APT’s inventive ‘Pericles’ a playful, whirlwind tour
During an odyssey involving six cities and consuming 15 years, Shakespeare’s Pericles often loses his way. During the production of “Pericles, Prince of Tyre” at American Players Theatre, the audience rarely does, even though just 10 actors tackle more than three dozen roles.
That’s a credit to director Eric Tucker, who has staged “Hamlet” with four actors and “Twelfth Night” with five in acclaimed productions in New York. Working with 10 APT actors in Spring Green must feel like a luxury.
Doubling and trebling roles is the rule rather than the exception in productions of “Pericles,” a collaboration between Shakespeare and George Wilkins that’s also the first of the Bard’s romances – those late, great plays in which tragedy gives way to wish fulfillment and love conquers all.
Although it was once among Shakespeare’s most popular plays and has enjoyed a remarkable recent comeback — this is my third “Pericles” review in three years — it remains underperformed. That’s largely because of the significant staging challenges involved in whisking Pericles through his many adventures around the eastern Mediterranean, while keeping characters straight and themes in view.
True to a play that begins and is repeatedly interrupted by a narrator urging us to use our imaginations, Tucker’s solution involves traveling through time as well as space.
As an evil monarch sleeping with a daughter, Tracy Michelle Arnold channels her inner Rosa Klebb (or Irina Spalko, or whichever evil Russian villainness you choose), assisted by Marcus Truschinski in the first of his night’s turns as a villain.
When Pericles visits a land of starving people, we visit America’s Depression-era Dust Bowl, where the governor (David Daniel) and his wife (Arnold) stand before a rolled-on farmhouse, speaking a southern-fried twang.
We’ll also spend time in the cheeky world of Gilbert and Sullivan (“H.M.S. Pinafore” comes most strongly to mind), a brothel set in the seedy disco underworld (think “Saturday Night Fever” crossed with “Boogie Nights”) and a Renaissance court in which Pericles’ chief adviser (Gavin Lawrence) suggests the Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons.”
Many of these exuberant vignettes are over-amped.
Inventively — and at times ingeniously — postmodern, Tucker’s vignettes provide new ways of seeing. But they also risk placing concept before character. And while they lighten the mood, they also lower the stakes; too many truly dark and dangerous moments in “Pericles” get played for laughs, robbing them of their urgency and their power.
That didn’t stop me from admiring Tucker’s invigorating sense of play — or appreciating how each of his scenes in time is thematically related to the specific city it brings to life. Collectively, these vignettes make the point that Pericles’ journey — one might think of it as a long night’s voyage through the subconscious — transcends its moment and belongs to all time.
As with each of Shakespeare’s romances, chief among these timeless issues is the often fraught relations between fathers and daughters; “Pericles” is particularly forthright in exploring the underlying incest taboo. Will the fathers in this play let their daughters grow up and marry? Or will they reduce young women to little girls they jealously keep for themselves?
An older, shambling Pericles (James Ridge) wrestles hardest with such questions, often looking on from the edge of the action. A young, dashing and confident version of Pericles (Juan Rivera Lebron) is among the figures inhabiting Ridge’s dream world, where the two most prominent women are Pericles’ wife Thaisa (Andrea San Miguel) and daughter Marina (Cristina Panfilio).
Scenes in which members of this splendid quartet realize what they share are best in play; they ring true even when the plot does not. Marina could be speaking of any of the Bard’s romances when admitting that telling her improbable history “would seem like lies.” But tell it Panfilio and this ensemble do, in a brave production that thinks big, daring the craziest dreams to live.
“Pericles, Prince of Tyre” continues through Sept. 29 at APT’s Hill Theatre. For tickets, call (608) 588-2361 or visit americanplayers.org/. Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.