Mad, Bad, and Rad.('Cymbeline,' 'Rebel Voices,' and 'A Hard Heart')(Theater review)

Toward the end of Shakespeare's 1610 romance "Cymbeline" (at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont, under the direction of Mark Lamos), while plot points ricochet around the stage as in some truly desperate episode of "Desperate Housewives," Jupiter descends on a golden eagle half the width of the stage to hurl a couple of thunderbolts. He tells the ghosts onstage to shut up; he assures them (and us) that the tribulations of the faithful Imogen (Martha Plimpton) and her banished, about-to-be-killed husband, Posthumus (Michael Cerveris), are over. "Be content," Jupiter says. "Your low-laid son our godhead will uplift: / His comforts thrive, his trials well are spent." No scholar has yet uncovered, among the Bard's papers, any use of the words "boffo" or "eleven-o'clock number"; however, Shakespeare's coup de theatre--which showed off the technical capabilities of the new theatre at Blackfriars, into which his company, the King's Men, had moved in 1608--leaves no doubt about his commercial intentions. In this theatrical hodgepodge, which is neither tragedy nor comedy but tragical-historical-comical pastoral, Shakespeare fondly teases both the audience and the tropes of his masterly earlier plays: cross-dressing heroines, Machiavellian villains, the corrupt court versus the regenerating country, tyrannical kings and disaffected children. "Cymbeline" exudes the glow of the elegiac. Approaching the end of his career--he died in 1616--Shakespeare surveys the world and his own work with an affectionate detachment. As the beautiful song in the middle of the play says, "Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney sweepers, come to dust."

A gilt frame around the proscenium arch at the Vivian Beaumont situates "Cymbeline" in the realm of fairy tale. Michael Yeargan's handsome sets--a galaxy of golden stars as a backdrop and a forest of gilded, emblazoned poles--have the fine filigree of book illustration. Brian MacDevitt's lighting, especially the impressionistic pastel colors of the forest floor, add to the play's gossamer atmosphere. The designers draw out the fabulous in the story and lend to the production a charisma that the ensemble, for the most part, fails to deliver. It's unfortunate for Lamos that he chose to introduce Cymbeline (John Cullum) and his kingship by reprising the prostrate kowtowing with which Trevor Nunn introduced King Lear in the recent celebrated Royal Shakespeare Company production. Cymbeline, who banishes Posthumus and treats his daughter cavalierly, may echo Lear's rashness, but he lacks the essential ingredient for tragedy: an inner life. When, at the finale, he learns from the court doctor that his late queen never loved him--that she "Married your royalty, was wife to your place, / Abhorr'd your person"--he treats the brutal revelation like a minor cavil. "Who is 't can read a woman?" he says, moving right along. "Is there more?" he adds.

"Cymbeline" 's verse, it seems to me, is remarkable for its lack of antithesis and of the drama that such contradiction brings to character. Shakespeare's intentions here have more to do with pageantry than with penetration. The play is a series of surface excitements, chock-full of piquant barbarity: rape, kidnapping, poisoning, beheading. The severed head belongs to the Queen's dim, fractious son, Cloten (the amusing Adam Dannheisser), a despised would-be suitor of Imogen. Onstage, Cloten's gory head is waved around like a handkerchief at the Harvard-Yale game; the ghoulish fun would have been more complete had the director remembered to put blood on the killer's sword.

"Does the world go round?" Cymbeline asks at one point. Shakespeare's answer is yes. The accumulation of plot reversals, absurd coincidences, and neat explanations--they so galled George Bernard Shaw that he wrote "Cymbeline Refinished" (1937)--work, in fact, to make a larger, more benevolent, and more paradoxical point about the human heart. The hand-wringing and the heartbreak here turn out to have been unwarranted. By the end of the evening, both the characters and the audience have known many sorrows, most of which, it seems, never happened at all.

At the finale of "Cymbeline," the King, in a spirit of forgiveness, ...