APT's wild and playful 'Pericles' takes a journey of joyful proportions

By Lindsay Christians, The Capital Times

August 21, 2017

SPRING GREEN — The performers in “Pericles” burst onto the stage like an exploding barrel of monkeys. Dressed in street clothes, they climb into the audience, kids on a jungle gym ready to start a new game.

For the next few hours, these 10 actors will be our storytellers for a tale theatrical and preposterous. 

They invent and re-invent the world of the play as they go, switching accents from Russian Bond villain to Southern farm wife. They swap crowns for doo-rags and priest’s robes for fur coats. They climb onto a stairway to turn it into a great ship and rattle a sheet of metal to make the sound of a storm at sea.

Costume drama might be pretty, but Shakespeare doesn’t get much more fun than this.

Leading “Pericles, Prince of Tyre” this summer at American Players Theatre is Eric Tucker, the artistic director of Bedlam Theatre in New York. His recent production of “Sense and Sensibility,” according to the New York Times, was full of “triumphant joy” in a “defiantly theatrical form.”  

Tucker’s staging at APT of Shakespeare’s challenging 1603 epic has a similar energetic spirit, aided by Andrew Boyce’s marvelous, free-form scenic design and Michael A. Peterson’s openly exposed lighting.  

With the machinations of theater magic laid bare and lots of silliness, the classically-trained company seems to have used the parody “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)” as a training regimen.

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