Review: "Pericles" West Coast Premiere Shines at Theater At Boston Court

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Taking shelter from the storm with a crazy story

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There comes a moment early in the scene-establishing ramp-up of PERICLES, PRINCE OF TYRE at the Boston Court Theatre in Pasadena where an actor rummages through a box and chooses between scripts. The setting is a high school gym that has been reconfigured into an evacuation shelter. Some really awful storm is raging outside the walls of this otherwise well-fortified bunker and a handful of shelter-seekers trundle in bearing suitcases, staking out cots, trying (unsuccessfully) to establish cell phone connections and otherwise doing their best to make do. Among them is Joel Swetow – soon to speak the production’s first words as the Chorus Gower - who happens upon a box in which he discovers a copy of KING LEAR (no, pass!), then WAITING FOR GODOT (nope!) and finally PERICLES. Eureka, that’s the one, and Swetow/Gower-to-be starts handing out pages, enlisting his fellow evacuees to act out the play, presumably to help pass the time.

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The conceit isn’t a misguided one. In staging the west coast premiere of Ellen McLaughlin ’s modern verse translation of PERICLES, director Margaret Shigeko Starbuck and a thoroughly can-do 10-person cast are working their respective Helicanuses and Thaisas off to keep this lesser-staged romance punchy and relevant. Largely, their resourcefulness elicits some real magic, as every found object – from a swim noodle to a bit of netting, from a cell phone flashlight to cast away pieces of mylar – are employed to launch Pericles on his journey. For these evacuees, the need for storytelling and the creative steps required to make it happen transcend stage fright, natural disasters, enmity, you name it.

McLaughlin (TONGUE OF A BIRD, THE NARROW BED) penned her translation as part of Play On Shakespeare’s initiative to open up the works of William Shakespeare to new and diverse audiences. Consider this PERICLES, then, to be appropriately cracked open, although it would have been a boon to give us a bit more context around who is doing the shelling. That scene-establishing intro is not short. Folks are interacting with each other, but exactly who these people are, where they are, who they’re missing and any relationship they have to each other is entirely unexplained. For the purposes of this exercise, they’re here to erect the proverbial barn and put on a show!

And what a show this is! Of Shakespeare’s obscure romances, PERCILES is a crazy quilt of a tale replete with voyages across the oceans, incestuous kings, presumed dead individuals thrown into sea only to be brought back to life later, pirates, prostitutes, gods, nuns, betrayals and reunions. No statues made human or exiting pursued by a bear, but yeah there’s a lot of stuff going down.

Starting out as a basketball court, Michelle Joo’s transformable set proves fertile ground for the play's remarkable journeys, particularly when the cast members start employing Rye Mandel’s wonderful assortment of props for creative purposes. Granted, everyone’s stuck inside, but when you start using risers, cell phone flashlights, snacks and drinks to bring PERICLES to life, that's inventiveness. Props (pun every bit intended) especially for turning a bunch of volleyballs decorated to mimic CAST AWAY’S Wilson into the severed heads of the princes who unsuccessfully sought the hand of the Princess of Antioch.

Meshing smoothly with the spirit of this production is McLaughlin’s translation which mixes portions of the Elizabethan text with present day speech without the effect coming across as pandering or jarring. So instead of a fisherman saying:

“Nay, master, said not I as much when I saw the porpoise how he bounced and tumbled? They say they’re half fish, half flesh; a plague on them! They ne’er come but I look to be washed. Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.”

becomes…

“See, boss, that’s what I’m talking about. Didn’t I say? I knew the porpoises jumping around like that meant bad luck. They say they’re half and half, porpoises, both fish and man, which, I gotta tell you, just gives me the creeps. I wonder what it’s like to be a fish. I mean, how they live out there in the sea like that.”

Starbuck’s cast – most of them playing multiple roles – embrace the ask of the production with gusto (even those whose characters appeared to enter the endeavor reluctantly). In the title role, Randolph Thompson is convincingly heroic, cunning or personally distraught as the case may dictate. Nicole Javier has plenty of spunk and later broken-down reverence as his queen, Thaisa. Collectively, ensemble members Joel Swetow , Julanne Chidi Hill , Desiree Mee Jung , Adam J. Smith , Alexander Matos, Jamie Gallo and Rio Masch are all given plenty to do in the name of world-building.

Post-intermission, the story turns to the fortunes of Pericles and Thaisa’s daughter Marina who, now grown up, ends up as clobbered by the whims of fate as anybody else in the play. Troy Leigh-Anne Johnson wanders into the evacuation center with a bang just before intermission. Again, we have no idea who this person is, but once the lights go down again, she’s pressed into service and given an important role to play

Which, in this context, makes her a storyteller because that’s precisely what these tempestuous circumstances require.

PERICLES continues through September 27 at 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena.

Photo of Randolph Thompson, Desiree Mee Jung , Adam J Smith, Nicole Javier and Julanne Chidi Hill by Brian Hashimoto.

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/los-angeles/article/Review-PERICLES-at-Theater-At-Boston-Court-20260911)._