By Jackie Demaline
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Pericles could be an answer in a Shakespeare trivia game. It's one of a handful of pieces in his oeuvre (along with Two Noble Kinsmen) that get only rare performances and hardly anyone remembers he wrote.

The very good reason for that is that most scholars don't believe Shakespeare wrote the fantastical adventure of a peripatetic prince (Nick Rose) who is constantly confronted with riddles, shipwrecks, murder plots and other stuff to occupy the attention of an audience with a serious case of attention deficit disorder.

The current wisdom is that The Bard wasn't the writer but the rewrite guy, called in to somehow doctor it into shape when Pericles swung completely out of control (which would be about the time that Pericles' bride dies in childbirth during a storm at sea; except, of course, she's not really dead) and he gives the baby away to an evil queen straight out of Snow White.

Now on stage at Cincinnati Shakespeare, we can at least be glad it's checked off on the "to do" list and we won't have to see it again for another 10 years.

This Pericles immediately sets off on the wrong course and never can be righted.

Director Rebecca Bowman decides to set the epic adventure in the confines of a library, and suddenly the festival's already limited playing space is crunched between fake bookcases.

Bowman's reasoning is in her director's notes in the program (something about finding magical stories in books on library shelves), but it's more important that her choice plays clearly and well on stage, and on stage she doesn't make her case.

In the title role, company founding member Nick Rose is the best he's been in a long time, and there's good supporting work from the ensemble, but there's no consistent style to Bowman's directing.

Rose is natural and charming; Brian Isaac Phillips makes pronouncements as an Egyptian king with a taste for Greek dancing; Matt Johnson is off doing his own sly thing as the narrator; Christopher Guthrie and Taylore Mahogany Scott lead a burlesque brothel subplot; and there's a lot of ceremonious parading - but none of it fits together.

The players would look better if they weren't trapped by the circumstances of the cheap set - the obviously painted bookshelves and the pathetic props that string out from behind panels to suggest changing locations.

Costumer Heidi Jo Scheimer is called on to make dozens of costumes so that the cast can constantly change character and locale; it's a valiant effort but there's no real sense of the exotic. It's just people wandering on and off stage without the play ever having any real sense of anyone going anywhere.

A big part of the problem is that Cincinnati Shakespeare operates on a small budget, and Pericles requires either money or vision.

The saddest thing about the festival's 12 months of upheaval (including three artistic directors) that ate up 2003 is that the company seems to have come out of it half-paralyzed by lack of money instead of being freed by it.

Pericles, through April 11, Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival, 381-2273.

E-mail jdemaline@enquirer.com