Director's Notes

The wonderful thing about live theatre is that it can break free from the bonds of reality while still bringing us face to face with the truth about who we are and what we are capable of doing. William Shakespeare's Cymbeline is the perfect example of this dual nature of theatre. Shakespeare provides sublimely ridiculous situations in the play while presenting us with characters whose actions and personalities remind us of our own follies, insecurities, and passions. The characters in Cymbeline are audacious, brave, cunning, kind, thoughtless, intelligent, wicked, and above all passionate in everything they do, as are we all. This play gives us the opportunity to see ourselves writ large and reminds us that our choices affect not only ourselves, but those who rely on us and whom we love.

This fairy tale of a play deserves a fantastical approach. Our production employs the outrageous physical styling of commedia dell'arte, a type of broad, improvisational theatre that was contemporaneous with Shakespeare's later productions, including Cymbeline. In fact, the characters in Cymbeline closely resemble some of commedia's better-known characters. For example, the play's vainglorious and rather stupid Cloten (rhymes with rotten) bears a startling resemblance to commedia's buffoonish Miles Gloriosus, while the clever and loyal servant, Pisanio, seems a close counterpart to the mischievous and cunning commedia character Harlequin. In our production, six commedia Zannis, or clowns, using text, music, and mask, take on all twenty characters in the play. You are invited to join our actors on the adventure-filled journey of the Princess Imogen and her banished husband. In a mere eighty minutes we will travel together from the luxury of an English royal court to the decadence of Italy, on to the wild forests of England, and finally to blood soaked fields of war. Hang on to your hats, the journey begins!