Cymbeline: Or, Imogen’s Fairytale

Or: “Thanks, Jupiter!”

Cymbeline is a hard show. Hard to stage, hard to parse, hard to summarize. I’ve long had a game of trying to sum up Shakesperain stories in their simplest essence; Cymbeline has always been “Plot Too Difficult to Explain.” That’s not to say it’s a bad play coughcoughlikeTroiliousandCressidacough, it’s just Maximilliist. Any Shakespearean device you care to name: lost rings, vital letters, poisons that aren’t really, star-crossed lovers, scheming villains, mistaken identity, beheadings, ghosts, cross dressers, rampant jingoism, Romans being too Roman for words; all will likely be found within its pages. The story benefits when the playing don’t take it too seriously. And yet it’s a Romance, and beauty of a Romance is that behind all the magic and contrivance and impossibility the truth of the story is the world is out of joint, and it can’t be put right again until a father learns humility, and a daughter finds her voice.

The Boise Bard Players, famous for their witty ingenuity, have gleefully taken Cymbeline and rolled down a hill with it, giggling all the way. Director Sam Murphy’s casting the play as a fairytale and giving Princess Imogen (Ab Jungen) top billing along with her wanna-be Lear father, Cymbeline (Chris Canfield), sets two expectations for the evening. One, don’t look too much for naturalism, this is a fairytale, it goes by fairytale logic. It also has a moral, the moral is: Men, Don’t Be Gross!

There are many gross men to choose from. Tris Berg doubles as two of them, Imogen’s banished beloved Posthumus Leonatus and her bullying stepbrother/suitor Prince Cloten. This is a not insignificant bit of double casting. Berg has a keen tongue for verse that lifts the language high and shows off its facets, and an open, earnest presence and both serve her very well for the sheer slippery weight of misogamy both characters have to tangle with.

As Cloten the nastiness is a firework show, horribly in our face, and delivered with zest, pop and relish. Posthumous, who begins as a sweetheart in roll and deed, is corrupted (some might argue burnished) in his murderous beliefs by scheming Iachimo (Rachel Fichtman, who’s swagger and O-Cuss-How-Shall-I-Ever-Get-Out-Of-This-Villainous-Pickle-I-Myself-Caused manner wins friends and influences the audience even at the little Iago’s most despicable).

Still, returning to Posthumous, however horrid his deeds, Berg brings around a sweetness that does not cloy to that brazen and bizarrest of heroes, walking a path to redemption. She goes all out as cruel prince though, all lewd gestures and innuendos underlined in neon, relishing the threats of assault and degradation, which is really the only way to get through them. Cloten even gets a personalized version of Blurred Lines outside Imogen’s door, which in a wonderful moment Jungen greets with a double barrel middle finger raised. Their Imogen is no retiring princess, but one who fully feels things, offers cries, curses, blows and boons with a full heart, and whose laughing gladness at a sudden revelation set off, in my audience, a great glad way of applause. Blessed be those who wear their hearts on their sleeves, and the actors who some convincingly portray them.

My favorite bit of this fairytale, dear reader, concerns a small found family in the mountainside: an old solder Belarius (Paul Jeffries) and the two youths in his care Guiderious (Madeline Keckler, who doubles as the Evil Queen, architect of all the plays woes) and Arviragus (John Wicks). Keckler and Wicks are perfectly matched in a hilarious ballet of mimicking their father while Belarius recounts their story for the umpteenth time (Jeffries with a wonderful clear voice that lifts the text and makes it shimmer). Throughout the show, on the high points and the lows, all three will deftly hold the line between the ridiculous and the sincere, and making improbable characters beloved ones.

It’s moments of simplicity amid all the madcap revelry that stake the production to the earth. You can’t take it too seriously, but through the silliness there’s a simplicity of a good story. One of the hardest scenes in the play, to produce, to parse, or describe, is when Posthumous is visited by the ghosts of his family and Jupiter, the King of Gods (hereunto only a rumble of thunder when his name is sworn on). The ghosts surround their son and brother, in a simple sway, untethered to the earth and to time, incapable of providing comfort. It was so evocative, but so simple as to unpin the latches of my jaw and leave my open mouthed. And then in comes a god on a giant eagle motorcycle, bearing the most surprising of visages, drops a blessing on the heart broken Leonati and wings off. It’s everything this most complex of plays can and ought to be, absolute bonkers, but who will set all right in the end.