[In the following review, Isherwood appraises director Bartlett Sher's rendition of Cymbeline performed by A Theater for a New Audience at the Lucille Lortel Theater in 2002. Sher is referred to as “ingenious” for his approach to the “play's preposterous extremes.”]

Shakespeare's densely plotted late romance Cymbeline is an unruly animal. Let the ornery thing run wild and it will bowl you over. Try to tame it and you're in trouble, too. Smooth out its contrasting textures and tones, and boredom ensues. Bartlett Sher, the ingenious director of the new production at the Lucille Lortel Theater, takes just the right approach: He embraces the play's preposterous extremes and, like a skilled rodeo hand breaking in a wild horse, turns them into virtues. The result is a pretty darn delightful production of one of the Bard's most troublesome plays.

The Wild West, as it happens, figures prominently, and charmingly, in Sher's production for Theater for a New Audience, which in November became the first American staging of a Shakespeare play to visit the Royal Shakespeare Co. in London. It's one of several contrasting styles Sher uses to accommodate and accentuate the play's multifaceted texture—and to cheekily tweak some of the overused cliches of Shakespeare direction.

Cymbeline, like the rest of the romances, mixes elements of comedy and tragedy. It's also chockfull of situations that recall other, more cohesive, Shakespeare plays. The title character is a king of England who, Lear-like, is at odds with a beloved daughter, Imogen (Erica N. Tazel). She, in turn, is betrothed to a noble man who is deceived by a miscreant whose name begins with I (Boris McGiver's Iachimo) into believing she's unfaithful (see Othello).

Like the heroines of more than one comedy, Imogen will eventually disguise herself as a boy, and the play concludes with a reconciliation scene to end them all, with virtually everyone onstage taking numbers and getting in line to either repent or forgive.

Sher acknowledges the play's contradictions by juggling several stylistic approaches. This both clarifies the play's various plots and locations and allows him to poke amiable fun at various popular approaches to directing Shakespeare. The play is, in a way, the most Shakespearean of Shakespeare plays, so why shouldn't the director, too, throw in everything but the kitchen sink? (Sher includes tongue-in-cheek tributes to Julie Taymor and Peter Brook.)

So king and British court are all clad in the kind of chic, Kabuki-style orientalia that has become an all-too-familiar approach to the Bard. The Italians, including Iachimo, are attired in Elizabethan garb. Milford Haven, where Imogen will encounter her long-lost brothers and the man who stole them from the king and raised them as his own, is envisioned as the wild American West.

That these visibly irreconcilable environments co-exist is Sher's savvy comment on the surreal artifice that is the play; he also accents its fictive nature by providing a pair of storytellers (Philip Goodwin, Thomas M. Hammond) who take several minor roles and serve as narrators of sorts. (They, by the way, have their own look: They wear '40s suits and fedoras.)

The director's crazy-quilt approach is nicely enhanced by a posse of delicious comic performances. Everything to do with the king's long-lost sons, played with sweet, swaggering flair by Pete Starrett and Roderick Hill, is lively, silly and enchanting. (The way in which set and lighting designer Christopher Akerlind evokes a Western sunset is a hoot, too.) As their caretaker Belarius, Earl Hindman is a big, blustery delight. All three actors relish their cowpoke accents, and when they mourn the loss of their “brother” (the drugged-but-not-dead Imogen in drag—oy!), the production achieves real poignancy, too. “Fear no more the heat o' the sun” is sung by the boys as a plaintive guitar lament, and it's achingly lovely. (Peter John Still has also provided terrific countrified music for a rousing pair of act-closing finales.)

Back at court, Andrew Weems triumphs as Cloten, the cloddish son of Imogen's stepmother. He's like a dimwitted Tasmanian devil in samurai garb. Most of the rest of the cast is able and effective, with Boris McGiver playing Iachimo's big scene, in which he steals into Imogen's bedroom, with the slow, slithery grace of a deadly snake relishing a repast.

The production's only serious flaw is, unfortunately, a significant one. As the ill-starred young lovers Imogen and Posthumus Leonatus, Tazel and Michael Stuhlbarg are an unexciting pair. She's ravishing to look at—a real charmer in chaps and a 10-gallon hat—but histrionically underpowered in this essential role. Despairing over her husband's apparent betrayal, or weeping over his supposed corpse, she never really touches our hearts. Nor does Stuhlbarg's whiny, petulant Leonatus evoke much pity when he seeks death in battle by way of remorse for his cruelty to his beloved wife.

But the story of Imogen and Posthumus isn't really central to Cymbeline; nothing is central to this resplendently chaotic play. It takes the arrival of a god, after all, to settle accounts. In Cymbeline Shakespeare posited the necessity of divine grace to sort out the chaos created by flawed humanity; a director needs similar grace to tackle the maddening challenges of the play. That Sher is up to the task is perhaps best illustrated by the audible delight that greeted the play's final scene, an attenuated saga of forgiveness and repentance that's usually met with numbed irritation.

As revelation followed revelation, one confession tumbling out in the wake of another, the expected sense of the audience noting the preposterousness and judging it severely was absent. Instead, there was a giggly kind of rapture, as they waited breathlessly to hear what inspired silliness would come next. The rarity of this phenomenon—coming as it did after more than three hours in the theater—cannot be overstated. It's a tribute to Sher's ingenuity and the talents of his collaborators. When the curtain fell on another twangy country chorus, more than one member of the audience let out a whoop of joy.