Sharpened Shakespeare

What will Joe Banno do next? Last season he directed for Source Theatre the only successful -- and only funny -- production of "The Merchant of Venice" I've ever seen. Now for the Washington Shakespeare Company he's taken Shakespeare's notoriously uneven and peculiar "Cymbeline" and turned it into a sexy, nasty, wittily berserk romp. With its antic references to contemporary culture -- cell phones, violent movies, Federal Express, prime-time soaps, boomboxes, espresso -- the production practically defines the term "postmodern," but under all the frolic there's emotion and sensuality. It's a candy box heart that pumps real blood.

To accomplish this, Banno and his assistant director, Cam Magee, have had to edit the text pretty severely. "Cymbeline" is one of Shakespeare's later plays, and most scholars believe that he was aiming for the new form that he later realized in "The Tempest." Aiming, and falling way, way short.

In a snit because his daughter Imogen (Michelle Shupe) has married the wrong man, King Cymbeline (Jeff Baker) banishes the husband, Posthumus (Christopher Wilson). The Queen (Miyuki Williams) plots to get Cloten, (Paul Takacs) her son by an earlier marriage, onto the throne.

Meanwhile: War breaks out between Britain and the Roman Empire, and the Eurotrash slime Iachimo (John Emmert) schemes to come between Posthumus and Imogen. And out in the Welsh wilderness, the banished courtier Belarius (Jim Zidar) lives, survivalist-militiaman style, in a cave with Cymbeline's two sons, Guiderius (Christopher Janson) and Arviragus (Andrew Price), whom he stole in infancy. If this weren't enough, there's also a pageant in which Jupiter descends from the sky, though not in this production. Presumably it's the first thing Banno and Magee cut.

They went on to remove a lot of the battles, several philosophical soliloquies and all but the essential parts of the famously interminable last scene, in which everyone recognizes everyone else and all the plot strings are tied up. This is no more than Shakespeare Theatre director Michael Kahn cut from "Henry VI," though that had an economic basis and here the idea is to enable the director to get hold of and master an awkwardly shaped play. I'm sure valid aesthetic arguments can be made against such a practice. All I can say is that the resulting script plays like a firecracker.

For all the modern trappings he adds, Banno has concentrated on the fairy tale elements in the story. Imogen is the wronged princess who must go on a quest and endure hardships to regain her true love. Many playgoers -- among them Swinburne -- have rapturously declared Imogen the most wonderful of Shakespeare's heroines. Forthright, active and enduring in the face of absurdity, she's certainly the most modern, an adult version of Alice in Wonderland or Dorothy in Oz.

Shupe, graceful in both face and manner, plays her beautifully. She makes the character virtuous without priggishness, and gives her frankness and courage and uncloying innocence. Her Imogen also has a sense of humor -- a quality the character really needs, what with nearly being poisoned, barely avoiding rape, and waking up at one point next to a headless corpse.

The snake in the garden here is Emmert's Iachimo, cobra-sleek in an Italian suit (Edu. Bernardino has again made sumptuous costumes on no budget). Emmert is pretty divine here. His sardonic, stylish, world-weary Iachimo is in the Jeremy Irons mold, but he has a comic exasperation all his own, and even brings some pain to the character. With reptilian sexuality, he turns the attempted rape of the sleeping Imogen into a genuinely creepy scene: You cringe when he touches her.

In that scene, Imogen's bed is represented by a long, pure white linen sheet that stretches from her body all the way offstage. Tony Cisek's design is full of these surprising, mysteriously right images -- a railroad track in a windy countryside, a dank morgue with two sheeted corpses. Banno and sound designer Daniel Schrader have produced a soundtrack that is by turns haunting, oddball and funny, depending on the mood wanted, and Ayun Fedorcha's lights guide us through this never-never land of romance, coincidence and true love.

The performances are vivid to the point of welcome eccentricity. Baker has very little to do as Cymbeline, but he does it smoothly, creating a modern CEO divorced from emotional reality. Ion C. Laskaris brings dignity to the tiny role of Lucius; Rena Cherry Brown transforms her servant's part into a comic turn; Chuck Young is funny in three different ways as a doctor, a Frenchman and a philosophical executioner. Janson and Price are hilarious as the two lost princes, simple, faithful, fierce and dumb as dogs.

Jon Sherman actually creates something touching out of the sentimental role of the faithful servant Pisanio; Takacs's Cloten is an amusingly punkish, and also scary, lout; Williams schemes malevolently as the wicked Queen and Kila D. Burton cowers as her maid; and Jim Zidar is uprightness itself as the patient Belarius, who has to cope with the boys' sticking "The Untouchables" in the VCR whenever he's out of the cave.

Posthumus is a terrible part -- he has to behave first irrationally, then dopily, and he's not even in two of the acts. But Wilson manages to make him attractive, sympathetic and even noble.

Throughout the evening, the moods switch without warning -- from comedy to sorrow to grotesque violence to sweetness to slapstick. This dizzying mix is not just the work of Banno and his company -- it's there in the script. No wonder the play has had such an unfortunate production history. Here at the end of the 20th century, filmmakers from Hitchcock to Tarantino have taught us to accept humor with horror and to take bizarrely mixed tones in stride. Finally, after four centuries, we've caught up with Shakespeare.

Cymbeline, by William Shakespeare.
Directed by Joe Banno. Props, Karen J. Sugrue.
At the Washington Shakespeare Company through Jan. 5. Call 703-418-4808.