Interview with Pericles Director, Paul Moser!
You should come see Proof this weekend and Pericles in just under a month! Here's an interview with Director Paul Moser about why his version of the Shakespeare classic is different and should be seen by the Oberlin community.
So you have done a lot of work with Shakespeare’s plays. Is this the first time you’ve done Pericles?
This is the first time that I’ve done “Pericles”. I’ve only seen the play performed once, as a grad student at Yale Drama School (w both Chris Noth and Patricia Clarkson in the cast!)
Over the years, I have directed many Shakespeare plays, from comedies like “Twelfth Night” (4Xs) and “Midsummer Night’s Dream” (3xs) to tragedies like “Romeo and Juliet” and “Hamlet”, to histories like “Henry IV” and “Richard II” to problem plays like “Merchant of Venice” and “Measure for Measure”. While the structure and content of these differ a great deal, they all share a continuity of writing style, dramatic action and staging conventions that are distinctly “Shakespearean”; this is not the case with “Pericles”. It is an oddly UN-Shakespearean play in many ways: it is heavily dependent upon narration, the writing style of the first two acts do not match the last three acts, many of the characterizations are extremely two dimensional, it contains multiple spectacular or fantastical episodes, and it’s dual plot story is so episodic that the play defies all Aristotelian unities. This has made it an especially challenging, yet fun and fascinating play to conceptualize for production.
Why did you choose the play?
As Theater faculty, we try to be responsive to the needs and interests of our students. Last year, in an effort to coordinate our season with the AMAM’s realism exhibit, the department presented three realistic plays. “The Promise” – post-Soviet Realism. “Nellie’s” – Contemporary American Realism. And “Ghosts” – the quintessential naturalist play. Several of my students voiced their desire to get away from so much realistic work, and do something else, particularly Shakespeare. And so I tried to think of a fitting project. I was drawn to “Pericles”; in part because it had a lot of women’s roles and an episodic structure that would allow for an ensemble approach. I am also intrigued by plays which attempt to create what Peter Brook called a “Holy Theater” experience – where the original impulse is to draw the audience into a greater awareness of the “invisible” within human condition. Specifically, “Pericles” portrays the role of Providence – or “the miraculous” – as central to human experience; it sprawls over vast space and time, with strong folklore motifs and a heavy reliance upon music, spectacle, and dumb-shows, all framed by unabashed old-fashioned story-telling
What is your concept for this show?
In a nutshell – I might describe my approach to the show as Story-Theater Shakespeare. The more I researched, analyzed and puzzled over this play, the more I saw it as a celebration of story telling rather than as a play per se. Lots of the dialogue just consists of characters providing expositional back-story; but more importantly, a central device of the original script –somewhat unique to Shakespeare - is the inclusion of a narrator figure – John Gower (the author of the first English novel, which included a version of “Apollonius of Tyre” on which “Pericles” is based) who Shakespeare “resurrects” to tell the story himself intermittently as a kind of chorus figure. I decided to adapt and assign this function to the whole ensemble cast, employing a style borrowed from Story-Theater –the improvisation-devised theater pieces originally applied to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, by Paul Sills’ company ( which eventually evolved into Second City) Sill’s techniques were inspired by his mother, Viola Spolin’s actor training methods (which is how I studied acting growing up) : self-narration, actors playing multiple characters, mask work, clowning, theatrical puppetry, and actor-created environments and sound-scapes.
So, rather than creating a theater piece dependent upon an invisible fourth wall, and sophisticated scenery and acting to create an illusion that suspends our disbelief – this relatively low-tech production consists of an ensemble of twelve actors who “tell a story”.
What is your design concept for this show and which orientation of Hall are you using?
The seating for Pericles will be on the stage as I find that both audience and performers appreciate the intimacy of that set-up. The seating is purposely meant to echo the shape of an amphitheater. The set is very simple - composed of concentric circles, drawing from medieval notions of the geometry of the cosmos but also reflecting magic circles of rituals or Jungian notions of mandala. A sail, a few props and changes in lights will aid the actors in establishing the numerous locales.
Are you drawing on inspiration from anything in particular that you’ve found either in your dramaturgical research or elsewhere?
The story of “Pericles, Prince of Tyre” is partially based upon John Gower’s version of the antique story of “Apollonius of Tyre” in Confesso Amantis (1390), still popular in Shakespeare’s time. Even though a quarto version of “Pericles” sold more copies than any other Shakespeare play during the playwright’s lifetime, curiously it was not included by his fellow actors in the first folio of his collected works. This raises the question of whether Shakespeare even wrote “Pericles”, and scholars have continued to dispute its authorship over the years – offering various theories: that Shakespeare didn’t write any of it; that it’s a corrupted script marred by the faulty memory of whoever pirated it for its original printing; that it was co-written by Shakespeare and at least one other playwright (various suspects have been hypothesized); or, that it was a very “early” Shakespeare play that was later resurrected with few mature revisions. Probably some combination of these theories is correct. My study and work on the play leads me to think that he at least co-wrote the last three acts but that his poetry and dramatic sophistication are missing from the first two acts. We will never know. Assuming that Shakespeare had at least some hand in the writing of the play, given the known dates of its first performances, it would have been his first attempt at inventing a new dramatic genre, now usually referred to as his Romances, also including “Cymbeline”, “The Winter’s Tale” and “The Tempest”. The play has different similarities to each of these three final plays.
Shakespeare’s plays are the ultimate Rorschach Inkblot Test; people invariably project themselves and/or their own age’s agendas onto his work – thus, many contemporary scholars present him as a feminist, anti-colonial, multicultural, environmentally-sustainable gender-bender. But some have attempted to interpret Shakespeare’s work within the context of his own biography, time and cultural influences, rather than our own. I have found this critical approach more enlightening, and frankly much more useful to me as a practitioner when interpreting his work. Especially helpful for me, has been research about the Shakespeare family’s Catholicism, and its suppression by a sometimes-violent Anglican regime. F.D. Hoeninger, the editor of the Arden edition of “Pericles”, hypothesized that the play’s peculiar narrative style and episodic structure may be a reflection of an attempt by its author to draw upon the Miracle (or Saint’s) Play tradition, popular entertainments performed at Catholic churches throughout England, from medieval times until the Protestants banned them and many other folk festivities which they considered to be pagan (Celtic) or papish (Catholic). These didactic plays each recounted the lives and miracles of one of the Church’s saints with narration, simple dialogue and characterizations, spectacle, music and a final moral. Miraculous acts of the Saints included surviving shipwrecks, resurrection from near death, relieving populations of famine, experiencing visions of the Virgin Mary, finding lost relics, escaping imprisonment, defending ones virginity against all odds, and astonishing family reunions. These “miracles” all happen over the course of “Pericles”. Theoretically then, Shakespeare borrowed the core of the classical “Apollonius” story with its Greco-Roman (non-Christian) Gods and characters to make the play ostensibly non-religious to get it past the Puritan censors, but in actuality, he was resurrecting a popular outlawed folk tradition in disguise. Maybe. Embracing this notion, this production has both presented various events in the narrative as miraculous, while also trying to incorporate a celebratory festive energy.
How have you utilized puppets in the past and how are you going about incorporating them in this show?
I have used puppets and masks in other productions. For instance, many years ago I directed a theatrical-puppet production of Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” for the Indianapolis Symphony – utilizing over three dozen puppets ranging in size from three feet to thirty feet. One actor narrated the show (and did all the voices) at a music stand while the entire symphony accompanied the show from behind a scrim. And more recently, my OSTF productions of “A Wrinkle in Time” and “The Tempest” integrated various kinds of puppets.
How would you describe your process of collaborating with the choreographer, the sound designer, and the ensemble for this production?
I’ve worked a lot with both Holly Handman and Sam Fisher, mostly for OSTF; so I know I can trust these guys. They are both very skilled story-tellers, but while I come to theater thru acting, they come to it thru choreography and music. After outlining for them my basic ideas throughout the production, I give them a lot of room to develop and explore their own ideas – before giving them feedback – and they also give me feedback on what I’m doing. We enjoy collaborating.
What departments/classes are relevant to your play?
Are there any specific organizations you would like us to direct publicity to? (Kendall, etc.)
Kendall, OSTF Shakespeare audience.
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