Succumbing To Subtlety Poem by gershon hepner

Greedy, power-hungry people we
encounter every day at work,
the people from whom we attempt to flee,
because we don’t like superjerks,
when magnified on stage and screen in works
of art that we enjoy, become
the characters that don’t drive us beserk,
since we to subtlety succumb.

Ben Brantley reviews in the NYT on August 25,2008 a performance of Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline” at the Boscobel Restoration in Dutchess County (“The Plot’s A Tangle: It’s Setting Not At All) :
The seeming incongruities in tone of “Cymbeline, ” along with its haphazard recycling of Shakespearean staples and sketchily drawn character, have led some scholars to see it as self-conscious parody, cynical writing-for-hire or the product of a tired old playwright who was, as Lytton Strachey put it, “half bored to death.” But Mr. O’Brien, in a program note, prefers to think of it as a rule-transcending masterpiece, quoting J. M. Nosworthy, who compares “Cymbeline” to the late works of Beethoven as “a comprehensive piece of impressionism.” This attitude would seem to license a hazy, arty approach. But Mr. O’Brien is, as always, painstaking in his clarity. If the performers in a Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival production rarely provide intricate psychological nuance, they almost always deliver confident, clean-lined portraits that exactly serve the plot and illuminate the theme. You never leave a show thinking, “What was that about? ” This straightforward acting style works especially well for “Cymbeline.” As entertainingly embodied here, the play’s villains, who also include the pocket-Iago type Iachimo (Noel Vélez) , aren’t psychosexual basket cases; they’re just superjerks, magnified versions of the greedy, self-impressed, power-hungry people you probably encounter in the office daily.And yes, the feelings of the priggish Posthumus do seem to spin on a ducat, but young people — make that all people — are given to behaving in ways incomprehensible even to themselves. This is especially true when they’re trapped in a hothouse atmosphere like a royal court. And everyone seems to grow up once they go a-wanderin’ in the woods, especially Ms. Hartke’s Imogen, who acquires eloquence, humility and beauty once she sheds royal attire for a male page’s clothes with the assistance of the trusty servant Pisanio (the delightfully droll Wesley Mann) .To underscore the redemptive powers of the sylvan, Mr. O’Brien has focused with fresh and witty emphasis on the play’s noble savages: Belarus (a pitch-perfect Richard Ercole) , a nobleman who fled Cymbeline’s court for the great outdoors after being falsely accused of treason, taking with him Cymbeline’s two small sons. Now young men, those boys (charmingly played by Christian Jacobs and Rolando Martinez) have the look of feral children but the manners of nature’s gentlemen. Watching these three characters gamboling across the grass and through the trees, calling to one another with lupine yips, you feel such vicarious pleasure that it’s a bit of a bummer when they are reintegrated into civilization. Not that this diminishes the absurdly moving chain of revelations and acts of forgiveness that concludes “Cymbeline.” As each successive coincidence, one more ridiculous than the other, announced itself, the audience laughed loudly. But I could see tears in the eyes around me as well. And when Cymbeline, victorious in battle, announced the dawn of a glorious, all-pardoning peace in his concluding lines, it was hard not to melt altogether. The tone of Mr. Johnson’s Cymbeline is exultant, of course, but also a shade disbelieving, a reminder that a harsher world, where wars never stop and forgiveness comes hard, awaits in the night beyond.


8/25/08