PERICLES
In 1989 Shakespeare Repertory artistic director Barbara Gaines had a huge and unexpected success with Cymbeline, a more familiar, less fantastic late romance. So it makes sense to try to rescue another work from obscurity (though in fact Pericles was produced in Chicago as recently as 1984, by Bailiwick Repertory). And Shakespeare’s minimal contribution needn’t be an issue, if Goodman Theatre’s sick joke of a Twelfth Night is any indication.
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Yet overall this Pericles, as beautiful to see as it is to hear, successfully overcomes–or distracts from–the story’s silliness; certainly Alaric Rokko Jans’s supple score injects the romance’s excesses with some real passion. Though this Pericles never achieves heroic or tragic stature, by the end Peter Aylward finds a hard-earned pathos as a heartsick sufferer with a despair almost like Lear’s; his reunion with Christine Calkins’s noble Marina (a worthy sister to Perdita) returns Shakespeare Repertory to the magic of its Cymbeline. Kristine Thatcher gives Thaisa a survivor’s dignity, but her contrived reunion with Pericles is anticlimactic after the big one between father and daughter, and it’s marred here by a stupid joke that breaks the spell.
