“Cymbeline,” really? But why?
That tends to be my reaction whenever I hear that the overstuffed late Shakespeare play is getting a revival. Surely there must be something to stage that’s less of a slog?
Now along comes a “Cymbeline” to prove me wrong. The National Asian American Theater Company’s production, using a lucid modern verse translation by Andrea Thome, is frankly a delight: funny, absorbing, even affecting. And with not a single man among its wonderfully strong cast, it has both a sense of frolic in satirizing macho pride and an in-the-bones understanding of male menace.
Directed by Stephen Brown-Fried at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater in Greenwich Village, with dramaturgy by John Dias, this “Cymbeline” is presented with Play on Shakespeare, a project dedicated to creating versions of Shakespeare’s plays in modern English. The freedom of that approach makes it a striking contrast to “Beckett Briefs,” slightly uptown at Irish Repertory Theater, where another dead canonical playwright, Samuel Beckett, retains his customary tight control to fine effect. More on that below.
Thome imbues her translation with a light, graceful touch; her “Cymbeline” feels like Shakespeare, but our 21st-century ears acclimate to it faster. The plot is still, of course, ridiculous, and less about the title character, a British king (Amy Hill), than about his daughter, Imogen (Jennifer Lim), who has secretly wed her beloved Posthumus (KK Moggie). Cymbeline wanted Imogen to marry the son of his dreadful new queen (Maria-Christina Oliveras), the doltish Cloten (Jeena Yi), whose one selling point is the amusingly puckish lord (Purva Bedi) who makes up his retinue.
The exiled Posthumus, tricked into believing Imogen has been unfaithful, commands his servant, Pisanio (Julyana Soelistyo), to murder her. The honorable Pisanio secretly defies him. Adventure ensues, involving Imogen’s brothers, Arviragus (Annie Fang) and the heroic Guiderius (Sarah Suzuki), who were kidnapped as tiny children 20 years earlier and raised as rustics by Belarius (again the excellent Oliveras).
There is also a war with the Romans. I defy you to care about that, even here.
The rest of the performance is awfully entertaining, though, despite the fact that Imogen doesn’t deem Posthumus’s attempt to have her killed a marital deal breaker. She still considers him a prize.
What’s interesting is how the spirit of forgiveness that pervades the play’s ending — and its faith that pardoned wrongdoers will simply learn their lessons and live better lives — lands right now: with a heavier meaning, for good or ill, because of our political moment.
The running time, two hours and 40 minutes plus an intermission, gave me pause beforehand. That’s three hours of my life, I thought. But they do not drag — and a three-hour respite in a place where you actually have to put your phone away might be exactly what you need.
Also worth your time, and asking less of it, is Irish Rep’s 75-minute “Beckett Briefs,” a collection of three one-acts about mortality and memory, smartly directed by Ciarán O’Reilly and including “Krapp’s Last Tape,” starring an understatedly masterful F. Murray Abraham.
The program is constructed to open up as it goes on: first the stark, disorienting minimalism of “Not I,” in which we see only a mouth that speaks a word-vomit monologue from pitch-darkness; then three heads sticking out of identical urns for the fast-paced comedy “Play”; and finally, in “Krapp’s Last Tape,” a full body roaming a room filled with the detritus of a life.
At the performance I saw, a cast member’s transit woes meant that the order of plays was rejiggered so that the show started with “Krapp’s Last Tape.” And there was Abraham, in a monochrome outfit in a monochrome space, his silver-gray hair fluffy as a clown’s — apt for the banana-peel slapstick Beckett so painstakingly choreographs in his stage directions. (Set design is by Charlie Corcoran, costumes by Orla Long.)
Beckett specifies nearly every movement of the play, yet Abraham and O’Reilly locate its interstices. Looking back over his life, listening to his own tape-recorded voice from decades before, Krapp is a ruin, close to feral. But when he cradles that old reel-to-reel tape player as he once cradled a woman’s torso: There are his might-have-beens.
Next, Sarah Street performed “Not I,” a torrent spoken by a woman who has been “practically speechless” all her sad, unloved life. And then came the funniest bit, “Play,” with Street, Roger Dominic Casey and Kate Forbes planted in their urns, rehashing a bitter love triangle. The man gets indigestion just talking about it.
Even the lighting there (designed by Michael Gottlieb) is precisely as Beckett demands, and it works brilliantly: “a single mobile spot … swivelling at maximum speed from one face to another as required.”
Unlike Shakespeare, whose plays are so hospitable to variation, Beckett knows exactly what he wants. You do it his way because he says so — and he’s right.
Cymbeline
Through Feb. 15 at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater, Manhattan; naatco.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.
Beckett Briefs
Through March 9 at Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.
