A Pittsburgh production of Cymbeline has taken a unique take on the play. In the review, the writer notes the many difficulties presented by the play. First, there are shifts in tone throughout the play. Some characters try to have other characters killed, which sounds serious enough, but it is all taken rather lightly. Then, we have the plot (or plots, I should say). Cymbeline is notoriously convoluted in its use of mistaken identities, cross-dressing, feigned deaths and humbled rulers. Equally notorious is the conclusion of the play, which features virtually the entire cast unraveling all of the knots created in the previous two hours. Cymbeline, in short, has all the makings of a hot mess.

This new production seems to acknowledge that potential and, as a result, has taken a highly comic approach to the play. As the reviewer noted, the production plays Cymbeline as a kind of parody of Shakespeare. Does this approach really work? Since I have a particular fondness for this eclectic play, I am tempted to take umbrage. Still, staging the play as a kind of comic melodrama sounds like a lot of fun. What’s more, it got me thinking about the potential for applying this approach to Shakespeare’s writing as a whole.

Cymbeline certainly isn’t the only of The Bard’s plays that takes ridiculous leaps of logic, nor is it the only one to feature complex plotting. In a way, even his tragedies, as beloved as they are, could easily be made ridiculous if played for laughs. A magical potion that makes someone appear dead even though they aren’t really dead? If someone wrote that today, we’d call him a hack. Since it’s Shakespeare, we call it brilliant.

Shakespeare’s women are nothing if not succinct. While their husbands, fathers, brothers and male friends blather endlessly about every stupid thought in their heads, the girls choose their words carefully; so carefully, in fact, that many of them simply do not speak for lengthy stretches. Given the tradition of boy actors in Shakespeare’s time, perhaps this reduced “female” presence made sense. Still, Will’s heroines are at times maddeningly taciturn. At the end of Measure for Measure, does Isabella accept the marriage propose to her or renounce it and continue with her religious avocation? No one can be sure because she never utters another word, and as a result Measure for Measure has become the Edwin Drood of Shakespeare’s canon because each production must decide how to end it.

Somewhere out in internetland, some folks explored this problem from the opposite perspective. Instead of focusing on the negative, they counted the number of lines of every female character in Shakespeare’s plays to discover who was the most talkative. The results are surprising in that they do not include The Bard’s most famous femmes like Juliet or Lady Macbeth. Coming in at number three is Imogen, the plucky heroine of the complex (and often confusing) Cymbeline. First runner-up goes to the Queen of the Nile herself in Antony and Cleopatra. Finally, the gabbiest gal in Bard-dom is none other that Rosalind from As You Like It. The winner is easily the most recognizable of the three as the other two are featured in less frequently staged works. What does that say about contemporary appreciation of Shakespeare’s women? Do we simply exalt the plays based on the male characters and the women become famous by default (sort of like Kelly Preston)? Or, more insidiously, do we prefer these characters when they suffer in silence?

According to the saying, a picture is worth a thousand words, but what about the opposite? Could a word (or even a series of words) be worth a thousand pictures? It seems that a Seattle art critic is attempting the latter–or maybe a combination of the two. In covering a local art exhibit, the writer attempts to find a line of Shakespeare that evokes the main idea(s) of the piece of art. So, perhaps in this case, the picture and the words are equally worthy. For this critic, art provides the means to comment on and respond to other art.

If Shakespeare were used as commentary for artists, which one or ones would be most likely to meet The Bard halfway? And which plays/sonnets/etc. would match with these artists? Though it might seem capricious at first, it is a challenging undertaking. Could Dali’s melting clocks serve as a counterpoint to Hamlet or Macbeth’s fraying sanity? Do the distortions and exaggerations of Picasso suit Shakespeare’s more structurally ambiguous plays like Cymbeline or Measure for Measure? In a sense, this is the same question faced by directors and designers of high-concept Shakespearean productions: what environments, periods, historical figures, icons, and symbols create a dialogue with Will’s words? Is this dialogue balanced, offering equal enlightenment to both the play and the conceptual element, or is one favored over the other? Such comparisons are intriguing because the call into question the notion of a hierarchy among the arts themselves: which would be worth more, an image or a printed word?

“I feel like I’m babysitting except I’m not getting paid.” Though I may be dating myself by admitting it, my earliest recollection of the actress Martha Plimpton was her saying that line in the 1985 kids film, The Goonies. At a young age, she established herself as tough, sardonic, and no-nonsense. Though her film and television work comes and goes, she has built up an extensive theatre resume, particularly through her affiliation with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. She often has been described as “interesting” or “quirky,” traits much more suited to a character actress than an ingénue.

She may not, at first glance, seem like an ideal candidate for a Shakespearean actor. Yet, despite her decidedly twentieth-century vibe (or perhaps because of it), Plimpton has been building up her cred as a Shakespearean performer, with roles in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a new production of Cymbeline. Her role as the rebellious Imogen fits her feisty persona and her appearance in one of Shakespeare’s least-produced plays suits her eclectic artistic resume. Imogen, as Plimpton acknowledges, is a great but underappreciated role (despite its having been portrayed by acting greats such as Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench). For an actress who partially shaved her head for her part as a difficult teen in Parenthood, the challenges of the play and the role are part of the attraction. Cymbeline is a play that could be described in terms that suit the actress herself: complicated, difficult to categorize, and wholly surprising.

More than a few times in this blog, I have taken cracks at Cymbeline, a late-Shakespeare work with more structural problems than a house of cards. In truth, I like the play because of (and not in spite of) its idiosyncratic nature. Is it a tragicomedy, a problem play, a romance? Is it a complete mess? Would anyone care about this play if it didn’t have the name Shakespeare attached to it?

American Players Theatre in Wisconsin is currently producing Timon of Athens, a play that, like Cymbeline, isn’t one of the Bard’s most popular. Perhaps the actors, directors and designers who take on these plays like a challenge, or maybe they want to be the first company to “get it right.” A more cynical point of view is that audiences are fatiguing in the face of the repetition of the best-regarded of Shakespeare’s plays (seriously, is there a Shakespeare Festival that isn’t doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream?). I like the lesser-known plays for a different reason: they humanize our Will. While King Lear and Richard III will always be “great literature,” it’s nice to remind ourselves that even The Bard didn’t always knock it out of the ballpark.

A recent article about a Shakespearean production referred to the play in question as “The Scottish Play.” For the uninitiated, “The Scottish Play” is an alternative way to refer to Shakespeare’s supernatural tragedy Macbeth. The term is most popular among theatre folk who believe it is bad luck to say the play’s name inside a theatre. As evidenced by the article, however, it has become so widespread that even in print, the play goes unnamed. Since we do not call Hamlet “The Danish Play” or Cymbeline “The Poorly Structured Play,” why is Macbeth the play that dare not speak its name?

Theories about the pseudonym’s origin abound, but have little evidence to support them. Since Macbeth has more fight scenes than many of his other plays, some believe that real weapons somehow made their way onstage in the first production, resulting in the deaths of some actors. If this Brandon Lee–esque theory sounds like hogwash, another legend purports that the actor playing Lady Macbeth died a few days prior to the opening of the initial production. Since the show had to go on, Shakespeare performed the role (badly) and King James was so displeased with the production that the play became a costly flop and fell out of the repertory for a time due to its bad reputation.

We’ll never know the reason Macbeth is the bogeyman among The Bard’s works. For those who are bold (or careless) enough to utter its name in a theatre, there are a number of “cures.” Most of these involving spinning in a circle and reciting verse from other Shakespearean plays. This may seem silly, but if you’ve ever thrown salt over one shoulder or locked yourself in dark room with a mirror and chanted “Bloody Mary,” you know that a little superstition can go a long way.

In a review of a new production of Julius Caesar, the reviewer noted the play’s unique role among Shakespeare’s works. Perhaps more than any of his other plays, Julius Caesar is many high school students’ first brush with Shakespeare. The reviewer liked, but did not love, the production, and in her assessment I found myself returning to the question of why this is the work that high schoolers study to learn about Shakespeare. The challenges that face directors and actors, as well as student readers, make it a curious choice for representing Shakespeare’s entire cannon.

Obviously, a play like Cymbeline would never make the cut because, love it or hate it, its structure is far from standard. Also, plays where the textual integrity is under question are poor choices as representative works. Still, Julius Caesar is a tricky piece, requiring highly able actors and directors (as evidence, see the highly profitable but critically execrated Broadway production starring Denzel Washington from a few years ago). A play whose protagonist is questionable (the title character is actually only a supporting role) and whose biggest scene occurs at the halfway point is a challenging undertaking for the best of teachers and students. Perhaps one explanation for Caesar’s triumph over King Lear and the Henrys is the historical angle. The play offers a cross-disciplinary tie-in to World History curriculum, not just for Roman studies, but for larger political questions as well. In this light, a blond Dane with mommy issues seems like a lightweight by comparison.

A new Idaho production of Measure for Measure is taking a modern-dress approach to the text to bring out the sociopolitical issues raised by this “problem play.” As with any high-concept interpretation, the purpose is to underscore the play’s contemporary relevance, yet the approach takes on added meaning when dealing with one of Shakespeare’s “problematic” scripts.

“Problem play” is one of those terms that’s acquired a wide variety of meanings through popular usage (and misusage). Today, it is usually invoked to describe one of Shakespeare’s plays that doesn’t easily fit into the comedy-tragedy-history triumvirate. In essence, the problem is ours, not Shakespeare’s, as mixed-genre plays are harder to categorize. Originally coined at the turn of the twentieth century, “problem play” did not mean the tonal shifts in the script were difficult to navigate in production. Instead, it referred to plays that deal with a specific social or political issue (much like the early realistic and naturalistic plays of that period). The three original problem plays were Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All’s Well That Ends Well. Today, it might include plays like Cymbeline (whose oft-questioned authorship may account for its tonal and structural shifts), The Tempest, or even Hamlet. Given that mixed-genre forms are so prevalent nowadays (see television shows like Desperate Housewives or Six Feet Under), maybe we should reconsider what is so problematic about any of these plays.