Pity poor Cymbeline, the late Shakespeare play without a single memorable speech to bolster it through the centuries. Oh, there are some good lines; "Falsehood is worse in kings than beggars" travels well, even though the story's set in pre-Christian Britain. Some situations and scenes evoke earlier, better plays: Romeo and Juliet (a secret potion and a parentally forbidden love), Macbeth (the scheming wife of a title character), Richard III (the last-act visitation of ghosts). And there's a raft of familiar dynamics: separated siblings, cases of mistaken identity and a bit of messiness when it comes to royal succession.
But Cymbeline doesn't add up to the sum of those parts, and an uneven production by New Theater in Coral Gables doesn't help much.
The setup: King Cymbeline, father of Imogen, doesn't approve of her choice in men -- Posthumus, a commoner who has grown up at court -- and banishes him. Cymbeline is a remarried widower whose sons were kidnapped 20 years ago. His current wife has a son, Cloten, who looks like Posthumus and seems much better for Imogen; certainly mother and son think so.
Although it bears the king's name, this rarely produced play belongs to Imogen. Luckily for the audience, Annemaria Rajala is up to the challenge. With voice and movements calibrated to the 100-seat theater and the crowded set, she projects the anger, desperation, sense of betrayal and occasional good humor Shakespeare gives her.
A Roman general arrives in Britain to collect the annual tribute Cymbeline has neglected to pay. In Italy, the banished Posthumus boasts of Imogen to a full-of-himself acquaintance, Iachimo, and agrees to a wager on her loyalty. Eventually almost all roads lead to Wales, where the sons of Cymbeline are living as the children of their kidnapper, a former aide to the king.
Playing both Posthumus and Cloten, Frank Rodriguez disappoints. Slouching and with his hair masking his face, his voice fails to carry. It's a big contrast to Steve Gladstone's stentorian and posture-perfect Cymbeline, who ostensibly raised Posthumus. And sound, costumes and makeup combine to make the ghosts of Posthumus' long dead parents and siblings all but incomprehensible.
But Robert Strain is affecting as Pisanio, the servant to a cycle of masters of both deserving and conniving ilk. Kudos to Barbara Sloan for playing the duplicitous Queen without a wink toward the audience. And Christopher Vicchiollo's Iachimo is perfectly oily in his manipulation of Imogen and gets the production's best costume, a black-and-white number.
Director Kathi E.B. Ellis uses the short center aisle to good and sometimes startling effect: Early on, a character making an entrance directs his asides at audience members, upping the laugh quotient. Toward the end, actors rush down the aisle wielding impressive prop weapons for the hand-to-hand combat between Romans and Britons. The audience by this time has heard some of the heftier props clanked together onstage, and we're glad a bit later to discover we've escaped becoming collateral damage.
