Cymbeline

Possibly Shakespeare’s wackiest play, CYMBELINE (depending on who you ask, a tragedy, or a comedy, or a romance), features orphaned royalty, mistaken identities, a girl who must dress as a boy to survive, a beheading, a war against Rome, poison that doesn’t really kill you, and a delirious final scene with an absurd number of sequential surprise *reveals*, none of which are surprises to the audience.

Nemesis’s 2023 production featured modern-day added characters named Actor 1 and Actor 2 providing much-needed plot recaps and commentary on the action. These audience proxies allowed some distance from the play’s more objectionable content; a rewritten ending created space for female power without resorting to cruelty or punishment for those who had already suffered throughout the play.

In a time when theatre was just coming out of the lockdowns and hesitating stop-starts of the Covid pandemic, Cymbeline’s mix of tragedy and hilarity, its focus on isolation, separation, loss, and grief overlaid by the final scene in which person after person after person presumed dead is discovered to be, at last, alive—seemed all too resonant and fitting. Cymbeline represents joy in grief, complicated relationships, forgiveness in the face of loss: topics with which we all became intimately familiar in the early 2020s.

With: Molly Graves, Zak Hamrick, Christine Hellman, Erin McCarson, Alex McDonald, Jon Stockdale, Eric Vik, and Paul Vonasek

Directed by Melon Wedick; Lighting Design by Abby Auman; Set Design by Melon Wedick; Scenic Painting by Devyn Ray; Fight Choreography by Jered Shultz; Intimacy Coordination by Hannah Williams; Stage Management by Dana Gillihan.