Playwright: William Shakespeare
At: The Goodman Theatre
Phone: ( 312 ) 443-3800; $20-$65
Runs through: Feb. 19
Director and imagist Mary Zimmerman's Pericles is—as we expect from her work—a perfectly gorgeous objet d'art, populated with signature elements from her regular production team. Mara Blumenfeld's colorful and sumptuous costumes of silk, satin, velvet and brocade seamlessly combine elements of many periods and places—Jacobean neck ruffs, 19th Century tunics, ballooning pantaloons and close-fitted trousers—but define none. Daniel Ostling's airy but austere scenic design presents giant windows of vague classical reference ( Georgian? Greek Revival? ) , yet with an overall clean and modern look. T. J. Gerckens' painterly lighting is deep and warm. The underscoring by composers Andre Pluess and Ben Sussman is sweet and soothing.
Pericles is beautiful, but also bloodless. Zimmerman has confined one of Shakespeare's ( and one or more collaborators ) most robust and far-fetched stories, making it an engaging entertainment fit for a court rather than for Shakespeare's raucous groundlings ( remember the film, Shakespeare in Love ) . A picaresque adventure set around the ancient Eastern Mediterranean Sea, Pericles tells of a king and his daughter over a period of 20 years and features four royal courts, a jousting tournament, incest, marriage, murder plots, pirates, slavery in a brothel and numerous storms at sea. Pericles is fanciful, to say the least. Indeed, so fanciful that its volatile shifts of scene and mood have stymied directors for decades. How do you play the plot improbabilities? How seriously do you take this outrageous tale? Pericles' deeper themes of redemption and family reunion are more profoundly sounded in The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, far better plays written shortly after Pericles.
Zimmerman's answer is to play Pericles moment-by-moment. Now serious, now high comedy, now low comedy, there's no overall character except that imposed by the physical production, which takes Pericles indoors. The towering walls and windows of Ostling's setting are grand but confining; their warm but neutral color and lack of adornment suggesting a sterile room, a formal room. Blue sky, clouds, snow, the sunset are glimpsed only through the windows. Outdoor action is brought center stage by theatrical devices such as miniature ships and voluminous strips of blue cloth for water, pulled from oversized file drawers built into a wall. Zimmerman has used these devices before, while the wall of drawers dates from Zimmerman's and Ostling's The Notebooks of Leonardo DaVinci a decade ago.
Zimmerman and cohorts—and a solid acting ensemble—always fill the eye and ear, and never bore ( plus, Zimmerman has cut the text ) , yet I felt neither a sense of purpose nor a strong vision at work. She has taken a wild beast of a play and tamed it in the sense of making it a well-groomed lap dog; but she's neither taught the dog new tricks nor learned any herself.