Pericles, Prince of Tyre is a little-known play by William Shakespeare—so little known, in fact, that I searched for a copy in two very good bookstores in the District in vain. The Folger Theatre has done a great service by giving the public an opportunity to get to know this curious, entertaining work.
Pericles begins with Gower (Armando Duran), who tells us that he has come "to sing a song that old was sung." Gower himself has arrived "from ashes … assuming man’s infirmities." We are hearing a story of old, told by a dead man. Shakespeare thereby disposes his audience for romance, in an older sense of the word: a story that deals with concerns remote from our everyday existence.
Gower’s tale begins with the young Pericles’ courtship of Antiochus’ daughter. After the unfortunate revelation that she has been committing incest for years with her father, he flees—and eventually arrives in Pentapolis with King Simonides and his daughter, Thaisa. Things move quickly: Pericles and Thaisa wed, she becomes great with child and gives birth on a ship sailing for Tyre, Pericles’ homeland. She dies—or appears to die—in childbirth, leaving Pericles a daughter, Marina, whom he leaves in Tarsus with his friends Cleon and Dionysa.
Years later, he returns for Marina but, he is told, she has died. In fact, she has been captured by pirates and sold to a brothel in Mytilene. Eventually Pericles is reunited with Marina, as well as his wife, who, it turns out, washed up on shore years beforehand and has been living in Diana’s temple at Ephesus ever since. Diana brings all things to pass and the play ends with the three of them happy—or at least relieved.
In the Folger’s production, a small company pulls off the wide array of characters admirably. Part of the fun of this production is seeing Brooke Parks perform the giddy, young Thaisa, then turn around and put on a calloused, cold demeanor as Dionysa. Scott Ripley and Barzin Akhavan are similarly flexible. But Michael J. Hume plays the most widely dissimilar roles to great effect: a senior counselor to Pericles and a comical female pimp in a Mytilene brothel. This is all great fun to see and the casting reflects a central theme of the play: man’s attempt to fill multiple roles throughout his life and remain unified at the same time.
The cast’s costumes are extreme, even cartoonish. Although this can be awkward and off-putting in some productions, it is fitting in a story sung of old about lands far, far away. The only part of the production that goes indefensibly far is the music. Every onstage group has a song to sing. While music plays a prominent role in Shakespeare’s story and must be given its due, the frequency of dialogue used as sung verse at some points makes the production feel like a Disney movie. The music is sometimes welcome—Gower’s opening monologue, for instance, nicely balances speech and song—but more often it’s a distraction.
This is the more unfortunate because there seems to be little need to fill empty space with song. The cast masterfully performs Shakespeare’s lively, playful dialogue. Early on, when Pericles (Wayne T. Carr) arrives at Pentapolis, we find that Thaisa and her father, Simonides, have a thoroughly modern father-teenage daughter relationship. Thaisa is embarrassed by her father, Simonides (played by a deliberately bumbling and hilarious Scott Ripley), and giddy at her suitors. She tries to hush him while lacking the power to restrain her giggling when potential husbands are around. As the courtship between Pericles and Thaisa unfolds, Ripley shines, as does Brooke Parks as Thaisa. Carr is well cast as the titular character, with the range to portray Pericles as a young man in years and experience, and as man grown old and broken.
The Folger has done everyone a favor by staging Pericles, Prince of Tyre this year.