Summary 
A fascinating and expressive deaf-mute lead performance combines dance, mime, and sign language. Achingly expressionistic, somber and slow, this outdoor production is signed for the hearing impaired and staged with ladders, rigging, masts, and sails. The silently eloquent reunion of father with wife and daughter at the conclusion is profoundly moving.
Design
Directed by Douglas Finlayson. Set by John Stark. Costumes by Ruth Howell. Lights by J. William Ruyle. Sonic and musical compositions by David Zerlin. Choreography by Nina Lucas.
Cast
Margo Buchanan (Gower), Danny Camiel (Boult), Robert Carin (Leonine), Peter Cook (Pericles), Robin Atkin Downes (Cerimon), Al Espinosa (Antiochus), Darrel Ford (Cleon/ Simonides), Callum Keith-King (Thaliard), Pamela Klarup (Thaisa), David Kortemeier (Helicanus), Jodi Marcs (Marina), Philip Thompson (Lysimachus), Pam Vogel (Dionyza/Bawd).
Analysis
Selected performances at the outdoor Illinois Shakespeare Festival are interpreted for the hearing-impaired. This production of Pericles employs American Sign Language (ASL), a syntactical language of symbols, rather than the more familiar finger-signing, which is a representation of individual letters. Before the performance, company interpreter Caryn Brieschke demonstrates the special signs designated for the different character names and places of the play. The production features an unusual combination of signing techniques, synthesizing Traditional - a single, stationary spot-lit signer - and Zoning - several signers assigned to specific areas of the stage - with Shadowing, which features a signer following a single actor about the stage and signing only for that performer.
Gower, a 14th-century poet, serves as the narrating Chorus for the play. Gower speaks her role while signing to the audience in the Traditional sense, for the most part spot lit alone onstage. At certain moments during the performance, however, the other actors suddenly "freeze" in their movements as the lights quickly go down and Gower moves to the front of the stage to address the audience, again spot lit as the Chorus. The production's Zoning interpreters each have a separate zone on the stage from which they sign dialogue, although they can move about freely within the action of the play. All the interpreters are fluidly integrated onstage by director Douglas Finlayson, blending unobtrusively with the many actors and on-stage musicians. Peter Cook, the Festival's guest star, is a deaf-mute performer who delivers his compelling portrayal of Pericles in a mesmerizing fusion of ASL with acting, mime, and dance techniques. Cook is fascinating in performance due to his emotional expressiveness and fluidity of motion, and Finlayson, in a unique innovation, "doubles" the character with Pericles' interpreting shadow. Gower shadows Cook about the stage - at one point following him to the top of a ladder - and speaks Pericles' lines, delivering the words emotionally with a clear and richly melodic voice. Gower also signs some of the part in ASL, with Cook signing the majority.
Cook does not merely sign the role of Pericles, he embodies the character figuratively through gracefully poetic mimetic movements and evocative expressions. On-stage percussion enhances Cook's dance-like performance, with actors taking turns punctuating Cook's movements with drum beats and cymbal crashes. The depiction of Pericles' courtship of Thaisa is especially moving: with unabashed adoration, Cook sweetly presents Pericles' humble "courtesy," a withered branch, green only at the top, to the Princess; and after the couple shares an extended, lingering dance, embracing tenderly, Cook romantically mimes an exchanging of hearts with the charmed Thaisa. Pericles' subsequent loss of his wife and daughter is made more poignant as a result of the chemistry developed between Cook and the actress portraying Thaisa. Pericles' anguish at the apparent death of Marina is vividly depicted by Cook, trembling on his knees before his daughter's tombstone. The "grave" is a spotlight in a stage-trap at the front of center-stage that intensely whitens the features of the grief-stricken Pericles and casts his shadow against an enormous white backdrop upstage. Cook's grief is expressed in emotionally tortured movements and gestures that literally become bigger than life, reflected in gigantic and overwhelming proportion against the billowing, sail-like backdrop. Finlayson's dramatic staging effectively visualizes how fate has become too much for the strength and endurance of Pericles, who is ironically rendered "speechless" and must be helped away from the grave by Helicanus. Finlayson depicts the ensuing redemption of Pericles, finally reunited with his daughter, with a tremendous sense of irony and with a dramatic power that transcends the play itself, commingling actor with character: after months of speechlessness due to his mourning, Cook's Pericles is finally able to "speak" again because of the miraculous return of his daughter, and after a long embrace with Marina that is silently eloquent, father and daughter together "hear" the sweet music of the spheres to which all the other characters are ironically deaf.
The Festival's traditional Elizabethan stage is set with an appropriately maritime theme: the performers scurry up and down an abundance of sail-ship rigging, masts, and ladders, and raise and lower several sails. The somber production is slowly-paced and expressionistically staged. Finlayson eschews most of the elements of humor and whimsy in this play, instead emphasizing the solitary journeys and hardships of a beleaguered but steadfast hero who endures challenge after challenge. The myriad twists of fate - from assassins, famine, and pirates to numerous sea-storms and shipwrecks - are depicted as menacing and lethal. An almost kabuki-like expressionism dominates the production: actors on and around the stage hold long, billowing blue sheets of lightweight cloth that ripple softly like waves; Pericles, in a dream sequence in which he has a vision of the goddess Diana, twirls in ballet-like slow-motion at center-stage, gradually entwining himself in the blue sheets of cloth as he becomes entranced; and large circles of aluminum, hand-held at the base of the stage, are employed to reflect spotlighting onto the stage with the effect of moonlight shimmering on water. The deaths of the incestuous Antiochus and his daughter are also expressionistically depicted. The bare-chested, red-clad Antiochus is perniciously carnal, leering lasciviously at his own daughter and kissing his personal assassin, Thaliard, full on the mouth. When consumed in lightning-like fire, Antiochus towers over his screaming daughter with his arms raised; he envelops them both in the sweeping, glittery red of his satin cloak that, when spotlit, reflects the light like flickering flames.
The cultural isolation of the character of Pericles, an unfortunate stranger voyaging from Tyre to Antioch, Tharsus, Pentapolis, Mytilene, and Ephesus, correlates interestingly with the sensory detachment and inner solitude of a deaf and mute man like Peter Cook: during a post-performance discussion, an actor compared Pericles' journeys and ultimate arrival to Cook and the company's rehearsals and ultimate performances. The discussion revealed the depth of the learning experience and how the actors and the director had to literally play charades in rehearsals in order to communicate with one another. Hidden cues were gradually concocted to prompt Cook in performance and although most of the cues were visual, some were necessarily visceral, as Cook was not always blocked to face another performer. The thematic fusion of character with actor in this production successfully creates what Finlayson hoped at the Festival's press conference would not merely be a portrayal of a deaf-mute Pericles, but a portrayal of truly "an extraordinary Pericles."
Note: A version of this article was edited and published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Vol.12, No.2, Spring 1994.