[In the following review of Danny Scheie's 2001 production of Cymbeline in Santa Cruz, California, Orgel praises the comic and innovative interpretation of Shakespeare's play and lauds the excellent performances; he also finds that the subversive directorial decisions remained true to the anarchic spirit of the drama.]

Danny Scheie made his professional directing debut with a brilliant, ingenious, and hilarious Comedy of Errors for Shakespeare Santa Cruz in 1988. As artistic director of the company from 1992 to 1996, he was responsible for a remarkable series of innovative productions, usually performed outdoors in a redwood grove on the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz. His directing style is irreverent, but more playful than confrontational. It is also witty, erudite, and highly allusive; and his work, even at its most deliberately outrageous (for example, in an all-male, frankly homoerotic Twelfth Night with Malvolio omitted, at San Francisco's Theatre Rhinoceros), has been consistently exciting, often bringing to light elements of the Shakespeare text that tend to be ignored or suppressed by editors and critics. His tenure at Shakespeare Santa Cruz concluded in 1996 with a superbly conceived and wildly funny Tempest. The production raised hackles because it was not in awe of the play and declined to take seriously all the things The Tempest is supposed to be serious about—magic, science, nature, art, grace. What it did take seriously were the human relationships and the fact that the play is a comedy.

Scheie returned to Santa Cruz in 2000 to do a fascinating and brilliant Cymbeline. Modern audiences and critics obviously have less invested in the seriousness of Cymbeline than in that of The Tempest, and the comic turns and running gags that filled this production were largely responsible for its success. That this involved some artistic license goes without saying: the play on the page is not notably comic—indeed, it appears in the First Folio as a tragedy. Doubtless this primarily reflects the difficulty the Folio's editors were having categorizing it, since the only available options were comedy, history, and tragedy, and the play more or less fits all three but comfortably fits none. If the Folio had included a section of tragicomedies, Cymbeline would surely have gone there. So, however, would the comedies Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, The Winter's Tale, and perhaps even Much Ado About Nothing and The Merchant of Venice—Shakespeare's notions of comedy and tragedy are anything but pure. Still, one would have thought that all those averted disasters, repentances, concluding reconciliations, the recovery of the lost sons, the fact that nobody dies except the villains, and the ultimate reunions not only of Imogen and Posthumus but even of England and Rome in the time of universal peace would have qualified it as a comedy. The trouble is that unlike The Winter's Tale, which is the Shakespeare play it most resembles, there really is not much in Cymbeline to laugh at. The ending is upbeat, certainly, but if there are to be laughs, they must be imported—there isn't even a clown in it.

So, to begin with, Scheie's Cymbeline was unlike Shakespeare's in that it was very funny. The setting, a simple architectural façade, was surmounted by a bank of video monitors that played a running visual commentary, for the most part parodic and subversive. Costumes were largely modern, though modernity here ranged from the 1930s to the 1970s, and consistency was never an issue: there were pure fairy-tale outfits for the king and queen, and when Posthumus and his Italian friends became an invading Roman army, they looked like Julie Taymor's soldiers in Titus. In one sense the production was a send-up of the play, but in another sense it really was taking the play on its own terms: tragedy or not, Cymbeline is very difficult to take seriously. If it isn't funny, much of it is loony, or idiotic, or baffling; and in that case—for a modern theater, at least—it had better be funny. Play Shylock straight, and The Merchant of Venice approaches tragedy; but play the Queen and Cloten straight, and Cymbeline is simply preposterously melodramatic. Imogen's trials and transformations and multiple fake deaths, moreover, are the stuff of fairy tales, not tragedy. Scheie's comedy was in fact very revealing about the dynamics of the play—about what can be taken seriously in it. The theatrical strategies of the production were characteristically startling, often disconcerting, sometimes frankly outrageous; but they seemed to me more often right than wrong, and indeed, sometimes produced genuine revelations.

For example, Cloten's deep, pervasive, continuous indignation after Imogen invidiously compares him with Posthumus's “meanest garment” (2.3.133) was played as a running gag, but it also became a touchstone, a potent index to the character—in this production, it was not the play but Cloten who could not let go of the gag.¹ Cloten is usually played as utterly repulsive, physically gross as well as morally repellent—this is what Imogen's reaction to him seems to require. Scheie made him instead petulant and silly but not at all unattractive, and this seemed to me true to the play—in fact, I'd have made him more attractive still. Imogen, after all, has to mistake him physically for Posthumus, and when she wakes and finds him and describes his headless body, it seems to her positively godlike—“his foot Mercurial, his Martial thigh, / The brawns of Hercules” (4.2.310-11): he's perfectly gorgeous.

Liam Vincent is a very good comedian, but his way of playing Cloten did systematically disarm his villainy. For all the threats and invective, he was clearly harmless, and in his one physical encounter, with Guiderius, he was played here as a hopeless coward. This certainly worked theatrically, but it also simplified the play; and there was a way in which it was a missed opportunity. Scheie conceived his Iachimo as a tough, smolderingly sexy thug, beautifully played by Andy Murray. Suppose Cloten had been conceived that way, to make it clear just how dangerously attractive sex is in the play? In Scheie's Tempest four years ago, he cast a wonderfully magnetic and charismatic actor named Jack Zerbe as a complex, erotic, and moving Caliban. I would have welcomed some of that complexity in Cloten. The headless corpse scene is an astonishing moment, not least because it requires us to reconsider just how different the loathsome, murderous rapist really is from the adored, idealized husband: they turn out, at this moment, to be all but identical; Imogen cannot even tell them apart. The production had a kind of manic energy, much of which was frankly sexual, and the confusion of Cloten and Posthumus really needed to be at the center of the play.

Susannah Schulman's Imogen was vivacious, glamorous, enthusiastic, all clinging dresses and long hair; Hans Altwies's Posthumus was classically handsome, clean-cut, and impeccably turned out in crisp seersucker; initially they might have been a couple out of a Noel Coward comedy. And the rival suitor Cloten seemed everything Posthumus was not: not only boastful, coarse, foolish, insensitive, arrogant, but also hilariously badly dressed in khaki shorts and a Union-Jack shirt; most to the point, lecherous and very persistent. Posthumus banished to Rome, however, moved not merely from England to Italy but from 1930s romantic comedy to GoodFellas or The Sopranos, and here the antithesis between the suitors quickly started to blur. The meeting with Philario and Iachimo took place in a pool hall; Iachimo, in black leather, bare-armed and tattooed, effortlessly taunted Posthumus into gambling with Imogen's chastity, effortlessly elicited his permission to try to seduce her. Posthumus's compliance, too easily obtained, is obviously far more dangerous and destructive than Cloten's clumsy attempts at wooing; but though Imogen subsequently sees through Iachimo's strategy almost at once, she also, surprisingly, forgives him almost at once. Her graciousness in Scheie's production seemed, if anything, rather overdone—she has passed the test, but she also hasn't been entirely displeased by this attempt on her virtue. And Andy Murray then played the midnight bedroom scene with a clear sense that he had already won—for all his evident lechery, the real satisfaction consisted in the collection of evidence and the prospect of facing Posthumus down, in pocketing the money, the bracelet, the ring. This is, of course, just how Posthumus has set things up, in making the bracelet and the ring stand for Imogen's chastity. In fact, as it turns out, Iachimo hardly needs the evidence: back in Rome, Posthumus is all too ready to believe him.

In the mafioso world of Scheie's Rome, the transition from adoring husband to murderous dupe was strikingly logical, and Altwies's furious revelation of how far from ideal the marriage with Imogen actually was—“Me of my lawful pleasure she oft restrained / And bade me oft forbearance …” (2.5.9-10)—came as a sufficient explanation for both his compliance in the wager and his rage at its outcome. These difficult scenes were beautifully realized and maintained their seriousness within the predominantly comic and satiric context. The denial of sexuality also explained, if more conventionally, the translation of Imogen into Fidele: in standard Renaissance plots women dress as youths to avoid unwanted sexual encounters—though the play immediately renders the strategy problematic when Guiderius and Arviragus declare their homoerotic passion for the newly created Fidele, a plot twist that is short-circuited only by the presumed death of the beloved young man.

Scheie's most startling directorial decision was to signal Posthumus's emergence as the British hero by sending him into battle totally naked. This was designed to be outrageous, which it certainly was—Posthumus did not merely flash us; he was naked for a good ten minutes. It was also hilarious and exciting and, in its way, entirely apt: it made the idealization of Posthumus not only blatant but blatantly sexual—Altwies looks great without his clothes. If the play is going to end in reconciliation, this is the Posthumus Imogen has to accept; this is what Imogen has to accept about Posthumus. And though this bit of sensational theatrics was all Scheie's, the play does toy with just this kind of revelation. When the Imogen of Shakespeare's stage in 1609 started to undress and said “I … am almost / A man already” (3.4.167-68), how far did she go—how far was almost? There is a similar moment in Othello, when Desdemona undresses for bed: how far did Shakespeare's Desdemona go? Neither could have gone as far as Susannah Schulman's Imogen, who went down to bra and panties, quite far enough to demonstrate that she was in fact a woman, because for Shakespeare's Imogen or Desdemona to have gone that far would have revealed just the opposite, the man beneath the dress—to undress in this theater is to prove you are a man.

Gender, like office and class in Shakespeare's theater, is a function of costume: a woman is anyone who wears a dress, a man anyone who wears trousers, a soldier a man in armor, a king a man with a crown—and Posthumus is a dead body in Posthumus's clothes; nobody ever sees through a disguise in Shakespeare. So the proof that Iachimo has really been with Imogen has to be a bodily proof, the mole on her breast; and the proof that Polydore is really Guiderius is a birthmark, the evidence of his body. Stripping Posthumus naked was not simply a piece of gratuitous porn (though it certainly was that); for once, finally, somebody in this play really was what he seemed. He was not only that, of course; even the naked Posthumus had his patriotic signifier, a Union Jack in grease paint adorning his chest. But the rest of his signifiers were unabashedly anatomical; clothes for once did not make the man.

This was a directorial decision, not at all required by the script; but it was a decision that has become almost a cliché of recent theater and often with much less point. In 1995, on Broadway, Jude Law took a very leisurely onstage bath, frequently standing up, for much of Act 2 of Cocteau's Les Parents Terribles (absurdly retitled Indiscretions, apparently in deference to the supposed linguistic incompetence of New Yorkers). The script calls only for the actor to enter from the bathroom in bare feet, but the play was running in competition with Love! Valor! Compassion!, and Jude Law's talents were obviously too good to waste on mere acting. San Francisco was only a step behind: the next season, in the American Conservatory Theater's Othello, a dignified but distinctly dumpy Othello undressed and took an extended bath in the middle of an early conversation with Iago; and a year later the ACT's Duchess of Malfi stripped the Duchess naked for her death scene and left her lying on a gurney for most of the last act, while her brother Ferdinand performed his lycanthropic scene also naked. All these were actors who, not to put too fine a point on it, looked a great deal better in their costumes than out of them. Last season ACT finally got its anatomical act together with Mark Lamos's production of Edward II, in which practically everybody was nude for long periods (sex does, after all, figure significantly in the play). The casting must have been done in a gym: all the actors were stunning. I was surprised that they could actually read lines too.

The naked hero made real conceptual sense in this Cymbeline. One of the great pleasures in all Scheie's productions is everything beside the acting—what one might call the static: the allusive decor, the implied subtext, the ironic background. Sight gags, sound gags, technological gimmicks, puppets, animations, anachronisms, provide a running commentary that drives people for whom Shakespeare is The Canon crazy, and drives people for whom Shakespeare is the essence of theater crazy with joy. When the queen's death was announced the opening bars of “Ding, dong, the witch is dead” were heard. The Jupiter section of Holst's The Planets was ubiquitous throughout the latter half of the play; indeed, the finale, the treacly patriotic hymn “I Vow to Thee My Country,” is set to the Jupiter theme and had every expatriate Briton in the audience—a large group in Santa Cruz—singing along (it was Princess Diana's favorite hymn and was sung at both her wedding and her funeral). Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony signaled Imogen's arrival in Wales, where Belarius and the princes were a minuscule boy-scout troop and the cave was their pup tent. The opening notes of Beethoven's overture to Fidelio were heard whenever Imogen declared that her name is Fidele (this only happened three times, but that was once too many). The aria Casta diva (“Chaste goddess”) from Bellini's opera Norma was the background music for Imogen going to bed—Norma, like Cymbeline, is set in ancient Britain—and there were, during the Roman invasion, appropriate bits from Handel's Julius Caesar and, as the plot works itself out, Beethoven's variations on God Save the King. I got this far myself; a companion who is not as generationally and pop-culturally challenged as I am pointed out The Sex Pistols singing their version of God Save the Queen, Annette Funicello on how much she likes Italians when Posthumus first got to Rome, and a little bell with its accompanying freeze-frame action from the TV series Bewitched, which served as a running gag throughout. During the Italian scenes the video monitors played RAI news in Italian and, during the Roman invasion, in Latin—a neat way of registering how the play switches back and forth between modern Italy and ancient Rome.

As for the visual gags, Imogen, when she goes to bed, is reading Ovid: the book here was the Riverside Shakespeare, with the name Ovid pasted across it. The tablet that Posthumus awoke to find after his dream, and from which he and Stephen Grenley's marvelously campy soothsayer read Jove's prophecy, was a copy of the Arden Shakespeare Cymbeline. The television monitors offered, as a running commentary, clips of Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson, scenes from Mrs. Thatcher's Britain, odd bits of The Beatles, Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, Upstairs Downstairs upside down. Imogen heading off to Wales was glossed on the tiny screens by Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music and Samantha Eggar in Dr. Doolittle making their breaks for freedom. Allusively, the production was distinctly nostalgic (who even remembers Samantha Eggar?), but the nostalgia was all over the place: the '30s, the '50s, the '70s—there was something corny for everyone. There were sight gags on stage, too: Andy Murray's Iachimo, the mafioso thug, kept his fingers crossed when apologizing to Imogen; Tommy Gomez's scoutmaster Belarius gave a visible sigh of relief when he realized he didn't have two gay scouts in his troop after all; the beefeater jailer guarding Posthumus was drinking Beefeater gin. Amy Thone's marvelous, unflappable wicked queen was a running visual gag: the primary butt was Mrs. Thatcher wielding a gold purse; but a dress with a huge angel-wing collar recalled Elizabeth I's Rainbow Portrait, and there were bits of Elizabeth II as well. The video screens glossed the queen's poisoning attempts with Beatrice Lillie in Thoroughly Modern Millie—the production had both total recall and a very subversive sense of relevance.

The problem with taking the comedy of tragicomedy seriously is that it makes it so difficult to keep the tragic element in view, and that remained a problem here. One could argue that the problem is built into the form—the point about tragicomedy is not that it is both tragic and comic, but that it is really neither; the comedy undercuts the tragedy, the tragedy subverts the restorations and reconciliations. Scheie's Cymbeline did have its transcendent moments, but I wanted a few more. The most serious loss for me was in the way Cymbeline's response to the revelation of the queen's villainy was handled in the last act. Cymbeline says,

                                                  Mine eyes
Were not in fault, for she was beautiful,
Mine ears that heard her flattery, nor my heart
That thought her like her seeming. It had been vicious
To have mistrusted her; yet, O my daughter,
That it was folly in me thou mayst say,
And prove it in thy feeling. Heaven mend all!

(5.5.63-69)

Gary Armagnac pretty much threw this away, but it seems to me a really crucial moment in the play. It says that untrustworthy as appearances are, they are all we have to base our trust on. This is a comment on the whole nature of perception in the play—Imogen says, “Our very eyes / Are sometimes, like our judgments, blind” (4.2.301-2), and it's impossible to know whether she's saying that our judgments are sometimes blind or always blind; but in any case the benchmark for blindness is judgment, not eyesight. How do you ever know what's true? In fact, the play makes very little distinction between lies and truth. When Pisanio is questioned about the disappearance of Imogen, he is exculpated by one of Shakespeare's omniscient gentlemen, who testifies that Pisanio was at court on the day Imogen was missing and therefore cannot be implicated in her disappearance. This is a flat lie, and it comes from the same gentleman who reports the Roman invasion: he is there to do nothing but give information. (Scheie rationalized this moment by giving the lie instead to Imogen's maid, who would have a reason for covering for Pisanio.)

Cymbeline is certainly as bad a king as we find in Shakespeare—as bad as Lear or Leontes, irascible, gullible, vain, arbitrary, unjust—but he is, like Lear and Leontes, nevertheless the king, and he is at the center of this society. When Posthumus is in prison, he has a vision of his dead family, who, in a résumé of the action, question the possibility of justice in a world such as the play presents. In reply, Jove descends and offers a version of divine justice that is simply Cymbeline's justice writ large: “Whom best I love, I cross” (5.4.101). There is a divine order, but it is much larger and more impersonal than anything we can comprehend, and it doesn't take human suffering into account—Jove's love produces only pain. This may be a basis for reconciliation (it is, after all, God's love), but it is not a recipe for a happy ending; and the Folio editors considered the play a tragedy. Posthumus's dream appeared here on the video screens, with Hans Altwies playing all his relatives, including, in drag, his mother, and with a crazily animated Jupiter and an eagle—descending to the theme from Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, naturally. This had a Monty Pythonish energy and wit, but the larger point pretty much got lost.

One of the great pleasures of watching Scheie's productions over the years has been seeing how he manages to transform a group of actors with quite individual acting styles into a unified troupe. Part of what makes this possible is his frankly anarchic conception of theater, in which disparity is all part of the mix. But part of it is really the other side of this anarchy: Shakespearean drama has far more energy than any single reading, any one interpretation, can accommodate, and there are very few directors who are willing to let that energy play out in the theater. Nobody has ever made Cymbeline funny in this way, because nobody has been willing to acknowledge the genuine craziness of Shakespeare's conception, to do the play and remain true to its manic energy.

Notes

1. Quotations of Cymbeline follow Peter Holland's new Pelican edition (New York: Penguin Books, 2000).