Stage

...It still seemed to me a patchwork of tag ends picked up at a Renaissance flea market—now tedious, now beguiling, now foolish, now fond...

...Smythe's other good choice was to reduce the "rude mechanicals" to two, Bottom and Quince (played by young women with a natural talent for slapstick), who present their "most Lamentable Comedy" Punch-and-Judy style, with hand puppets on stages that they wear as costumes...

...There has so far been only one other notably inventive Shakespeare production this season (not counting Prospero's Books)—A Midsummer Night's Dream presented by the Bryn Mawr/Haverford Theatre Program...

...I usually do not comment on amateur productions, but this was a special one...

...The key to the success of this Pericles is that it can go for the most obvious laughs without mocking Shakespeare or the genre he is toying with...

...It is a shame that it is not still running so that both my readers could check it out for themselves...

...The production confirmed both Osborn's faith in the play's essential coherence and my sense of its grand incoherence, and at the same time delighted both of us...

...From time to time, the lovers try to break away from their puppet selves and eventually, when the puppets have been put aside, they remove their masks as well (from the beginning, the human characters wear half masks, the fairies are clean-faced), a device that allows the production to suggest the levels of illusion the play can hold...

...In the Pentapolis scenes, for instance, in which Pericles wins fair Thai sa, her father, king or no king, is a figure of slapstick fun, and the rival suitors are painted side-by-side on a single board, manipulated by an actor who does all the voices...

...Robert Smythe, the puppeteer whose work I described in my review of The Puppetmaster of Lodz (October 26, 1990), visiting artist this year at Bryn Mawr, both directed and designed puppets and masks for this Midsummer...

...There is much playfulness in the production— games with costume and prop and bombastic readings...

...Betty Osborn and I—the true believer and the confirmed skeptic—went together to see what wonders Michael Greif (fresh from last year's phantasmagoria, Constance Commonweal 14 February 1992: 19 Congdon's Casanova) had worked on Shakespeare's recalcitrant yet vulnerable script...

...orals more than forty years ago...

...The performers, who were serviceable enough for the occasion, could not be expected to have the skills of practiced professionals, but one could forgive a little stiffness of speech and movement when the stage was flooded with so much imagination...

...It is a gallimaufry of villainy and loyalty, storms at sea, piratical abductions, incest, brothel comedy, death and resurrection...

...Since the play begins with Pericles's escape from the murderous king of Antioch, who wants to protect his incestuous love of his daughter, the saintly Marina, the play can be read (and not just in these scenes) as another variation on fathers and daughters, this one with the happy ending denied King Lear...

...John Gower, whose Confessio Amantis was one of Shakespeare's chief sources, is used by the playwright as a chorus...

...Each scene in the play has found its particular voice and, with no mandatory tone to violate, it vacillates between excessive broadness and touching lyricism...

...When the lovers fall asleep in the woods, they awaken as Bunraku-style puppets, manipulated by the actors who play the parts...

...The brothel scene that exemplary account of the power of innocence to corrupt evil—might pass as a contemporary revue sketch with a bawd (Bobo Lewis) who is more Brooklyn than Mytilene...

...Campbell Scott, whose Pericles shifts comfortably from comedy to pathos, makes the transitions seem easy...

...In this production, the scenes are spread across centuries...

...With that sentence, M. Elizabeth Osborn opened her love song to Shakespeare's eccentric romance which appeared in Theater Week (December 2, 1991), just in time for the play's opening at the Public Theater...

...With each appearance, he gets younger, his dress changes until he finally emerges as a young man in a sports jacket, his transformation marking that of the play...

...When I read the play a few days before I attended the production, it was the first time I had looked at the work since I was preparing for my Ph.D...

...Thematic coherence, after all, but that seems of much less importance than the theatrical vigor that Shakespeare and Greif gave to scene after scene...

...It was the most exciting—certainly the most theatrical—piece that I have seen so far this season...

...When we first meet him, he is a proper figure of the fourteenth-century poet, a decrepit creature who looks as though he really has been called up "from ashes," as his first speech says...

...Not being an Aristotelian—let alone a neoclassical—tragedy, Pericles celebrates the disunity of action, time, and place...

...The action is scattered all over the Mediterranean, moving, usually by way of shipwreck, from Antioch to Tyre to Tarsus to Pentapolis to Ephesus to Mytilene, and it takes place over enough years to allow Marina to be born and to grow to marriageable age...

...GERALD WEALES 20: 14 February 1992 Commonweal...