Hysterical `Pericles' Not for Purists

PERICLES

by William Shakespeare

Directed by Ollie Lewis '00

Produced by Seth Harrington '00

April 9-11

At the Loeb Ex

Ahhhh, yes--an evening with the classics. One can envision the sequence of events: the unsuspecting Shakespeare aficionado heads off to the Loeb Ex last weekend to take in a showing of Pericles. This play, being one of the late romances, naturally contains all the elements one might expect from Shakespeare's pen: sea burials, royal courtships, knightly jousting, hired assassins, tempests, poison, whorehouses, incest--incest?--basketball tournaments, stripteases, the electric slide...and, of course, pirates!

Our aficionado collapses in a dead faint.

Well, he was an idiot anyway if he'd been expecting something conventional from the Ex. Last weekend's production, under director Ollie Lewis '00, sacrificed most of the appeal of the canonical in favor of a quirkily idiotic yet thoroughly entertaining reinterpretation. Under all the pageantry, music and the interpolated jokes, the viewers might not have been able to follow the plot, but they almost undoubtedly had a rollicking good time.

And, given that we're talking about Pericles here, that's really saying something. Pericles has always been one of Shakespeare's "problem plays," a point that the producers, with characteristic chutzpah, choose to illustrate by decorating the front of the program with germane quotations from critics spanning the last four hundred years. In a nutshell, they hated it: Ben Jonson called it "a mouldy tale" from the get-go, when it had barely had time to go stale. We're not even sure who wrote the play's first half. Current critical consensus suggests the culprit was a guy named George, who subsequently tried to sell the publication rights illegally, and when thwarted, wrote a popular "novelization." Some things haven't changed much in four hundred years.

So why would anybody choose to stage this play in this first place? Well, evidently because it's possible to have a lot of fun with it. Without the calcifying weight of canonical adulation weighing you down, you can take the interpretation in any direction you please. And if the text is, by consensus, total crap to begin with--well, then, elaborating on it couldn't possibly hurt!

This seems to be the general premise behind this vision of Pericles, whose framing device--a basketball court infested by pre-adolescents--sets the stage for the play's ruling aesthetic: a massive, hallucinatory flashback to middle school. The "players," a group of kids whose dress and language evoke a sort of archetypal, semi-mythical 1980s Experience, are unwillingly pressed into service as actors by a terrifying bag lady (Gower, the play's narrator, here played with an alarming intensity by Jessamyn Conrad '00). Since they retain their eighth-grade personalities, the romancing and sexual innuendo of the first half of the play is spiced up with impromptu fist fights, Fritos breaks and such literary and urbane interpolations as "Oh, shit," "Get him, dude!" and "You the man"--a brand of humor whose effectiveness, unfortunately, cannot be adequately conveyed in transcription.

To make the inevitable stylistic comparison, the atmosphere feels like a slightly closer-to-home version of "South Park." Overlaid on bad Shakespeare, the result turns out to be surprisingly funny. In one of the most hilariously effective touches, the celebration that sets the scene for Pericles' and Thaisa's romance metamorphoses into a terrifyingly believable middle-school dance--complete with strobe lights, the electric slide and the immediate clearing of the dance floor when the slow songs begin. (Who doesn't remember those magical, sweaty nights in the school cafeteria?)

Lewis's interpretative choice here may not beg too much analysis. It is funny, after all and proves to be robust. Were one so inclined, one might make the argument that it succeeds in large part because the action in Pericles is, in fact, sophomoric. Patched choppily together as the play is from so many different sources--fairy tales, folk stories, classical narratives and medieval saints' lives--it leaves itself quite receptive to having a few more layers slapped across the top.

Nonetheless, it comes as a relief when, in the play's second half, the performance style swiftly sobers up, allowing us to reconnect with the story's plot line and characters--elements that have been largely drowned out during the first half in the loud static of eighth-grade toilet humor. But the bizarrely goofy comedy of the production becomes all the more surreal in contrast with the newly straight-faced drama, providing some startlingly memorable moments: Kirk Hanson '99 as the apothecary Cerimon, hamming it up as he restores the drowned queen Thaisa to life ("She's ALIIIIVE!"); Michael Roiff '01 as the whorehouse Bawd, camping it up in a drag performance so broad it threatens to overwhelm everyone else on stage; and, of course, the constantly intrusive pirates, who are always guaranteed to provoke a laugh.

The players, all capable comedians, often fall considerably short when it comes down to delivering the Shakespeare. Much of the play's dialogue (and, therefore, plot) is lost to incomprehensibility and rushed speeches. (Of course, given the inherent flimsiness of the plot, this may not be such a terrible loss.) Still, everyone gets an A for effort. David Egan '00 is a sincere and entertainingly histrionic Pericles; Erin Billings '00, doubling in the major women's roles as Pericles's wife Thaisa and his daughter Marina, splits her personality neatly between a shudderingly silly and endearing pre-adolescent 1980s chick in the former role ("Wow! She's, like, the cutest thing since Safari-Style Barbie!" confides the love-struck Pericles to the audience) and the more serious one of the frightened virgin Marina in the latter.

A few standout performances do emerge. Roiff's comic ability, whether manifested as a fisherman's deadpan pragmatism or as the mesmerizingly over-the-top camp of the bawdy-house, continually brightens the stage. And Kate Taylor '00, who for the first half has nothing to do but to stand on stage as Antiochus's Daughter and crumple her face in disdain, emerges unexpectedly in the second half as a coldly terrifying Dionyza, the evil queen of Tarsus who plots the murder of our heroine Marina. (Taylor's final appearance, as the goddess Diana in an extraordinary strip tease scene, was equally impressive. But, unfortunately, the moment is ephemeral and cannot be recaptured in prose.)

A Shakespearean purist--like our hypothetical unconscious friend--would have been disappointed in this Pericles, both for its irreverent reinterpretation and for the flaws in its dramatic presentation. But a less stuffy spectator, if slightly baffled by the storyline, would nonetheless find himself laughing for much of the play's two-and-a-half-hour duration. And the transformation of the structurally iffy Pericles into a worthwhile evening's entertainment is, after all, something of an accomplishment. If the play has been changed along the way from a series of adventures into a series of comedy sketches--well, maybe that's not such a bad idea. Plot incomprehensibility aside, the humor created by this gestalt of interpretation and actors comes close to having a breath of genius. And as far as middle-school humor is concerned: although it might make our purist twitch to hear it--when it comes right down to it, toilet humor was something Shakespeare understood quite well.