Plays Happen Director Makes Powerful Debut With Transmuted ëPericlesí by Carolyn Cosmos "Play scripts are fossils," declared visiting Shakespeare Theatre director Mary Zimmerman at the recent Windows on Shakespeare discussion. Zimmerman is directing a glittering new production of the Bardís "Pericles," a tragicomedy playing at the Shakespeare Theatre through Jan. 2. Yet there she was, verging on blasphemy. Fossils? She was talking about William Shakespeare himself, the revered theaterís idolized namesake. "Scripts of plays are not plays," Zimmerman said, ignoring those who would rather read Shakespeare at home alone than endure the indignities of flawed stagings. "Plays," she said, "happen. They happen in collaboration with an audience, in a specific space and time. Performance is alchemy, and it converts gold into lead and lead into gold." The irreverent and zestful Zimmerman may well have been describing her own directorial debut in Washington, D.C. She is a "Pericles" alchemist, and she has transmuted a seldom read, not often performed, and sometimes disdained play into spun goldóalthough the collaboration with the audience is a little uneasy in the climactic final scenes. "Pericles" was probably in part written by a minor author, George Wilkins, with Shakespeare primarily responsible for the second half of the play. Critics and scholars from Shakespeareís time into our own described some of the playís wretched verse and cartoon characterizations as, variously, "moldy" and "thin." Even Zimmerman allowed the flaws: "The lines of verse are not as dense, as thick," although there are some passages that are just as good as anything Shakespeare ever wrote, she told the Windows crowd. A travel tale, the play centers on the sea journeys of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Ryan Artzberger). In his search for a bride, he uncovers a kingís incestuous relationship with his daughter, forcing him to flee for his life. Improbably shipwrecked and saved several times, he competes for the hand of Princess Thaisa (Colleen Delany) and, dressed in rag-tag armor, improbably wins and marries her. Pericles loses Thaisa to childbirth during another ocean voyage, and her coffin, thrown into the sea, is rescued by a sorceress figure, Cerimon (Sarah Marshall), who magically restores Thaisa to life. The infant Marina is given over to a royal couple who raise her, Cleon (Joseph Costa) and Dionyza (Michelle Shupe, who also plays the goddess Diana), and Marina next appears onstage as a virgin teen (Marguerite Stimpson). Wicked stepmother Dionyza sends a courtier to kill the teenager and tells Pericles that his daughter is dead. At this second family loss, Pericles falls into a deep depression. But Marina, captured suddenly by pirates, has been sold to a brothel where she improbably preserves her virtue, turns the place upside down, and becomes a teacher. Hired to help the grieving Pericles, Marina is reunited with her father in a celebrated scene widely believed to have been written by Shakespeare himself. Father and daughter, with the aid of the goddess Diana, are reunited with Thaisa in the end. Zimmerman was asked how she dealt with the playís stereotypes and caricatures at the Windows discussion: "The characters in ëPericlesí are archetypes," not caricatures, she said. The universal themesólife as a stormy journey, loss of loved ones, separation and reunion, evil pursuing virtue, resurrection and rebirthóresonate in a performance, she pointed out. Zimmerman, who won a 2002 Best Director Tony Award for her version of Ovidís myth-filled "Metamorphoses," said, "This is not a naturalistic play Ö I believe it to be fairly-tale like." Zimmermanís fairy-tale staging, aided by her long-time Chicago collaborators, set designer Daniel Ostling and costume designer Mara Blumenfeld, is a marvel of comic invention, costume color, music, movement and dance. In this imaginative "Pericles," sea journeys are signaled by the movement of toy ships carried by members of the cast. Lines written for a narrator in the original are given to different actors during the show, who turn to the audience and read from a book, sometimes comically stumbling over words, underscoring the storytelling, sense of fun and artificial plot. The set consists of a single towering room wide open to the top of the stage. Itís punctuated by three tall windows, some Shaker furniture and a wall of drawers, similar to a childís playroom. The cast pulls props from these drawersónotably long, silk banners that ripple over the stage, creating blue sea waves or stretches of golden beach. When Thaisa "dies" and is committed to the deep, her body is silently wrapped in a blue banner. The play is exceptionally accessible Shakespeare. The beautiful costumes in muted colors, matte gold, rust, silver, apricot and apple green are more than aesthetically pleasingóthey are teaching tools and guides. Each kingdom the hero visits has its own distinctive color scheme and costume style, and even the walls are awash in each kingdomís colors as the scenes shift, thanks to lighting wizard T.J. Gerckens. Most critical of all, however, every actor in this highly trained troupe has an unparalleled way with the Bardís words, making them understandable and conversational by contemporary standards while preserving Shakespeareís poetry and nuance. Artzbergerís Pericles is outstanding. He has a difficult role to playóstraight man straight through and through, although comedy often rains down around himóbut his portrayal is genuinely touching and heroic. When someone in the post-production discussion opined that the characters lacked depth, Artzberger said he was "offended" and disagreed. Similarly, Delany, who plays Thaisa, said that she too felt her part had substance. Artzberger and Delaneyís approach underlines the serious backbone in this play. During the Windows discussion, Shakespeare scholar Deborah Curran Aquino pointed out that the play is part of the aging Shakespeareís preoccupation with "reunion, rebirth and resurrection" and his move into experimental theatrical forms. Although giving the dark its due, Zimmerman accentuates the comic. She obviously loves Shakespearean clowning aroundóthere are over-the-top brothel scenes with master comic Floyd King playing a bawdy house owneróand she even creates some extra slapstick and one-liners herself. Zimmerman also anticipates modern reaction to the productionís pop-up pirates and its virgins defeating tarts. She goes after the audience, winking at and inviting the viewer to laugh at the play as well as laugh with it. Two villains in serious scenes, for instance, later face the audience as comic nitwits, reading narrator parts with red devil horns parked atop their heads. The comedic turns work well and make the evening a delight as Zimmerman and the troupe maintain the balance between "tragic" and "comedy" up until the end. At that point, among the most serious scenes in the play, including the touching father-daughter reunion, the audience occasionally reacted with laughter in seemingly inappropriate places. Asked about it in the post-production discussion, Artzberger and Delaney said they were not bothered by the titters, seeing them as audience "involvement" and "emotional release." The laughter, however, could also have meant that the directorial tilt to the comic had gone too far and that Zimmerman had not sufficiently smoothed the path for the domestic resurrections and the triumph of virtue at the end of the play. Perhaps her end-stage collaboration with the audience could have been more hospitable, but it was nevertheless a fruitful interaction that turned a fossil of a play into a gem of a production. "Pericles" runs through Jan. 2 at the Shakespeare Theatre, 450 7th St., NW. Tickets are $12.75 to $68. For more information, please call (202) 547-1122 or visit www.shakespearetheatre.org. Carolyn Cosmos is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.