred to any kind of grain); in this production, they wave around boxes of corn flakes.
 
Even worse, the knights’ tournament scene has been rewritten to include a female entrant from the Greek island of Lesbos. Who then tears through the audience to briefly fondle a woman before returning to the stage to winkingly implore her to call. It’s very clear the knight is a lesbian, but what’s this sophomoric contrivance supposed to be in service of?


Still, I sincerely admire the Brown/Trinity Rep Class of 2015 for taking on the challenge of staging Pericles. Given the play’s severe problems, to do that at all takes guts. But I can’t help but remember that in his fiction workshops Donald Barthelme, that genius of comic postmodern writing, admonished his students to remember something. “We have the wacky mode,” he would instruct. “But why do we have the wacky mode? To break their hearts.”
 
Unfortunately, half of that formula is missing from this production. 

Pericles runs through March 7 at the Citizens Bank Theater, Pell Chafee Performance Center, 87 Empire Street. Tickets are $12, $6 for students and seniors. 401.351.4242. Box office: 201 Washington Street. Trinityrep.com.  

 

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