Summary 
Considerably trimmed but elegantly staged and costumed version of the odd romance story, plotted like a tragedy with a cruel banishment, a wager on a seduction attempt, and an impending war with Rome. Presented with liberal doses of humor, but uneven performances and a cumbersome emphasis on stage combat. Some evocative original music played live onstage in a handsome overall entertainment.
Design
Directed by Jay Paul Skelton. Set by Marcus Stephens. Costumes by Richard E. Donnelly. Lights by Kevin Dreyer. Original music and musical direction by Robert Steel.
Cast
Kevin Asselin (Iachimo), Wardell Julius Clark (Posthumus), Ian Paul Custer (Cloten), Margie Janiczek (Imogen), Joshua Jeffers (Polydor), Maureen Gallagher (Belaria), Lucy Lavely (Queen), Christopher McLinden (Pisanio), John Neisler (Cymbeline), Devin Preston (Cadwal), Scot Shepley (Caius Lucius).
Analysis
The set for Jay Paul Skelton's Cymbeline at the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival features a blend of middle-eastern, Moroccon/North African, and Spanish architecture, with an angular courtyard in front of intersecting purplish-white stucco walls. Five pairs of ornately paneled doors line the walls, and a walking area above provides performers with an unexpected space to provide musical accompaniment or observe other characters. The production begins with a bare-footed man in billowing white Arabian pants and colorful layers of filmy silk clothing banging a gong along the wall above. Characters emerge from the five doorways, all barefoot and all wearing loose layers of white and tan, and they sing as a chorus, smiling amiably and trading off lines from the text.
Skelton's Moroccan-style production is enhanced with an original score, some of the music played onstage, chimes and bells, some strings, even drums and maracas for rhythm. Margie Janiczek's plucky Imogen is the heart of the story, a cute-as-a-button heroine in short hair and a long red-dotted filmy-pink scarf, standing at the edge of the stage 1.2 to peer out over the audience in wistful anticipation of her Posthumus. Posthumus is portrayed with similar feistiness, an expressive young man barely able to stand still, especially when lied to by the Queen, who gives him a diamond ring and kisses upon his face. When King Cymbeline banishes him for his marriage choice, Skelton portrays the moment with dramatic shock as well as wise insight into character, as the action spills into the first rows of the audience. Cymbeline shouts and rages at the couple, banishing Posthumus and slapping Imogen across the face as the audience cringes nearby. The King then seems pained and sorrowful, almost defeated, lowering his head and sagging his shoulders, but he says nothing by way of apology.
Skelton's cuts to the text are judicious, streamlining the story and quickening the pace. He moves quickly to 1.5, with the yellow-clad and bespectacled doctor giving the severe queen a poisonous flower, then showing Posthumus within a stick-fighting exhibition while in exile. With observers perched above, ladies in blue sashes and sports bras wage single combat, shouting and swinging long sticks at one another. After Posthumus' exhibition, he finds his departure blocked by Iachimo's staff. Kevin Asselin's performance as Iachimo is the finest of the ensemble, assured and confident, handsome and poised like a leading man, but quick-witted and glib like a master villain. Asselin also serves as fight captain for the numerous - perhaps too many - exhibitions and fight sequences, and his short-haired, bearded villain instigates the 10,000 ducat wager on the fidelity of Imogen. Chimes sound and the cast freezes in place, allowing Asselin's intense Iachimo to step forward and soliloquize to the audience, and his attempted deceit of Imogen in 1.7 - "be revenged" - fails when he attempts to kiss her then must laugh off the gesture as a "test." To a drumming rhythm and a song sung from above, Janiczek's vulnerable Imogen reads by candlelight upon a pillow 2.2, Iachimo's trunk in her bedroom beside her. When she sleeps, Asselin's hand slithers from the trunk and slides the lock away, and he emerges in flickering candlelight to steal her bracelet, stand astride her to find her mole, then study her private chamber, before climbing back within the trunk to strummed guitar chords.
Skelton maximizes the comic relief provided by the pouty Cloten, clad in a phlegm-green jacket 1.3 while he pounds the stage with his staff in comical frustration. Attended by two female servants, one ignoring him and the other giving an array of unnoticed eye rolls, sighs, smirks, and sneers, Cloten receives a back rub, then smiles confidently to the audience in his romantic pursuit of Imogen. He plays and sings, of course poorly, knocking like a woodpecker at Imogen's door 2.3, after indicating his grossly sexual plans: he hopes to "penetrate her with my finger" and reveals, "I'll try with my tongue, too." Shunned by Imogen, now in a filmy blue blouse with navy squiggles, the vapid Cloten proves too ineffectual to be an actual villain, stomping in a snit - "his mean'st garment!" - with his hands on hips, and in 4.1 he sports Posthumus's clothes and sniffs at the Roman ambassadors, vainly holding his hand aloft so the Romans must come to him to shake his hand. He pulls a map on the stage closer to him with a foot, deigning to even bend, and when he attacks in 4.2 he is quickly screaming and running in the opposite direction.
Skelton crowds the intermission with the amassing conflicts, showing Iachimo shoved by Posthumus in 2.4 - "I'll deny nothing!" - the two men then squaring off on opposite sides of the stage, then the purple-robed Romans gathering for war 3.1 against Cymbeline's kingdom, and finally Posthumus lurking above, sidling along the wall, jealously watching the faithful Imogen. With 3.3 the gong is struck once more, and the entire cast again emerges to begin the second act, singing while a female Belarius - "Belaria," played with subtlety and wisdom and some welcome maturity within a mostly very youthful and unevenly effective ensemble - emerges from a center stage trap with her two adopted sons, Polydore and Cadwal. She speaks to them while they clean their knives, and they join her to sit devotedly on a downstage step, but with a chiming "ding" they freeze in mid-motion so Belaria can reveal to the audience in an aside that they are the sons of Cymbeline. The two boys indeed exhibit their royal lineage, Polydore returning 4.2 with Cloten's head within a bloody bag, and Cadwal carrying the supposedly deceased Imogen (as Fideles) and mourns her (him) with flowers and a tenderly sung a capella dirge: "fear no more the heat of the sun."
Janiczek's Imogen shows her fiery pluck with Pisanio 3.4 - "men's vows are women's traitors" - crumpling Posthumus' directive and flinging it at him, then encouraging him to murder her despite his professed weariness: "do it, and to bed, then." Skelton accelerates the pace, moving quickly into the 4.3 battlefields, with reverberating sound effects and martial music played just offstage. Skelton eschews the fifth act pageantry of Jupiter, even trimming the prison cell revelations of Posthumus, instead relying upon onstage hand-to-hand combat, his cast scurrying and shouting, pounding the stage with their staffs and ducking and bobbing and weaving. After Belaria helps Cymbeline stand after an assault, the King reveals his combat prowess, blocking attacks from two Romans with a single lunge, and the energetic Posthumus swings his pole out over the first rows of the audience.
The battlefield exploits conclude with Skelton rushing through the heavily edited fifth act to the happy conclusion. Announcements are made - "the Queen is dead" - humorous asides are delivered - "who is't can read a woman?" - and Posthumus is brought fighting to the stage as a prisoner. Imogen kneels before him in a moving gesture of utter forgiveness, and a Harry Potter-like servant - "oh God I left out one thing!" - fills in the blanks in the plot for the entire cast. Cymbeline embraces his long lost sons - "all are joyed!" - and even the kneeling villain Iachimo is forgiven ("live, and do better by others") in a tautly paced, if sharply condensed, final act.