Review: Cymbeline for Lesbians

Royalty in disguise, crossdressing, an evil queen, and a very significant piece of jewelry—Cymbeline has everything you might expect from a Shakespeare play spare one thing: men. At least that’s the case in NAATCO and Play On Shakespeare’s off-Broadway take at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater. Turning Elizabethan tradition on its head, this production, directed by Stephen Brown-Fried with a “modern verse translation” by Andrea Thome, features not one man in the cast (press materials refer to the casting as “all-femme” in the fashionable parlance of a bygone era).

And surely, if an all-male company could debut this 400-year-old comedy-drama about male trust issues, an all-femme company is best positioned to shine a light on the misogyny baked into Cymbeline, drawing it out and making it that much funnier.

The theory is solid, but the results are mixed, with some cast members delivering revelatory comic performances and others fading into the fabric of Ant Ma’s austere scenic design, which employs bedding and trunks as the building blocks of this fantasy version of ancient Britain at the dawn of the Roman Empire.

Surprisingly receding is Amy Hill, who plays Cymbeline, vassal king of the “swan’s nest” at the northwestern edge of the world. At the insistence of his second wife, the Queen (Maria-Christina Oliveras, who really ought to get a call from Disney at the end of this run), Cymbeline would like his daughter from his first marriage, Imogen (Jennifer Lim), to marry the queen’s son from her first marriage, Cloten (the hilarious Jeena Yi embodying a princeling so grotesque that even the Trump family would scorn him). They will solidify the family’s hold on power through this most innocuous form of incest.

But Imogen has already taken matters into her own hands by marrying Posthumus, a childhood friend portrayed by KK Moggie in another strangely muted performance. Enraged, Cymbeline banishes Posthumus to the continent. That’s where he meets the Italian rake Iachimo (Anna Ishida), who wagers he can seduce the allegedly chaste Imogen—a bet Posthumus foolishly accepts.

Hands in her pockets and subtle poison on her tongue, Ishida seems to conjure the entire breadth of lesbian exploitation cinema. The scene in which she pops out of a trunk in Imogen’s chamber to soliloquize over her body is especially creepy, reminiscent of Barbara Covett in Notes on a Scandal. She later appears as a jailer with (you guessed it) a giant ring of keys. Ishida understands the assignment and delivers the most convincing performance in support of Brown-Fried’s vision—but I still suspect that the bedroom scene is far less menacing when the creeper is a woman.

“If you can penetrate her with your fingering, good: we’ll try with tongue too,” says Cloten to a band of musicians (don’t get any funny ideas) hastily conscripted from the audience. Thome has only lightly altered this line from Shakespeare’s original (replacing the word “so” with “good,” just to give you an idea of what “modern verse translation” entails) and that proves to be the correct choice, allowing Yi to luxuriate in the bard’s unrivaled bawdiness.

If Posthumus’s trust in Imogen is well-placed (if all too easily withdrawn), Cymbeline’s trust in his wife proves to be foolhardy as she and Cloten insult the Roman envoy (Purva Bedi) and convince Cymbeline to cut off tribute to Augustus. War looms. Meanwhile, Imogen flees to Wales hoping to be reunited with her husband. Disguised as a boy, she instead meets an old gentleman (also Oliveras, but practically unrecognizable from her earlier appearance as the queen) and two young men (Annie Fang and Sarah Suzuki) with a secret past. It’s deep into Act 3 and the exposition just keeps falling like the English rain.

This obviously leaves a lot of loose ends for Shakespeare to tie up in Act 5, and that leads to one of the two great triumphs of this production as this ludicrously distended resolution is played for maximum comic effect, with snappy line deliveries keeping us hanging on every word. Most delightfully, Hill’s performance finally comes into focus as Cymbeline becomes the good-natured but mostly clueless monarch he was always meant to be.

The second triumph is Mariko Ohigashi’s costumes, which synthesize couture streetwear and medieval battle attire. Lace-up boots stomp across the stage like a runway and everyone has at least one item in leather or pleather. It’s as if Moschino put out a collection inspired by the ren faire.

That hugely imaginative design element is not enough to keep the play from sagging at times. But as far as productions of Cymbeline go, you could do worse.