The last time I watched Fiasco Theater take on Shakespeare in the cozy brick box of Classic Stage Company, it was December 2017. In the words of Pericles, the hero of the play the company’s doing there now, “I see that Time’s the king of men, / He’s both their parent, and he is their grave, / And gives them what he will, not what they crave.” Who among us hasn’t, in the past six years, been given a heavy helping of what Time will? Strangely—at least from an aesthetic perspective — the answer might be Fiasco, whose hearty, earnest, theater-out-of-a-trunk approach to the words and worlds of Will seemingly hasn’t aged a day. And even if I lately find myself craving rougher and more wayward seas, more depths and heights of devastation and wonder in a Shakespeare production — truly, in all theater — Fiasco’s more moderate course still feels welcoming and genuine. It’s here to spin a good yarn. Under the musically graceful direction of Ben Steinfeld — one of the company’s three co–artistic directors as well as the composer of the show’s songs — Fiasco gives Pericles, Shakespeare’s mixed-bag picaresque of a late romance, a clear and pleasant shape.
Well, maybe it’s Shakespeare’s. At least partly. The thing about Pericles is that it’s kind of a wild hot mess, a fair percentage of which was probably written by some guy named George Wilkins (his delightful Wikipedia page describes him as an innkeeper who was “also apparently involved in criminal activities”). But as Avengers: Endgame has more recently demonstrated to the world, being a wild hot mess doesn’t stop you from being popular — and the story of the adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, despite being pretty scattershot, was and is popular. It’s early Jacobean England’s hottest club! It’s got everything. Incest, shipwrecks, jousting, marriage, comic relief from possibly libertarian fishermen, whorehouses, miracles, pirates.
The play’s built-in narrator — an invocation of the real 15th-century English poet John Gower, here played by Steinfeld — helps hold all these bits and pieces together. The company has made some judicious cuts and tweaks to Gower’s prologues to each of the five acts, and Steinfeld is particularly good at speaking his deeply clunky verse with clarity and good cheer. (This is the near doggerel that throws the play’s authorship into question: “And he, good prince, having all lost, / By waves from coast to coast is tost … / Till fortune, tired with doing bad, / Threw him ashore, to give him glad.” Wilkins is big on one-syllable rhymes.) Steinfeld has also smartly augmented or alternated parts of Gower’s choruses with actual song. Fiasco is a wonderfully musical ensemble — its members’ braided, rising harmonies at the play’s beginning suggest a ritual incantation, and every so often, characters get brief solos or duets that don’t feel too far removed from the sincere hero ballads of Disney’s golden era.
Everything is cheerful, wholesome, hail-fellow-well-met. There’s billowing blue silk for water; the silvery ding of finger cymbals marks important turns in the narrative; wooden crates serve the majority of scenic purposes; and simple costumes channel vague Mediterranean antiquity, or maybe a Waldorf School faculty spring picnic (lots of linen, lots of sandals). The company doesn’t lean far into the story’s most disturbing bits: The play begins with young Pericles (Paco Tolson) hightailing it out of the court of a king (Noah Brody) who’s committing incest with his own daughter and who likes to display the heads of her suitors on spikes, but it’s all G-rated. Nor does the show frequently aim for laughter of the really gutsy, released variety. Smiling and chuckling is more its speed. Fiasco’s performers are all solid storytellers, sometimes at the expense of deep characterization, and, to grant them the necessary grace, the play doesn’t help them much. One of the great beauties of Shakespeare’s romances is the way in which they feel like collages of echoes from his former plays — but here, though we get shades of the Macbeths, of Isabella’s righteous purity in Measure for Measure, and of various shipwrecks and reunions past, Pericles has a tendency to render these shapes in two dimensions. For too much of its two hours’ traffic (which is how long Fiasco’s production runs, including intermission), its characters feel like paper dolls, desperate for actors to fill them out.
Of the ensemble’s nine members — four of whom at various points assume the central role of the kingb—bit’s Andy Grotelueschen who most successfully adds life, contour, and real humor to the play’s relatively thin blueprint. It’s not as if Dickins is a hot commodity on American stages these days, but I’d love to see Grotelueschen in some: He’s got the twinkly eye and the sly, gregarious spiritual ease of a Micawber or a Cheeryble. As “the good Simonides” — the party-loving king of Pentapolis and soon to be father-in-law to our hero — he incorporates into Pericles what’s essentially a parallel mini-tour through A Christmas Carol. He starts out with irresistible, guffawing Ghostbof Christmas Present benevolence, then pulls Scrooge’s classic “And therefore I’m about to raise your salary!” trick on his daughter, the princess Thaisa (Jessie Austrian), and the befuddled Pericles (at this point Tatiana Wechsler), whose union he pretends not to favor just for a gas.
Grotelueschen is so good at this kind of nimble congeniality — which sees him mingle quick, precise textwork with spot-on little ad-libs — that he naturally starts to outshine a few of his fellow performers. Wechsler speaks the play’s verse emphatically but without much variety, and as the fourth and eldest Pericles, Devin E. Haqq has the gift of the play’s most beautiful scene, but he makes it shout rather than sing.
Such heavy-handedness in the play’s tenderest moment is also a matter of direction. When Pericles — older and almost destroyed by the sorrow of, so he thinks, losing his wife and then his daughter — encounters a young woman in the boisterous, bawdy land of Mytilene, we know a miraculous reunion is at hand. This girl is Marina (Emily Young, not quite channeling the character’s near-magical aura). She is the child Pericles hasn’t seen since her infancy, the child he thinks he’s lost. On the page, their reunion scene — strange, probing, gentle, and gorgeous even in its inevitability (“For truth can never be confirm’d enough!” cries Pericles) — sparkles like a precious gem in a necklace of charming plastic beads. In it, we can finally feel Shakespeare — the Shakespeare that was emerging from a six-year streak of bitter, bleak, and sorrowful plays into the wondrous twilight that would produce Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. But Steinfeld doesn’t steer Haqq and Young toward intimacy or delicacy. Instead, they circle the stage at a distance from one another, their voices and gestures still in a presentational mode. We don’t have to lean in — we can hear the story, yes, but we can’t quite hear the sound of two hearts breaking for joy.
It’s also telling that, despite sprinkling the show with songs, Steinfeld chooses, during this same climactic reunion, not to let us hear “the music of the spheres.” “I am wild in my beholding,” says Pericles (we’ve come a long way from rhyming bad with glad). “O heavens bless my girl! But, hark, what music?” His wise old counselor, Helicanus (Paul L. Coffey), says he hears none. Nor can Lysimachus (Tolson), the governor of Mytilene. But still, “List, my Marina!” says Pericles. The cosmos is singing, but we, like Helicanus and Lysimachus, are kept earthbound, the fullness of the miracle unopened to us. Still, if we are to take the introductory words of Steinfeld’s Gower — slightly modified from the original — as sterling, then he and his company have come hither “to soothe our souls” and “pleasure bring,” and to that task the true hearts of Fiasco continue to rise.
Fiasco Theater’s Pericles is at Classic Stage Company through March 24.
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