Word: thaisa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Admittedly, to produce Shakespeare's Pericles. Prince of Tyre courts disaster. The play is rarely performed and for good reason. An inane plot juxtaposes strength, integrity and innocence--embodied in three main characters, Pericles. Thaisa and Marina--with a passel of debauched and wicked malefactors. Goodness prevails in a series of circumstances and coincidences which quickly becomes a caricature of itself," this day, the play remains of questionable authorship, though a number of well-turned and colorful phrases reveal the Elizabethan Bard. Indeed, language, infages, themes and parallels occasionally redeem the play, but mostly it just sloughs along. Uncut...
...director does create a few inspired and captivating images. The knights vie for Thaisa as hockey-masked, business-suited drag racers; the final act heightens Pericles' dejection by portraying him as a dirty bearded Howard Hughes bum in a box: a single swinging light on a black stage conjures a violent storm. And the opening, with narrator Brother Blue emerging from a turquoise pool of light and fog, works well. Simple scenes in the hands of Sellars can become striking: the discovery of Thaisa's coffin by villagers plays hauntingly, though many other poignant scenes fall flat. Background music takes...
...Sellars treated them like his hobby, puppets. Sellars' novel device in Pericles actually does just that--turns actors into puppets, using plastic masks on the evil characters. The technique produces an eerie, sinister effect; the masks, sometimes grotesque, sometimes animal, sometimes human, look frighteningly real. Though without masks, Pericles, Thaisa and Marina are equally un rounded as characters; when Lysimachus removes his mask repenting of his past ways, the easy gimmick becomes a tour de force...
...affects the same position, demeanor, voice and gestures until his idiosyncrasies become grating and tiresome. Pericles, played by Ben Halley Jr. mimics a stiff operatic James Earl Jones, a stunning figure with fine diction, but his manner is too rigidly classical and neither dramatic nor human. Sandra Shipley as Thaisa plays her role with quiet understanding and control. With only a few lines, she surmounts Pericles as the family's core. Jeannie Affelder '83 as Marina speaks and moves with soulless uniformity, relieved only by her song, which is sweet and sonorous. Other high points include Paul Redford...