This whole earth may be bored

After our wonderful experience with The Winter's Tale, my kids and I decided to go back to Cedar City the next year and see three of the Shakespeare plays in the 1997 festival schedule. Two of them were among my favorites: Twelfth Night and Hamlet. Twelfth Night had been a favorite of mine for over 20 years, and I had just recently come to appreciate Hamlet the year before, while preparing for Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film. The third was Pericles.

Because we were to see two of my favorites, and because I had enjoyed the low-budget Pericles I'd seen a few months earlier, not to mention our immensely favorable experience with The Winter's Tale, I really looked forward to our visit.

You know how when you're a kid and Christmas is coming, and you let people know very specifically what you want, and then you wake up all excited on Christmas morning and you're about to burst with anticipation and excitement, and then, after the presents are all opened, you feel horribly let down and about as crumpled in spirit as a piece of discarded wrapping paper because you didn't get anything you wanted plus you have to do the breakfast dishes?

Yeah.

The first play on our agenda, Pericles, I saw by myself. I thought the kids might be bored. I didn't reckon on my own boredom. Okay, to be fair, the costumes were fantastic. I read that there were about 145 of them in this production. And Gary Armagnac, who played Pericles, did very well. It was a pleasure listening to him speak. The guy who played Gower was good, too, and I think that's a real compliment because I think Gower can be a drag if you're not careful. But the women were a real disappointment.

The actress who played Marina looked good in the costumes (who didn't?), but when she opened her mouth it quickly became irritating, because her voice tended to shrillness. It was like she didn't have enough control for speaking clearly in a large space and had to resort to shouting, which did away with any modulation of tone or expression of emotion. Everything sounded the same. Everything.

I was also disappointed in Thaisa, who, besides Pericles, is my favorite character in the play. That's what happens when you see a really amazing performance of a character. It spoils you for lesser actors in the same part.

My last complaint was with the director, Michael Addison, and that's because of how the scenes of the attempted murder of Marina and her experiences in the brothel were handled. I didn't think they were harrowing enough. They were played farcically (a safer approach?), like, let's make the audience laugh and maybe they won't notice she's about to be violated. This is not to say that the Bawd and Boult can't be very funny characters, which they were, but it was hard to feel any real sympathy for Marina when her problems were treated as not much more serious than what you'd find in an episode of I Love Lucy . There never seemed to be any real threat to her. I thought it would have served the play and the character better to have the circumstances be a little more on the anxiety-inducing side.

Well, if only I were in charge.