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March 24, 2006 > Arts & Entertainment > Baker’s Cymbeline shines with novelty

Baker’s Cymbeline shines with novelty

By Julia Bursten | Thresher Editorial Staff

he only thing better than good Shakespeare is good, obscure Shakespeare. Cymbeline, a comedy written late in the Bard’s career, features all the intrigue of his more famous tragedies without the stigma of over-publication in high-school textbooks. With an Italian as conniving as Othello’s Iago and a heroine more independent and more deeply deceived than Juliet, Baker College’s spring production is a refreshing break from Shakespeare’s traditionally performed literature.

Like most Shakespearean drama, Cymbeline teems with convoluted subplots centered on love, honor and inheritance. In Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet all these are common knowledge, and audiences expect them. Cymbeline does not have this advantage and consequently, the quality of a production depends heavily on its actors’ abilities to convey the unfamiliar and complicated story. Baker’s actors rise to the challenge passionately.

Set in Britain and Italy, Cymbeline starts as a story of a wedded couple — Princess Imogene (Baker College sophomore Michelle Moller) and Posthumus (Baker senior Jared Blakely) — torn apart by oppressive royalty. King Cymbeline (Lovett College senior Ames Grawert) banishes his daughter’s husband to Italy in hopes she will forget him and remarry.

While there, Posthumus makes a bet with Iachimo (Baker sophomore Chris Turner) that Imogene will be unfaithful. As the results of the wager unfold, the play incorporates epic battles, an evil queen, the return of the king’s long-lost sons and the inevitable Shakespearean poison scene.

The actors’ rhythmic recitation of Cymbeline’s first lines establishes a welcoming, energetic tempo without detracting from the actors’ projection or enunciation. Except for a few minor, hurried scenes, this cadenced energy continues throughout the play and helps to clarify a potentially puzzling plot.

Moller pushes this tempo one step further. She delivers one of Shakespeare’s most complex and respectable female roles with natural bluntness. The play includes a copious amount of characteristic misogyny, but Moller’s Imogene upholds a much brighter image of women than most Shakespeare.

To counter this heartening persona, Turner’s Iachimo is simultaneously egotistical, womanizing and scheming. The part’s fluid scripting lends itself to physical, pun-filled comedy and character development, and Turner delivers with beautiful posturing and stage use. Turner, who choreographed the play’s fight scenes with James Cooper (Brown ‘02), successfully teases physicality out of the rest of the cast as well.

A physical play needs a set conducive to action, and director Joseph Lockett (Hanszen ‘93) and set designer Cat Coombes, a Baker freshman, accommodate Cymbeline’s unique and plentiful scene changes with a highly functional, geometric stage.

The stage lies in the middle of the commons with seating on each side — a mock-up of the Globe Theater that has become Baker Shakespeare tradition. Instead of a customary trapdoor, necessary for a breaking-and-entering scene, the stage has a cavernous opening beneath one of its multi-level risers. Not only does this innovation add another dimension to the characters’ motion, it doubles as a den for an exiled trio of aristocracy-turned-mountain-men shortly after intermission.

Baker’s production of Cymbeline illustrates the merits of thoughtful script selection and casting. The plot can be difficult to follow because it is not common knowledge, but the production’s actors engage the audience consistently, and the set lends visual appeal when the action gets overwhelming. The play’s success lies in part in its relative obscurity, but the cast and crew take full advantage of this asset for a thoroughly enjoyable show.

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