Beyond Interpretation

ONLY A FINE LINE divides amateur and professional theater, and the Boston Shakespeare Company's season premiere, Pericles, makes this woefully clear. Though this production has some innovation, drama, and wit, more often it is confused, contrived, disjointed and dull. Peter Sellars '80 and his troupe enthusiastically embrace their material, but they do so with little vitality and less virtuosity. For someone of Sellars' demonstrated skills, knowledge and insights, Pericles comes as a marked disappointment.

Admittedly, to produce Shakespeare's Pericles. Prince of Tyre courts disaster. The play is rarely performed and for good reason. An inane plot juxtaposes strength, integrity and innocence--embodied in three main characters, Pericles. Thaisa and Marina--with a passel of debauched and wicked malefactors. Goodness prevails in a series of circumstances and coincidences which quickly becomes a caricature of itself," this day, the play remains of questionable authorship, though a number of well-turned and colorful phrases reveal the Elizabethan Bard. Indeed, language, infages, themes and parallels occasionally redeem the play, but mostly it just sloughs along. Uncut, the three-and-a-half-hour romance is an ambitious undertaking--just to watch.

The inimitable Sellars believes intensely in the play and its greatness. His points are worthy. The program notes credit Pericles with.

fusing the classical blaze of the late tragedies with the hard, bright glare of contemporary comedy and the flickering pageantry of the renaissance masque and the special illumination of the Christian Mystery play.

But Ben Jonson may have been closer to the mark when he called it "a mouldy tale."

No question, Sellars applies a thoughtful interpretation to his work. For him Pericles symbolizes modern American man. His character becomes a latter 20th-century well-to-do Everyman in the odyssey of life. Pericles's court the corporate boardroom and his nobles its directors. Dissatisfied with business life and wary of the evil it can wreak, he leaves Easy Street to live adventure and try his fortune. After ups and downs, he finds his greatest solace in having his own family. Affairs of business (the board of directors wants a new chairman) drive him away again, and in that journey his family is torn asunder, eclipsed, distanced from each other, only to come together years later after great hardship and anguish. The story provides a paradigm of family traumas: striking out alone, marriage, divorce, filial differences or just plain lack of time for each other. But ultimately, Pericles celebrates the nuclear family which endures and reunites against all odds and society's evils. All will live happily until the cycle of life starts agains with new children.

SELLARS STAGES this "classical ruin" in the ancient future, a sparse and sterile set reinforced with projected slides of Renaissance perspective drawings of depth and space. This staging may demonstrate how much can be done with so little, but it appears to be of no other value or contribution to the production. At Harvard, Sellars' use of imaginative economy out of necessity was clever and even provocative, but in the real world it appears cheap, lazy and negligent. Besides, we have seen most of it before in Sellars' past shows. The attempt at surreal miasma falls short of what he has done in productions such as King Lear, and too many techniques remain unexplained: on stage, for instance, the stage manager and light board at down left and down right. Why? Brechtian alienation? To indicate controlling forces like puppeteers? Sellars lets us neither know nor care.

The director does create a few inspired and captivating images. The knights vie for Thaisa as hockey-masked, business-suited drag racers; the final act heightens Pericles' dejection by portraying him as a dirty bearded Howard Hughes bum in a box: a single swinging light on a black stage conjures a violent storm. And the opening, with narrator Brother Blue emerging from a turquoise pool of light and fog, works well. Simple scenes in the hands of Sellars can become striking: the discovery of Thaisa's coffin by villagers plays hauntingly, though many other poignant scenes fall flat. Background music takes the place of scenery, underscoring places, themes and problems. By the end this music actually plays onstage, with a visible piano offering a melodic counterpoint to the finale.

The same wasteland set directs all attention to the actors, who usually cannot handle the responsibility. This is not entirely their fault: Sellars, whose theatrical forte is opera, directs them in a stagnant, grandiose style which quickly overdoes it, as in a knights' dance which starts amusingly and continues until it becomes embarrassing. In opera this may be acceptable: in theater it is frustrating and boring.

SOME HARVARD PRIMA DONNAS used to grouse that Sellars treated them like his hobby, puppets. Sellars' novel device in Pericles actually does just that--turns actors into puppets, using plastic masks on the evil characters. The technique produces an eerie, sinister effect; the masks, sometimes grotesque, sometimes animal, sometimes human, look frighteningly real. Though without masks, Pericles, Thaisa and Marina are equally un rounded as characters; when Lysimachus removes his mask repenting of his past ways, the easy gimmick becomes a tour de force.

Like the play as a whole, the acting has moments, but too few. Well-known Cambridge storyteller Brother Blue, a great choice to play narrator John Gower, appeals well at first. Yet each time he comes on stage he affects the same position, demeanor, voice and gestures until his idiosyncrasies become grating and tiresome. Pericles, played by Ben Halley Jr. mimics a stiff operatic James Earl Jones, a stunning figure with fine diction, but his manner is too rigidly classical and neither dramatic nor human. Sandra Shipley as Thaisa plays her role with quiet understanding and control. With only a few lines, she surmounts Pericles as the family's core. Jeannie Affelder '83 as Marina speaks and moves with soulless uniformity, relieved only by her song, which is sweet and sonorous. Other high points include Paul Redford '81 as the gregarious and amusing buffoon king, Simonides, Sindri Anderson as the turned-evil Dionyza, and Brian McCue '80 in a grab-bag of roles.

As both Artistic Director and Patron for the Boston Shakespeare Company. Sellars' commitment to Pericles and his perspective on it must result from much work, yet his points get lost in an amateur hodge-podge of avant-garde theatricality. He sacrifices crucial substance for a vapid style, believing his messages can still come across. The last scene seemed comical to much of the audience, but watching Sellars stare intently and emotionally at the stage, one quickly realized this was no farce to laugh at but serious stuff. Only he saw it.

Few can rival Sellars in knowledge of the visual, musical and theatrical arts. With this knowledge, he combines thematic insights and a knack for manipulating the stage. His dedication and achievements rank him an artist of the greatest integrity. But when people neither understand nor enjoy his production, what is the point? Art? Must art be tortuous to fathom? To disdain those who walk out of a production, to direct a work grasped only by its creator is too easy and risks too little.