[In the following review of the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival production of Pericles, directed by Brian Kulick, Simon strongly criticizes the director's staging of the play as a farce.]

Pericles is so imperfect a play that scholars postulate either a collaboration with a lesser dramatist responsible for the first two acts or, likelier, a revision of a lost earlier play by a hack, to which Shakespeare warmed only in the latter part as his involvement grew. It is based presumably on a likewise lost Hellenistic novel about Apollonius, Prince of Tyre, hugely popular through many medieval and Renaissance versions. But in no version is this tale about the whims of fortune, the endurance of trials, and miraculous events a farce. For that, it took Brian Kulick, artistic associate of the Public Theater, to place himself, squarely and foolishly, beyond the pale.

Pericles reaches the heights of poetry in several scenes, but even the other ones are based on the wondrous, the spectacular, the awesome. Kulick turns almost everything into the farcical, and navigates even the deeply moving into those shallows. Visually, his notion of presenting the play largely in gilded boxes of various sizes suggests that the Bard's collaborator was Godiva Chocolatier. Playing a goodly chunk on a steeply inclined plane, with actors performing feats of equilibrium or comically sliding down, suggests a further collaboration with Ringling Brothers. Tone-deafness to the music of verse and tongue-tiedness in its delivery bespeak untrained actors and a blockhead director.

As the poetical is clearly beyond Kulick's ken, the political becomes primary on the agenda. Kulick revels in casting black actors as the daughters of whites even where the text explicitly calls for blondeness, and, by way of escalating perversity into swinishness, deliberately picking actors whose looks and demeanor offend in roles demanding comeliness. It may be that he sees these gimmicks as marketable mainstays of Theater of the Ridiculous, but pandering to supposedly or actually subliterate audiences, instead of trying to educate them, is not only artistically but even politically self-defeating.

True, there may be some space and cost problems in staging a seafaring spectacle that requires a large cast and magical stage effects. But in a needless attempt to economize, Kulick double- and multi-casts recklessly, and diddles with two ship models—one small and portable, one large inside a glass container wheeled about on casters to and fro—instead of giving us one decent shipboard set. Even a competent actor such as Sam Tsoutsouvas is overused and undereffective in triple exposure, but damage can be done with less: Viola Davis confuses Shakespeare with August Wilson, Francis Jue plays the brutish Leonine as a girlish Leontine, and Miriam A. Laube turns Marina, the paragon of maidenly grace consigned to a brothel, into an ill-spoken gypsy romping through her caravan.

Mark Wendland's sets and Anita Yavich's costumes wallow in absurdity; Mimi Jordan Sherin's would-be prettifying lighting is chicken soup to a corpse. Mark Bennett's “original music” is rather too original to pass for music, and Naomi Goldberg's choreography is more appropriate to puppets, with which she has often worked. This peregrinating Pericles, forced from his home in Tyre, becomes the Prince of Tiresome.