Cymbeline

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, for as long as I can remember, has had hits and misses just like any other theater. Sometimes they even happen in the same show, and sometimes they’re distinct enough that they can be attributed to specific jobs within the production. Cymbeline is just such a show. 

Image from the Eureka Times-Standard

OSF has always attracted the cream of the crop in terms of actors. This cast is mostly superb, with stand-out performances by Dawn-Lyen Gardner as (the play’s real lead) Imogen, Daniel José Molina as the impetuously fatalistic Posthumus, Kenajuan Bentley as the ever-suave creep Iachimo, and Donovan Mitchell as the adorable little brother Arviragus aka Cadwal. These four actors ground Shakespeare’s ridiculously involved soap-opera of a plot with honest and often playful interactions with the convoluted world in which they find themselves.

Cymbeline loses its grounding in its direction. Director Bill Rauch and costume designer David C. Woolard chose to add “a few mythical creatures to populate a landscape in which miraculous surprise lies beyond every bend in the story” (from Rauch’s program note). The goat-men and pig-men and people with pointy ears confused an already confusing story. That’s not to say it was a bad choice – in fact, I feel it was a good choice used sloppily. Kate McConnell writes in OSF’s Illuminations: A Guide to the 2013 Plays about Shakespeare’s “green worlds”:

“This ‘green world’ (a term coined by literary critic Northrop Frye), separated from the rules and organization of urbanity, gives the characters space to transform (sometimes literally), fall in and out of love, and discover who they truly are. In Cymbeline, the wilds of Wales perform this function….For the characters who travel to this place, transformation and revelation await.”

Rauch could have used his mythological creatures to emphasize Wales as a place of transformation and lent clarity to the story. Instead, this choice read as superfluous at best, and at worst, confusing.

Rauch’s casting Howie Seago as the titular king was also ill-advised. Seago is deaf and communicates via ASL. The way this plays on stage is that he delivers his lines in ASL and another actor interprets for those of us not schooled enough to understand sign-language. The effect is that Cymbeline’s tempestuousity is scattered across the stage, diluting its power and weakening the impact of the play’s main power-broker. Not that Seago is a bad actor – in fact, from what I can see, he is very accomplished in his craft. It’s just that, unfortunately, his lack of hearing is very much a handicap when it comes to acting Shakespeare.

Cymbeline is a play in which Shakespeare revels in his accomplishments as a storyteller by creating a labyrinthine plot that ranges from the improbable to the confusing. With such a play, it’s the artistic team’s job to clarify and ground the plot. OSF’s actors for the most part are successful in this. Unfortunately, they receive no help from their director, whose choices add further layers to an already excessively layered play.