Friday, May 29, 2009

Yet am I arm'd against the worst can happen

This was originally a hard review for me to write. After seeing the play in August 2002, it took me many days to get around to it because it is not in my nature to be sarcastically negative about people unless they are members of my family. But in the end I found that the only way I could even begin to approach this staging of one of my favorite plays was with sarcasm and negativity.

The USF production of Cymbeline, directed by Russell Treyz, bore a certain resemblance to Cloten's corpse: so lopped and cropped, yet having enough superficial similarity to the original play, that a viewer familiar with the original might easily mistake what she saw for the real thing . . . especially if that viewer had just awakened from a drugged sleep into a stupor of semi-conscious thought. But I regularly abstain from things murd'rous to th' senses, and therefore realized that what I was seeing was a puttock and not an eagle.

I mean, what is the point of hiring actors to perform Shakespeare if they have not been classically trained? Put them in a musical comedy or a farce, but please don't employ them to massacre Shakespeare. Perhaps another reason to refer to Cymbeline as a tragicomedy is to acknowledge that un-classically-trained actors usually do an adequate job in the comic parts, but what they perpetrate in the serious scenes is a tragedy indeed. Thus, the scenes with Belarius and the boys, played mostly for laughs, came off well. Cloten in a shoulder-length wig was a clown and so quite popular with the audience. However, watching the same actor as Posthumus raging over his wife's supposed infidelity and grieving over her supposed death was like watching a 7th grader in the annual school play: passion equals volume plus the contracted brow. In such a manner did he indicate anger, sorrow, despair, jealousy, and sometimes even joy - although most 7th graders make their brows go up to show joy.

I don't mean to single out Posthumus as the only one-dimensional performance. The actress playing Imogen was worse, only I suppose she had the excuse of not yet having completed her graduate acting studies. Nevertheless, her attempts at outrage, longing, rapture, or anything beyond the merely funny were almost embarrassingly inadequate. Just for an example, when Iachimo attempted to seduce her, her disgust with his purposes was punctuated with some very confusing calls to Pisanio. Yes, I know that's in the script, but she had a way of making it seem like it didn't fit.

"I dedicate myself to your sweet pleasure," says Iachimo. The actress leaves his side, walks to the front of the stage, calls "What ho, Pisanio!" in a fishmongering tone, then turns back to Iachimo so that he can offer his service to her lips. She tells him to get lost and says he hasn't got a chance, then returns to the front of the stage and bellows "What ho, Pisanio!" again. At this point, my children, who were in attendance with me and who had twice seen other productions of this play, turned to me for guidance. I had none to offer. I could only later address their concerns by saying that it appeared to be an unfortunate combination of poor acting choices and confused blocking.

I could go on counting atomies, but won't. I will sum up the acting by saying that King Cymbeline was bland and the Queen blander; Iachimo was moderately effective in 1.4, bizarrely garrulous in 1.6, unthreatening and underwhelming in 2.2, and boringly garrulous in 5.4; Caius Lucius came off as another minor clown; and Cornelius gave some welcome and genuinely comic relief. Oh, one more thing: someone ought to have told that actress what's really happening when Imogen finds Cloten's headless body. It was while watching her deal with the devastating discovery of what she mistook as her beloved husband that thoughts of the relationship between acting and the egress from paper bags came to my mind.

All right, enough assignation of blame to the actors. I will skip over the costumes and set design, because those were lovely and well done, as they usually are at the USF, and proceed to the director.

From his resumé in the program, one could determine that Treyz was an experienced director, but, based on what he did with Cymbeline, I had to question how well he understood the play or even if he really liked it. Aside from the weird blocking and negligence toward acting skill I witnessed, I have rarely seen such a hatchet job done on a Shakespeare script. (Except once, when I saw a truly vile production of The Merchant of Venice; but no more of that.) From the beginning, there were cuts here and cuts there, which, I suppose with a sigh, is a typical procedure when staging Shakespeare, but by the time we arrived at 1.6 and Imogen asked, "What's the matter, trow?" I wanted to answer "It's all the little cuts - make enough of them and you're bound to end up with some pretty large and unsightly gashes." Yes, I know it's weird for Iachimo to be talking to himself, out loud, in front of Imogen and Pisanio, for 26 lines, and he's such a jerk that I don't really want to listen to him, but it's the principle of the thing. And then his speech in Imogen's bedroom at 2.2 was truncated. (Truncated! Ha ha! Get it?)

But the worst cut occurred in 3.2, when Pisanio, in some random palace corridor, receives and reads the letter from Posthumus directing him to take Imogen to some out-of-the-way place and kill her. The scene went something like this:

Pisanio says most of lines 1-22 (I'm using the 1998 Oxford Shakespeare edition of the play, edited by Roger Warren), and Imogen enters. He gives her her own letter from Posthumus. She says a fraction of her lines at 26-39, then reads that Posthumus wants her to secretly come meet him at Milford Haven (ll. 40-45). Little does she know it's all a ruse to get her out of the house.

"O for a horse with wings!" she says (without any emotional integrity, by the way. She might just as well have been describing her preference at the carousel). Then most of lines 50-65 are cut.

They continue through the rest of the scene, and then - after Imogen says "Accessible is none but Milford way" - instead of leaving the stage as they ought rightly to have done, Pisanio gets this pained look on his face, and Imogen suddenly jumps from the end of 3.2 ahead to 3.4.10 and asks, "What's the matter?" And that's where I had my heart attack. Well, not really, but I went into a kind of shock, audibly exclaiming "What the--?!" and thus attracting the attention of my children and a few other patrons in the vicinity.

Pisanio hands Imogen his own letter (the one with the evil instructions), and the next thing I know, Imogen is reading that she is a strumpet (3.4.21). She contracts her brow like a shocked and upset 7th grader, skips all the bits about Aeneas and Sinon, exclaims that the divine prohibition against self-slaughter cravens her weak hand, and then grabs Pisanio's dagger and tries to kill herself!! Not so craven after all.

Fortunately, Pisanio knows the play (in fact, this actor's performance was one of the better ones of the evening) and so he takes the dagger from her. But even his understanding of the play cannot make up for this strange conflation of scenes, and so - after Imogen skips most of that really sad stuff about the scriptures of the loyal Leonatus - Pisanio most strangely remarks, "Since I received command to do this business / I have not slept one wink" (3.4.99-100). Well, unless he suffers from narcolepsy, there's no reason he should have been sleeping, since in this version he only read his instructions from Posthumus a mere five minutes earlier.

Of course, since they would no longer make sense under the circumstances, all Imogen's subsequent lines asking Pisanio why he brought her out to the forest if he's not going to kill her and refusing to return to the court are omitted, including one of my favorite lines, the bitterly humorous "Most like / Bringing me here to kill me" (3.4.116-117).

I won't go into what happened during and after Cloten and Imogen's funeral except to say that, if memory serves, the song "Fear no more the heat o' th' sun" was also thrown out. Many of Imogen's lines at 4.2.292-303 (the misidentification of Cloten as Posthumus) were also cut, but I decided that might be for the best, myself having a prohibition against line-slaughter.

One would expect that, with so much cutting and conflating - reminiscent of those abbreviated performances of the 18th century by companies liked David Garrick's - the scene (5.3) where Posthumus dreams of his entire dead family, and of Jupiter descending to visit him, would also have been eliminated or at least shortened. but Treyz kept all that in, and the subsequently necessary Soothsayer. Well, it needed a Soothsayer to explain what Treyz was doing.

This is not to say that the evening was a total loss. Aside from the fact that ruinous productions like these make me appreciate the better ones, the final scene (5.4) with its series of divulgences was successfully done, owing to Shakespeare's skill in managing these many revelations and to a well-played Cornelius, who, after his first explanations, left the stage, and then came running back through the audience, crying out "O gods! I left out one thing . . . !" In this scene, Imogen also got some laughs when, at "O get thee from my sight!" (5.4.237), she knocked Pisanio down, jumped on him, and began to pummel him. Considering he was easily three times her size, it looked funny. I found it gimmicky, however, and not very Imogen-like, or even princess-like.

There was one scene, or part of a scene, that I genuinely enjoyed: in 2.3, when Cloten has Imogen serenaded with "Hark, hark, the lark". I have read critics who say this song ought to be performed seriously and not be made a mock of or played for laughs. I don't know as I agree: I've seen it done both ways - as a lovely Renaissance piece and as an upbeat modern tune with Cloten channeling Elvis - and enjoyed both. On this occasion, when Cloten called for the musicians, two members of the court approached, one a small fellow who played the violin, the other a tall, slender woman carrying a trombone. She was, in fact, Sara Kathryn Bakker, who was concurrently playing Rosalind in As You Like It. Her trombone-playing lady-in-waiting, standing on a box and towering over Cloten and his attendants as she moved the slide up and down, and then grinning widely at having pleased the prince, was, for me, the highlight of the production. She appeared again at the end of the play when all the court was present, and I found my attention being demanded by her and her reaction to the revelations and reunions. She seemed genuinely happy at how things turned out, and I appreciated her response, although I could not share it.