Aug 22, 2008

'Pericles' well-acted, but twisted as ever

By John Angell Grant / Theater Reviewer

Sex between a father and daughter - there's a hot button topic. Such incest sets off big conflict in "Pericles," one of William Shakespeare's most confusing and oddly written plays.

San Francisco Shakespeare Festival is running a free local production of this complex and affecting work at Central Park in downtown San Mateo. Set by Shakespeare in Tyre and parts of Asia Minor, this local production has been reworked as a 19th-century American Appalachian farce, staged broadly in a vaudeville, slapstick style, similar in ways to a San Francisco Mime Troupe show.

The actors play multiple parts, with lots of high-speed costume changes. There is great hillbilly bluegrass music, along with square dancing and other forms of American back-mountain country choreography.

In "Pericles," to marry the daughter of a local king, suitors must solve her riddle, which turns out to be that she has a long history of sexual intimacy with her father. When suitor Pericles solves the riddle, and realizes with horror that the young woman he wants to marry is her father's lover, he goes on the run, pursued by the father's hired killers.

This is definitely a weird story. With its elements of riddle-solving and parental incest, it echoes Sophocles' "Oedipus." Much of the play is driven by Pericles' recoiling in horror from that injury of incest.

In director Kevin Kelleher's San Mateo production, Pericles voyages from town to town, motivated by an inability to shake his sense of disturbance over the thought that the woman he courted was intimate with her father. Pericles seems haunted both by an inability to speak about this crime, and a need to unburden himself of it.

Pericles' travels are marked by the kindnesses of various strangers. Thematically, these kindnesses seem to provide a healing for the incest trauma.

The problem with "Pericles" is that it feels like it is written in two parts that don't fit together. Incest and flight occupy the play's initial story. In the play's second segment, Pericles marries a different woman and has a child. Here, family separation and suffering ensue, before concluding with an emotionally wrenching happy ending.

Although the two halves of "Pericles" represent a jumbled story of destruction and redemption, there are many discontinuities. Some say this is because Shakespeare didn't write the entire play, but just part of it - that the work is a collaboration with another writer or editor, which accounts for those places where the script pieces don't mesh.

The production is well-performed in its resetting of this incest story as a back-country Appalachian tale. Most of the players are members of Actors Equity, the professional stage union.

Siobhan Doherty stands out as a bubbling and convincing Marina, the daughter of Pericles who comes to prominence in the play's second half. Michael C. Storm, in a strong and emotional performance, creates a charismatic Pericles, disturbed in his soul. These two characters are part of a powerful tearjerker, which ends happily at the show's conclusion.

And the price is right, of course, because it's free. "Pericles" plays this Saturday and Sunday at Central Park in downtown San Mateo, before moving up to San Francisco's Presidio for a month.

Rating: Three stars

E-mail John Angell Grant at jagplays@yahoo.com.