Eunice Wong (top) stars as Pericles, and Mary Neufeld plays his wife, Thaisa, in Shakespeare’s Pericles at the Target Margin Theater in Brooklyn.
Shakespeare’s romance Pericles has washed up at the Doxsee, the Brooklyn home of Target Margin Theater, with all the “outrageous fortune” in the 1607–08 play intact. Clocking in at 105 minutes, this new staging by David Herskovits, though wildly uneven, delivers some limpidly beautiful moments that redeem the production.
From left: Shawn K. Jain, Wong, Hannah Tamminen, and Neufeld appear in Pericles.
Herskovits rightly spins Pericles (sensitively performed by Eunice Wong in this gender-blind production) as an Odysseus figure who encounters disasters, shipwrecks, the loss of a wife and daughter, and many other privations before his fortune reverses and his splintered political and personal life become whole again.
Herskovits notes in the playbill that he has staged Pericles as a “chamber play,” but it’s a vision that’s difficult to pull off in the face of the drama’s sprawling geography, which embraces vast parts of the ancient Mediterranean. What’s more, Kaye Voyce’s spartan set, lighted by Cha See, is dominated by a moveable wall-like structure that alternately serves as a court, banquet hall, brothel, and ship. But, lacking a prop on stage that conspicuously suggests a seascape, the nautical atmosphere essential to the romantic fable is lost.
From left: Anthony Vaughn Merchant, Neufeld (in the coffin), and Peter Romano in the Act III burial-at-sea scene in Pericles.
The labyrinthine story revolves around Pericles, Prince of Tyre, who sets out on a quest to become a good ruler and find a suitable wife. He first woos a nameless princess in Antioch, solving a riddle propounded by her father: the answer involves incest, and he has to flee to escape death. After setting up a surrogate in Tyre, Pericles continues his journey—but a shipwreck tosses him up on the shore of Pentapolis. There, local fishermen, after helping the protagonist retrieve his rusty armor from the sea, guide Pericles to the palace of the good King Simonides (Anthony Vaughn Merchant), who is overseeing a jousting tournament for suitors competing for his daughter Thaisa (a soulful Mary Neufeld). Pericles joins the tournament and wins Thaisa’s hand. They marry with Simonides’ blessing; Thaisa soon becomes pregnant and, during a tempest at sea, delivers a baby girl, who is christened Marina (Susannah Wilson).
And that’s not all. Thaisa supposedly dies during childbirth and is cast into the ooze in a casket. Overwhelmed with grief, Pericles pierces the heavens with his cry: “Oh, you gods! Why do you give us good things that we love and then take them away?” It’s a Lear-like sentiment—and ties Pericles’ suffering to those of Lear.
Turning away from life, Pericles parks the infant Marina with seemingly kind rulers in Tarsus, Cleon (Shawn K. Jain) and Dionyza (Hannah Tamminen). Pericles neglects to visit his daughter for 14 years, but Marina remarkably survives, even though Cleon and Dionyza prove dangerous.
“‘Pericles’ is an outlier in Shakespeare’s canon. ”
There are a couple of standout performances: Wong, as Pericles, is persuasive in the eponymous role, inhabiting her part with the requisite humility, courage, and fortitude. Susannah Wilson terrifically captures Marina’s trusting nature early on with her caretakers Cleon and Dionyza (and some pirates) and later projects the purity and eloquence that makes her a paragon of women.
To be sure, Pericles is an outlier in Shakespeare’s canon. Omitted from the First Folio, the text exists in a “bad” quarto and is generally considered a collaboration with George Wilkins, who probably wrote the inferior first and second acts. Nevertheless, the play has been a crowd-pleaser over the years. Now that it’s back, veteran theatergoers and newcomers alike will have a fresh opportunity to savor the salty tale.
Still, there are some transcendently moving moments in the production, notably the recognition scene in Act V, in which Marina becomes like a therapist to Pericles, pulling him out of an almost catatonic state by disclosing her own name, Marina (it means “woman from the sea”) and then her mother’s: “Thaisa was my mother, who did end /The minute I began.” It is by far the play’s most poignant scene, and one would have to be a stone not to feel its pathos and shed a tear.
Wong (left) plays the hero, and Susannah Wilson is his daughter Marina, in Pericles. Photographs by Richard Termine.
The envious Jacobean playwright Ben Jonson called Pericles a “mouldy tale,” perhaps because of the figure Gower (performed in the current production by Neufeld), the medieval poet who told ancient tales and performs a prologue for each section of the drama. Whether one cottons to the character or not, he significantly serves as a framing device for the narrative and underscores the fact that an ancient story is being reenacted and passed down to the next generation.
Although this new production of Pericles is flawed, theatergoers who want to see Shakespeare’s rarely staged romance should hie themselves to the Doxsee in Sunset Park before it shutters.
Target Margin Theater’s production of Pericles runs at the Doxsee (232 52nd St. in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn) through April 2. Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and information, visit www.targetmargin.org.
