This month, Cold Frame Collective is presenting a new staging of Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre. This isn’t one of Shakespeare’s better-known plays, and in fact might not have been written by Shakespeare at all (or might’ve been co-written by him, depending on which scholar you ask). It’s classified as one of the comedies, but mostly now referred to as one of the ‘late romances.� All of those oddities might be why it’s not performed much, but they’re also part of why Cold Frame wanted to put it on stage.
“It’s like a blank slate almost because people haven't seen it, and so that's part of what drew us to it. This is a show that we've wanted to do for quite a while,� says Cold Frame co-artistic director Audrey Barret, “but we felt like we needed to build up an audience first � kind of a loyal audience that will come see our shows � because nobody has heard of this play. It is a little tough because it's one of the ones people are like, did Shakespeare write this? Did he start it and someone else finished it? Did he start it and died, like what happened? There's a lot of mystery around it.�
“It's a very fun show, but it's very difficult,� says Patrick Wheeler, who plays the title role in this production. “People didn't know what category to put it in. It's episodic, which is unique, as far as Shakespeare's catalog goes. So it's a lot of short stories from seaport to seaport to seaport as we're following Pericles's journey, as he's looking for adventure, looking for love, finding danger, losing battles to raging sea storms. Is it a comedy because there are weddings? Is it a tragedy because there are deaths? And all those things happen in the middle of the show, which is also unique to Shakespeare, because Shakespeare gives us those clues of like, oh, a comedy ends with a marriage. Nope, we're gonna do it before the first act intermission, you know?�
“I’ve read so many Shakespeare plays and just a couple of years ago was the first time I read Pericles,� says Liz Zimmerman, who plays Thaisa. “I sat down basically with a bunch of friends, and this was the one we read and we all went in going, God, Pericles, who knows� like what is this? It ended up being our favorite play when we were done. It's so unexpected. It is not at all what you think it's gonna be. It turns everything on its head.�
“Yeah, it's a fairy tale. [That’s] the really simplistic description that we've been giving, to kind of make it more relatable to modern audiences. It's a fairy tale. There's a prince and there's a princess and there's an evil queen and there's good kings and bad kings and there's pirates� and things end up happy at the end.�
“This is this is just coming into my brain now, but Pericles is actually one of the reasons why I do theater,� Wheeler remembers. “I saw it in New York when my uncle took me on a trip to see a friend of his off Broadway, and it was very formative for me. It was sweeping. It was beautiful. It was hilarious. I don't remember much about the story, but I remember the feeling. I remember being overwhelmed with emotion, and I'm excited and ready and proud to be a part of that vehicle that hopefully can� tell the story in a successful way and hopefully give that to the audience.�
