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Mask Play and Silliness Combine for Enjoyable Shakespeare Under the Stars at Samuell-Grand

Cymbeline is Shakespeare Light: twice the plot with half the text. If you like disguises and discoveries, poisons and pardons, Kings, Queens and all that’s in between, this is your rare opportunity to get them all and then some. This script is the closest thing to the Monty Python version of a Shakespeare mash-up. You get the impression the Bard began with trying to write the longest, silliest, most convoluted resolution scene possible. Then, he went back and wrote the play to fit the ending. How ever he got there, Director Rene Moreno seems to get the joke and ends up with a production that is equally laughable as laudable. Get a blanket, cooler and sand chair and head outside your house and your comfort zone to Shakespeare Dallas at Samuell-Grand Park.
By David Novinski |
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Cymbeline is Shakespeare Light: twice the plot with half the text. If you like disguises and discoveries, poisons and pardons, Kings, Queens and all that’s in between, this is your rare opportunity to get them all and then some. This script is the closest thing to the Monty Python version of a Shakespeare mash-up. You get the impression the Bard began with trying to write the longest, silliest, most convoluted resolution scene possible. Then, he went back and wrote the play to fit the ending. How ever he got there, Director Rene Moreno seems to get the joke and ends up with a production that is equally laughable as laudable. Get a blanket, cooler and sand chair and head outside your house and your comfort zone to Shakespeare Dallas at Samuell-Grand Park.

Director Moreno has a cast to match the Bard’s patchwork plot, but there are enough heavy hitters and good nature to make up for the rough patches. Truth be told, the secret to the show’s success is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously and that goes a long way to earn the good will of the grasslings. If there is any mistake, it is that they are tentative to embrace the silliness. What begins as a prim production on an eyesore of a set morphs into a relaxed indulgence of plot twists and winking text. But, it only works because the main characters play it straight. The stakes are life and death and they treat them so. Leading the heavy lifting is Joanna Schellenberg who plays Imogen with clarity and passion in equal measure. Chris Hury plays her paramour, Posthumus Leonatus, with an equally robust attack. Both are beautiful to behold and no matter the plot troubles the pretty people will always end up together, right?

Joanna Schellenberg (Imogen) and Chris Hury (Posthumous). Photo by Linda Blase for Shakespeare Dallas

A synopsis is helpful because there are a lot of names and people dressed as other people and sometimes a change of clothes means a change of name and sometimes it doesn’t. T. A. Taylor’s, Cymbeline, is full of health and swagger. His Queen is full of something else. Sheila Landhal’s arched speech and presentational gestures give you all the warning you could want that she’s bad and so is her son, Cloten, played by Christian Taylor. These two want to reign. The Queen wants Cloten to marry Imogen, the king’s daughter. While he pitches woo, she pitches poison. She tells servant Pisanio that it is some fantastic medicine. Problem is that what she thinks is poison is just sleeping drops. Meanwhile her son’s assault is just as impotent because Imogen is in fairy tale love with Posthumus who by the laws of fairy tale love is a commoner. The king banishes him all the way to Rome for marrying his daughter. While there he runs into the scoundrel Iachimo played by Justin Locklear who by the laws of scoundrelling is goateed. He convinces Posthumus to wager that Imogen will remain faithful despite all of Iachimo’s goateed romancing. This sounds just as scoundrelly on Posthumus’ part, goatee or no, but the scene is a very believable account of how dumb guys are when they combine beer and boasting.

Iachimo fails, but according to the laws of bad guys being convincing and good guys being gullible, he convinces Posthumus that Imogen was unfaithful. In Posthumus’ defense, Iachimo has a lot of evidence. Blind with rage Iachimo sends a letter to servant Pisanio demanding her death. This is too much for the honest fellow played with earnest dignity by Adrian Churchill. His solution is to send Imogen away dressed as a boy named Fidele. While on the lamb she/he runs into a man named Morgan and his boys Polydore and Cadwal. Morgan is actually Belarius but she doesn’t know that. They are actually Guiderius and Arviragus but they don’t know that. And what none of them know is that they are brothers and sister. Belarius’ boys are played by Marcus Stimac and Austin Tindle with such sensitivity and sonly duty that we could hope that Fidele could find a life here. But Cloten garbed as Posthumus has a run in with Guiderius in which they both lose their heads, one figuratively and one literally. This sets up a gruesome reenactment of the Romeo and Juliet wake-up-next-to-your-dead-lover bit. Only this time, it’s not her love, just his clothes, but he’s headless. So, how’s she supposed to know any better?

There happens to be an invasion by the Romans over some tribute owed. Fidele (Cymbeline in drag) joins them. Coincidentally, fighting on their side is Posthumus who is suicidal over his belief that Pisanio carried out his order to kill Imogen. He switches sides before the battle and along with the Belarius brothers makes short work of the Romans thanks to Sara J. Romersberger’s fight choreography. ‘Course Posthumus is in the wrong uniform and is taken prisoner as a Roman. In his cell, he has a dream that is the silliest moment of the production. Ghosts chanting in rhyming couplets, Jupiter as a Dandy, and a Technicolor Julie Taymor eagle fill the stage and the audience with confusion due to an unfortunately portentous sound cue. It takes the bird to finally free the audience up to laugh at the spectacle. The whole thing gets us ready for the whopper of all resolution scenes.

After this evening of disguises and reprisals you’ll know that if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s not necessarily a duck. Some of the time, appearances are deceiving or in the case of this show, all of the time. It looks like Shakespeare and sounds like Shakespeare but it tastes great and is less filling.


Photo: Joanna Schellenberg as Imogen (Credit: Linda Blase for Shakespeare Dallas)

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