[In the following review, Brustein describes director Andrei Serban's 1998 production of Cymbeline at the Delacorte Theater in New York's Central Park, mentioning its set, dramaturgical innovations, and strong individual performances, as well as its illumination of the play's theme of reconciliation.]

Cymbeline is currently receiving its second staging in ten years by the New York Shakespeare Festival (Joanne Akalaitis last directed it as her farewell production at the Public Theater in 1989). Produced at the Delacorte as part of Shakespeare in Central Park, this version has been concocted by the Romanian stage and opera director Andrei Serban. Serban and I have done seven shows together and are now preparing an eighth for the coming season. Three members of the cast, moreover, have been members of my company. Michael Chybowkski, responsible for the lighting, is one of our resident designers. And my theater has sometimes collaborated with the composer, Elizabeth Swados. I mention these affiliations for the sake of those interested in potential conflicts of interest. I could, of course, elect not to write about the production. But since I believe it deserves a review, I will at least try to be more descriptive than prescriptive in my report.

The set designer, Mark Wendland, has set this tale of ancient Britain and ancient Rome on a verdant mound of grass. The area is decorated with four cypress trees and a circle of sand with a boulder in the middle resembling the altar of a Greek orchestra, the whole thing bounded by a body of water. Ten placards—white on one side (for Britain), red on the other (for Rome)—are employed to suggest changes of scene. What has functioned as a stage in the middle of Central Park, in other words, now seems to be an extension of the park itself, beautifully illuminated and ending at the feet of the audience. Thus we are invited as participants into Shakespeare's sylvan world, even grow complicit in his plot when Posthumus wanders through the audience raging against his supposedly adulterous wife.

Serban's other major innovation is to have the Roman gods, so often mentioned in the play, actually play a part in the action. In the text, Jupiter comes to earth at the end to serve as deus ex machina. In Serban's production, Jupiter, played by the menacing Liev Schreiber with a gait that has the suggestion of a goose step, is a fairly constant presence, both in his godly persona and in the person of the villainous character Iachimo. This doubling creates the sense that Iachimo's wager over seducing Imogen (he settles for cataloguing the items in her chamber, after wading hip deep to her watery bed) has either been part of another celestial sexual intervention, like Leda and the swan, or a heavenly pretext designed to test Posthumus. That Posthumus fails the test and is nevertheless forgiven only underlines and extends the theme of exoneration that is the leitmotif of Serban's concept. Even the ghosts of the Stepmother Queen and her nitwit son Cloten—more accurately, the ghost of Cloten's severed head—make a final appearance to join in the general benediction.

Clearly, Serban is exhuming the spiritual, mythic, and religious aspects of the play—buried under two hundred and fifty years of rationalism—rather than its qualities as a tragicomic romance or fairy tale. And these transcendent qualities are nowhere better embodied than in the Imogen of Stephanie Roth Haberle. Endowed with long black hair and piercing, deep-set eyes, the beauteous Mrs. Roth Haberle appears throughout most of the play clad in a white robe (designed by Marina Draghici) which largely disguises the fact that she is in an advanced state of pregnancy. Yet the hint of impending childbirth emphasizes the poignancy, and the danger, that follow her pursuit of Posthumus to Milford Haven. Seeing the headless body of Cloten and thinking him to be her husband, she cries “O! 'tis pregnant, pregnant,” grabs her belly, and smears her cheeks with his blood.

That climax is followed by one of the most gripping moments in the production. Asked her identity by some Roman officers, she shrieks “I am nothing” with such a shuddering sense of loss that it seems as if we have entered the world of King Lear. (Later, walking through the water carrying a candle, she recalls Lady Macbeth.) Everything ends happily, of course, in a long dénouement staged with Arthurian stateliness as the British court congregates in long black hooded gowns. But in the meanwhile, we have accompanied the heroine on a perilous journey that has brought us to the edge of tragedy.

Strong qualities are also to be found in the performances of Herb Foster as Cymbeline, George Morfogen as the Storyteller, Hazelle Goodman as the wicked Stepmother, Robert Stanton as a pink-haired Cloten, Philip Goodwin as the sympathetic servant Pisanio, and, especially, Randall Duk Kim playing Belarius. As the adoptive father of the king's lost sons, Guiderius and Arviragus, Kim sustains a resolute center of loyalty and strength in the face of misfortune and misunderstanding, contributing considerably to the dynamism that drives the production.

Like The Winter's Tale—indeed like Othello—Cymbeline is about a woman falsely accused of adultery who is ultimately acquitted of the slander. The power and fury with which Leontes, Othello, and Posthumus generalize their indictments of female inconstancy suggest that Shakespeare himself may have felt a similar sting in his own marriage (it is a theme that runs throughout his work). But Shakespeare's daughter Judith was also officially charged with adultery, and his compassion for his wronged child may explain the prevailing atmosphere of forgiveness. At the very end of this production, when Imogen and Posthumus are reunited, when Iachimo is spared, when the Romans are freed from their chains, when an eagle rises over the stage and Jupiter appears in a brilliant gold gown backlit between the trees, we feel the characters being blessed with absolution. The theme of trial, misunderstanding, and reconciliation that pervades all of Shakespeare's last plays has found its resolution in the lap of nature warmed by summers in the sun.