'Pericles, Prince of Tyre' and 'The Maids' review: from fun to frightening

By Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal

September 7, 2017

Eric Tucker is America’s best classical stage director, and American Players Theatre is America’s best classical theater festival. It’s fitting, then, that APT has brought Mr. Tucker to Wisconsin to stage a Shakespeare play, and that the results, performed in the company’s outdoor amphitheater, should be so miraculously memorable. “Pericles, Prince of Tyre” is rarely staged because of the near-insurmountable complexities of its plot, but Mr. Tucker has turned it into a crowd-pleaser. By turns earthy and fanciful, unabashedly absurd and divinely poetic, his production is a riotous explosion of pure joy.

Unlike Shakespeare’s better-loved plays, “Pericles” is—not to put too fine a point on it—more than a bit of a mess. A loose-knit skein of coincidence, it tells the increasingly implausible tale of a Phoenician prince who loses his wife and daughter at sea, then finds them again at the end of a string of adventures that occupy several decades and involve some 60-odd characters. What’s more, Mr. Tucker has mounted it in the crazy-quilt style of his own Bedlam Theatre Company, performing the play with 10 actors who switch without warning from part to part, changing accents as cheerfully as they change hats. But thanks mostly to his own shrewd direction and partly to the colorful, ingeniously designed costumes of Daniel Tyler Mathews, it’s not hard to stay abreast of the plot, and the occasional moments of near-chaos become part of the fun.

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