Often when an improv scene is going nowhere, the director will shove an actor onto the stage to bring a new energy, a new texture, a new something to play.  And sometimes it works.  Particularly if the new actor comes on with a powerful objective or obsession and the people onstage can turn from the unrewarding field they have been plowing and have something fresh to cope with.

It happens in plays, too.  Not all plays are planned out ahead of time.  Sometimes a writer will begin with a setup and a few characters and start writing to see what happens.  In such cases, the writer may discover the story only a little ahead of the audience.  For instance, I always felt that William Saroyan had no firm idea as to where The Time of Your Life was going.  He just kept adding characters hoping that one of them would help.  And finally he added Kit Carson, an amiably addled cowboy who seemed to live in a world of tall tales, and let him kill off the villain in an offhand way so that the curtain could come down.

I have a hunch that Pericles was written like that.  Shakespeare (and whatever collaborator he had on the project) seemed to run into one narrative sand trap after another which he would blast his way out of by introducing shipwrecks, pirates, sudden and arbitrary shifts in behavior.  I find none of this remotely persuasive and have always felt that Pericles was a slapdash affair that occupied the bottom of my list of Shakespeares I had any interest in seeing again.  

But the Fiasco Company has decided to take it on, and I have liked or loved everything I have seen the Fiascos do.  (Their productions of Cymbeline and Two Gentlemen of Verona were my favorite productions of those lesser plays.)  And I have to say I enjoyed what they did with Pericles.  Not that they made me think any better of the play.  I still think it’s a mess and that the title character, probably unique among Shakespeare’s characters, has no inner life to speak of.  But the Fiascos are storytellers and, even when the story is bonkers, they get pleasure from—and give pleasure by—revealing the next silly thing that happens.  The company uses song, dance, mime and the transformation of whatever objects are on hand to induce a giddy state in the audience.  They introduce the most improbable narrative lurches with a winning “You’re not gonna believe this shit” bravado.  Well, I didn’t believe this shit, but I didn’t care.  Their joy was contagious and I had a happy evening at CSC in their company.  

I can’t remember enjoying a dopey play more.