The authorship of all of William Shakespeare’s plays has been attributed elsewhere, to Christopher Marlowe, to the Earl of Oxford, to Queen Elizabeth’s favorite lady-in-waiting (well, that one’s a bit of a stretch). Yet even the Bard himself might have preferred his name stricken from Pericles, Prince of Tyre. In fact, modern editors maintain he wrote only the second half — or less — of the drama, the first portion almost certainly penned by second-rate dramatist and tavern buddy George Wilkins.
This past weekend at the Vineyard Playhouse, novelist Nicole Galland and actress Chelsea McCarthy launched their third season of Shakespeare for the Masses. They’ve taken the Jacobean soap opera that is Pericles, stripped it down to a mean, lean 45 minutes, give or take, and squeezed as many laughs from it as a Monty Python movie.
Rob Myers as Pericles struts and frets his hour around island kingdoms and ferocious seas. Why he’s missing from Tyre in Phoenicia (ancient Lebanon) is anybody’s guess, but he seems to be having his postadolescent fling around the ancient world before settling down. But settling down is an option when he comes upon the court of Antiochus where the ruler (Bill Cookson) offers the hand of his hottie daughter (Liz Hartford) to anyone who can answer a riddle. There’s a catch, typical of barbaric times, pre-Jamesian England: Those who respond wrongly shall die.
Big ick factor: The riddle strongly signals that king and princess are conducting an incestuous affair. (In Victorian times this aspect of the drama was muted or deleted.) Pericles asks for time to contact a lifeline; he flees; an adorable assassin (Anna Yukevich) takes after him, fails, but calls in a win.
Pericles zips back to Tyre, where his trusted aide Helicanus (Jill Macy) advises him to flee while the orange alert is still in force. He takes to the sea once more and comes upon famine on the island of Tarsus. He distributes grain to the people and receives heartfelt thanks from King Cleon (Peter Stray) and his wife, Dionyza (Alexandra London-Thompson). Back to sea. A storm washes him up on the shores of Pentapolis. One thing leads to another, and soon he hoists sail again, this time with a lovely bride, Thaisa (also London-Thompson; there is massive doubling up of actors in this play; always has been; it’s part of da fun and da funk.)
Another storm arises — and, by the way, each big blow is heralded by one of the younger actresses stepping up to squirt Pericles in the face with a spray bottle. Next poor Thaisa dies in childbirth. Sailors are a superstitious lot and they pressure their captain to throw the corpse overboard. The grieving king kisses Thaisa’s cold brow, then chucks her, hilariously, into the wings.
Are you following? Next thing, Pericles drops off baby Marina with the still-grateful Cleon and Dionyza. Now in an exciting plot-twist, at Ephesus, Thaisa’s coffin washes ashore and, blimy!, she’s alive. What is a poor, prematurely, dumped-overboard bride to do? What else? She enters the temple of Diana to become a priestess.
The action could round out an entire season of As the World Turns, but the baby Marina grows up, she is prettier than her adoptive parents’ bio daughter and, before you can say ungrateful [expletive deleted], Queen Dionyza dispatches another cute assassin (Emma Urban) to eliminate the Pericles’ dynastic link from the Pentapolis landscape.
Marina, however, as Samuel Richardson would have phrased it, is “reserved for a worse fate” when she’s rescued by a crew of pirates and sold into a brothel in Mytilene.
Pericles learns, erroneously, that Marina is dead. This is a man with serious losing of spouses and daughters issues. He descends into the slough of despond. At this point he’s back in Tyre, but we can only imagine his mental state makes him a lousy administrator.
Marina is too beatific for any brothel client to touch her. She’s released into a music-and-arts tutoring gig for young ladies of the nobility. Eventually Pericles gets back in his boat and ends up on Mytilene where he, Marina and finally Thaisa are reunited.
Kudos to the above-mentioned cast for their flair and bravado, tossing capes over their shoulders as if they do it in the streets of Oak Bluffs. All are clad in Greek chorus-style black, many of their heads adorned with silver foil party crowns. Billy Meleady and Chelsea McCarthy, whose past reincarnations had to have included roles at the original Globe, team up as scrofulous pirates, fishermen, sailors and gentry.
Galland and McCarthy not only pared down the narrative and cut out all the boring bits and long speeches, they cleverly rewrote the script to sell the sizzle not the steak: After a preclimactic wrap-up, Galland, who narrates, concludes, “So that’s anticlimactic.” She calls the jobbed-out Marina “the Martha Stewart of Mytilene” and a joust of swords in the Jacobean play becomes an American idol dance-athon. Mr. Myers as Pericles wins handily with an applause-making breakdance. The actors, when not occupied in center-stage business, whoop it up like a select crew of the noisiest groundlings.
Behind-the-scenes credit goes to MJ Bruder Munafo, Geneva Monks, Steve Zablotny, Mark Ferrarini, David Smilie, Paul Munafo and Mac Young. “Mac Young is the unsung hero of the production,” says Ms. Galland. “He pitched it with just about everything.”
During the past weekend, the proof of great theatre was in the pudding of the audience: Playhouse seats were packed to maximum by Vineyarders of all ages. Gaggles of 19-year-olds mingled with patrons verging on 90. Well, what do you expect? It’s free and it’s a riot! Donations are accepted, but all proceeds go to the playhouse; directors, script-doctors, cast and crew mount these productions as a labor of love.
Galland and McCarthy have sketched out a tentative 2010-11 winter season: they’re considering either Winter’s Tale or Richard III, and either Measure for Measure or Hamlet (the latter pair from an earlier season). Ms. Galland writes in an e-mail, “These things change depending on who is available to do what, and when MJ [Bruder Munofo, artistic director of the Vineyard Playhouse] has a slot in the winter schedule.”
For those who caught Pericles last weekend, we now have the plot down cold, and we’re released from ever having to see the play in its entirely in any other venue. Naturally the productions of Hamlet, Lear, MacBeth et al can be imbibed numerous times, but this is an excellent opportunity to view, over the years (depending on Galland’s and McCarthy’s unflagging enthusiasm), the entire canon and to tuck a bit of Shakespearean scholarship under our belts.
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