Liz Lauren
Colleen Madden, left, Sarah Day, center, and Tracy Michelle Arnold are among the all-woman cast in APT's 2021 version of 'Cymbeline.'
APT’s provocative new production of Cymbeline has had an unusual journey from concept to completion, led by director Marti Lyons and the artistic team at American Players, who believed that this lesser known Shakespeare play was ripe for modern reinterpretation. The resulting adaptation uses a smaller, all-female cast to question the historic mistreatment of women whose virtue was questioned and who ultimately would not submit to being controlled by their fathers, suitors or husbands.
It began last summer, when American Players Theatre switched to virtual readings in lieu of live performances, abandoning its original slate of plays for a selection of pieces that lent themselves well to the medium of Zoom. In one of many COVID-related changes of plans, director Marti Lyons directed a video reading of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline for APT instead of helming Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility for the company.
That Cymbeline, adapted by Henry Woronicz, trimmed the play down to eight actors and used some powerful doubling, while streamlining the plot and themes. After watching the Zoom production, the APT artistic staff began to see new perspectives in the play, including a powerful examination of toxic masculinity and difficult questions about vengeance and forgiveness.
That experiment led to yet another adaptation of Cymbeline, one of the bard’s later, often overlooked, plays, undertaken by Lyons and APT’s director of voice and text, Sara Becker. The result utilizes the first all-female cast of a classic play that APT has undertaken in its 40+ year history — enabling the company to offer exceptional non-traditional roles to its actresses, while pointedly examining the inherent misogyny in the characters and plot. Featuring a multicultural cast of eight women, half of them from APT’s Core Company, this version of Cymbeline greets — and challenges —audiences outdoors in the Hill Theatre, through Sept. 11.
“It truly opens up new facets of the play,” says APT artistic director Brenda DeVita. “The story very much feels like a fairy tale, and it’s so much fun to play with those tropes and kind of turn them upside down, and inspect what’s relevant and true and exciting.”
Ultimately, she says, “it’s a play about forgiveness. Who deserves it? Is anything truly unforgivable? How do you hold people accountable for their misdeeds, whether they’re trivial or dangerous? Those are questions we, as a society, are asking every day, and it could not feel more timely.”
Becker says it’s unusual to work on Shakespeare plays that don’t have some cutting involved. “Sometimes you’re cutting for running time, sometimes you’re conflating characters and cutting for the cast size, and sometimes you’re cutting to highlight themes that the director feels particularly connected to. Marti and I did all of these things in our early script work together.”
Shakespeare’s scripts, published after his death, were compiled from a variety of partial actor scripts and bootleg editions, so a definitive version doesn’t really exist. “That gives creative artists an enormous amount of freedom to be in conversation with these texts,” Becker says.
Starting with Woronicz’s adaptation as a jumping off point, Lyons and Becker drew from different editions of Cymbeline, as well as their own research and ideas the actors brought to rehearsals, to shine a new light on the historical mistreatment of women.
Becker was attracted to Cymbeline because it’s “a late-career Shakespeare. His early plays are so different, and he seemed to always be trying to push his skills as a writer. You look at all of the elements in this play leading up to the glorious last scene, and have to wonder how he’s keeping all these balls in the air. How in heck is he going to tie this one up?”
Shakespeare’s late plays also spend a great deal of time on the theme of wrongs done to the innocent and the ultimate forgiveness for these offenses. “Forgiveness is really hard, mysterious. In life, it doesn’t always follow a tidy five-act structure,” says Becker. “Lots of people at the end of this play have something they have to apologize for. To watch forgiveness and apology bounce around the stage and the community of this play is incredible.”
Although the plot of Cymbeline is complex, this adaptation keeps it mostly intact, while telling some of the story visually. Some scenes have been rearranged, and some lines have been given to different characters, but the framework of the story is still there. “I think Shakespeare would like what this company has found,” Becker says.
Fashioning this version for an all-female cast was an important change. “One of the actors made the observation in rehearsals that so much of the casual misogyny in this play would skate right past you until you hear a female-identifying actor speak it,” Becker says.
Colleen Madden, who plays two of Imogen’s vengeful suitors in Cymbeline, says being in the all-female production was “totally free and empowering! We were a room of women from very different and diverse backgrounds and experiences. There was plenty of variety of opinion and insight to provide good balance.”
Castmate Melisa Pereyra, who plays the much-wronged Imogen, says that being in an all-female cast led her to question “what aspects of storytelling come from a patriarchal perspective and how does that affect my ‘performance’ of womanhood on stage? Without the male gaze, how do I see myself in the world and in this story? I loved that investigation during this process.”
Although women have played traditionally male roles in Shakespeare plays at APT before, this experience felt very different, says Madden. “Playing men as men was, in many ways, more challenging. We had to figure out what playing a man meant in the physical dimension, as well as psychologically. But in many ways it was easier and more exciting, because we could lean into the language of violence toward women — without doing backbends to justify why women would be saying these words.”
Pereyra agrees. “Watching women step into these male energies and characters was special because on a very basic level, no one had to explain the patriarchal, misogynistic and problematic perspectives at the center of this play. Having conversations about how we were going to deal with all of those subjects was invigorating and hopeful. By simply putting the words of these male characters in the bodies of a multiracial and multiethnic cast of women, we were able to let the problems see themselves. I think that’s a worthwhile endeavor in any work of art.”
Both Madden and Pereyra loved the experience of the all-female cast. “I really loved the camaraderie of the experience,” Madden says. “The play is so clearly Shakespeare sending up hyper-masculinity and its consequences in politics and in intimate things that make our world go round — and exploring these themes with other women was rad as hell. We dug in, we supported each other totally, and we laughed. A lot.”
