Maria-Christina Oliveras (left) plays the Queen, and Amy Hill performs the titular role in the National American Asian Theatre Company production of Cymbeline, directed by Stephen Brown-Fried.
Although the all-Asian, all-female production of Shakespeare’s late romance Cymbeline by the National American Asian Theatre Company (NAATCO) doesn’t succeed on all dramatic fronts, it’s brimming with vitality. It draws on fairy-tale elements, including a wicked queen, an unscrupulous villain, a wronged hero, and an extended scene of revelations that give it the aura of a fairy tale. Cymbeline perhaps can best be summed up as a myth of national origin that reveals how the British and Roman heritages came together under its ancient, peace-loving title character.
Purva Bedi (left) plays a lord serving the Queen’s son Cloten, and Jeena Yi is Cloten in Andrea Thome’s modern-verse translation of Cymbeline.
Although Cymbeline isn’t considered a masterpiece like its sister romances, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, like those plays it deftly incorporates themes of forgiveness and rebirth into its dramatic fabric. And it’s chockful of characters, although Cymbeline (Amy Hill), the play’s monarch, is a cipher. He’s clueless about the treachery afoot in his palace and henpecked by his nameless Queen (Maria-Christina Oliveras), whose hobby is experimenting with poison on small animals. Her oafish, violent son Cloten (Jeena Yi) plots to rape Cymbeline’s daughter Imogen (Jennifer Lim) after Imogen rejects him as a suitor. But Imogen elopes with Posthumus (KK Moggie), a worthy nobleman brought up at court after being tragically orphaned as an infant.
Shakespeare loads on preposterous episodes in this anything-goes play. The exiled Posthumus goes to Rome and meets his nemesis in Iachimo (Anna Ishida), a villain cut from the same cloth as Iago in Othello. Goaded into a wager, Posthumus bets on Imogen’s virtue with Iachimo. Suffice it to say that when Iachimo goes to the British court, he fails to seduce Imogen. But he sneaks into her bedchamber and acquires intimate information that persuades Posthumus that Imogen is unfaithful. After Iachimo departs, Posthumus launches into a misogynistic tirade worthy of Othello: “Is there no way to birth men without women / Adding their half? We are all bastards.”
The newly commissioned modern verse translation by Andrea Thome is the weak link in the production. It tends to dilute Shakespeare’s poetry and loses some of its innate magic. Take the famous opening line to Imogen’s speech—“O, for a horse with wings! Hear’st thou, Pisanio?” Thome’s version is “Oh, for a horse with wings! Did you hear, Pisanio?” While her modernization of the original echoes today’s speech patterns, Shakespeare’s verse is more onomatopoeic, with its cluster of sibilant sounds imaginatively approximating what the wings of Pegasus might sound like in flight.
Under the lively direction of Stephen Brown-Fried, the acting is the ace of this production. In the central role of Imogen, Jennifer Lim has the poise and stamina to inhabit this character that the 18th-century critic William Hazlitt called “perhaps the most tender and the most artless” of all Shakespeare’s women. And one must hand it to Lim for pulling off perhaps the play’s most famous scene, in which she wakes up next to a headless corpse, believing it’s her husband, crying out, “Oh, Posthumus, / Where is your head?”
Jennifer Lim (left) is Imogen, and KK Moggie plays her husband, Posthumus. Photographs by Julieta Cervantes.
Oliveras inhabits the evil Queen with a swaggering, take-no-prisoners attitude. Julyana Soelistyo slips into the skin of Posthumus’s servant—and later Imogen’s servant—with the selfless devotion of a saint. And Anna Ishida hilariously interprets Cloten, the uncouth son of the Queen, as an angry young man who has some good karate moves. While Ishida doesn’t have an imposing physical frame, her prince throws his royal weight around by speaking his lines with a snarl.
The production values are in synch with this dark fairy tale. Ant Ma’s set is made up of several giant sheets that continually shift their location to meet the dramatic moment. Yiyuan Li’s soft lighting intensifies in Act V for the family reunion scene wherein 37 revelations are made to resolve the plot. Although a shadow falls on this joyful scene when the doctor Cornelius (Narea Kang) reports that the Queen has died of despair following the strange disappearance of her son, there’s poetic justice in her death. Indeed, when Cymbeline asks about the details of her worldly passing, Cornelius responds: “in horror, madly dying, like her life, / Which (being cruel to the world) concluded / Most cruel to herself.”
Caroline Eng’s enchanting sound design accentuates pivotal moments in the play without overpowering the actors’ voices. Mariko Ohigashi’s eclectic costumes accommodate Cymbeline’s range of characters.
Commissioned by “Play On Shakespeare,” NAATCO’s exuberant new take on Cymbeline is worth a visit. It tackles an extremely complex play with gusto and grace.
The National Asian American Theatre Company production of Cymbeline at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater (136 East 13th St.) through Feb. 15. Evening performances are 7p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. For more information, visit naatco.org.
Playwright: William Shakespeare, in a modern verse translation by Andrea Thome
Director: Stephen Brown-Fried
Set: Ant Ma
Costumes: Mariko Ohigashi
Lighting: Yiyuan Li
Sound: Caroline Eng
Fight and Intimacy Director: Alex Might
