SOURCE: Winter, Jessica. Review of Cymbeline. Village Voice 47, no. 11 (19 March 2002): 70.

In the following review of Mike Alfreds's Cymbeline, which was transplanted from England to New York City in 2002, Winter comments on the attempts to reduce or eliminate the barrier between audience and stage, and summarizes individual performances in the production.

At the outset of the Globe Theatre's Production of the Bard's most infamously convoluted contraption, artistic director Mark Rylance pointedly announces The Tragedy of Cymbeline! That's how the play is categorized in the folio of 1623, which had no category for romances (or ‘problem plays,’ or “Goldberg, Rube”). But Shakespeare's erratic twilight opus is better pegged as Very Tragical Mirth, ranging from the broad buffoon comedy of A Midsummer Night's Dream to the wrenching father-daughter schisms of King Lear. Careering between three countries (England, Wales, and Italy) and many more temperaments, grafting in the sexual double cross from Othello...