|
Pericles
is something of a cartoon – something of a joke, really, one
of the most puzzling, uneven, and rarely performed texts in
Shakespeare’s canon. Still, there are many good reasons one
might imagine for Peter Sellars’s wanting to direct it.
Because it is rarely seen, an ambitious young director has few
rival productions to contend with. Because the text is thought
corrupt, a flamboyant director cannot be accused of
desecrating a masterpiece. In fact, the play, with its
uncharacteristic sprawl through time and space and its odd
passages of dreams, supernatural events, and choral
imprecations, seems like a perfect playground for a
rambunctious postmodern stage director like Sellars. (I must
admit that reading the speculation about Pericles’
authorship in F. D. Hoeniger’s definitive edition I thought
of the communal handiwork that went into making the musical My
One and Only, Sellars’s last big
Boston
adventure.) Finally, a conceptualist as penetrating yet
literal-minded as Sellars would notice that the play contains
three resurrections, and he has just the sort of rascally
arrogance that would celebrate his inauguration as artistic
director of a nine-year-old theater company with a play about
resurrection.
The miracle
is that Sellars has, with a single production, transformed the
Boston Shakespeare Company from a post-collegiate amateur
company that no one took seriously into a vital art theater
for the
Boston
community. Taking over this theater was a calculated gamble
– why should anyone else in the world care what goes on at
the Boston Shakespeare Company? Nevertheless, his bold work
for the American Repertory Theater (The
Inspector General, Orlando), the Chicago Lyric Opera (The
Mikado), and the La Jolla Playhouse (Brecht’s The
Visions of Simone Machard) has already established him as
one of the handful of American stage directors who
automatically commands attention, in no small part because it
is always inspiring to watch a talented young artist tackle
and reinvigorate a classical art form.
Sellars’ productions always burst with conceptual ideas that
in a lesser director’s hands would be called gimmicks, and Pericles
was no exception. Take the choice of music: Debussy on tape,
two Beethoven sonatas played live at an onstage baby grand,
and at key points in the play, the Delta-based blues of Elmore
James (“Stormy Monday” during a storm at sea, “Shake
Your Moneymaker” introducing the brothel scene, etc.). The
blues tunes also related to the casting of black actors in two
major roles. Ben Halley Jr. played Pericles with breathtaking
majesty, and to speak the singsongy choral interludes of John
Gower, the poet who supposedly returns from the grave to tell
this story, Sellars hired the eccentric street performer and
radio personality Brother Blue – a conceptual coup but a
practical mistake, because his jivey rapping garbled crucial
exposition.
Besides
these sweeping choices, Sellars applied his inventiveness to
individual scenes with equal verve. In the first scene, where
Pericles divines the secret incest between Antiochus and his
daughter, the pair appeared as pornographic images – he in a
leather s&m harness, she in white bra and panties like an
underwear ad. This scene, taken with the brothel scene in
which Pericles’s beloved daughter Marina faced three
denizens wearing animal masks, sounded a theme of degraded
sexuality and man’s sick need to destroy beauty.
Marina
was played by the only performer other than Halley and Brother
Blue not double-cast and who never appeared masked, which
emphasized her singularity. Time after time she talked her way
out of being killed or defiled with a voluble eloquence that
could only be explained in so young and unschooled a girl by
acknowledging that goodness has its own power that can prevail
over the violent and sexual powers in man and nature.
Sellars
presented the quest for goodness as central to Pericles,
and in his typically arcane and articulate program notes he
discussed the play as Shakespeare’s attempt to address –
after writing Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth
– the possibility of a happy ending. The director figured
that the Bard found his inspiration in Christian mystery plays
and the model of death-and-resurrection, so throughout his
production Sellars stressed the Christliness of Pericles (not
difficult given Ben Halley’s evangelical performing style),
not as a religious martyr but as a man who tries to do good,
seems to lose everything, and is eventually rewarded for his
suffering.
If the entire show resided on this lofty plane, it would
surely have gotten dull. Luckily, Sellars has a low side to
indulge as well. The Tempest-like
scene in which Pericles washes ashore at Pentapolis was
treated as pure slapstick; the fishermen who rescued him were
regular “hosers” in flannel shirts and red noses. The
knights’ competititon for the hand of the princess Thaisa
was more buffoonery, and the dance celebrating her union with
Pericles was a riot – their courtly minuet set off rock and
roll gyrations among the guests that looked like the antler
dance from Saturday Night Live, and eventually Pericles and Thaisa got into a
down-and-dirty bump themselves. While some of these scenes
were staged with the visual splendor of Hans-Jurgen Syberberg,
some were simply cheap thrills, like the storm at sea lit by a
single lamp swinging wildly across the stage, casting huge,
vertiginous shadows. Although Pericles
was produced at the Jean Cocteau Rep two seasons ago in a
well-reviewed Genet-like production, it’s hard to imagine
anyone in New York giving Peter Sellars the resources to do
this kind of freewheeling, uncut three-and-a-half-hour
production. His gamble has paid off.
Village Voice, November 22, 1983
Excerpted from a longer essay on Boston theater -- for the
full text, click here.
|
