Romantic Movement?

Some plays should just not be performed.

Such a play is Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1886 drama, The Cenci, a work which proves the point that romantic poetry looks a lot better on the page than on the stage.

The Cenci

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

Directed by Nick Moschovakis

At the Cabot House Underground Theater

Last weekend

The Cenci is Shelley's dramatization of the 16th century legend of Count Cenci, an evil old man who, as Percy Bysshe Shelley (Matt Schuerman) tells the audience at the opening of Nick Moschovakis' production, "having spent his life in debauchery and wickedness, conceived at length an implacable hatred towards his children."

This hatred translates into death and forced poverty for the count's sons. When it escalates into the count's incestuous encounter with his own daughter, his wife and children band together to murder the wicked patriarch.

Even a professional cast would have difficulty infusing emotion into heavy-handed lines like, "Can it be possible I have to die so suddenly? So young to go under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground! To be nailed down into a narrow place; to see no more sweet sunshine; hear no more blithe voice of living thing; muse not again upon familiar thoughts, sad, yet thus lost--How fearful! to be nothing!"

But this is not a professional cast. Although a few actors--Nick Raposo (Cenci), Jim Marino (Orsino) and Schuerman--make noble attempts to salvage the performance, most others have difficulty escaping the tendency to recite rather than act their lines.

Mona Karim, who plays Cenci's daughter, Beatrice, falls all too often into this trap. While Shelley's play is intended to be a tragedy, Karim fails to convey believable anger in her accusations. There is so little emotion in her portrayal of Beatrice that when she reveals the incest forced upon her by her father, one may be uncertain of exactly what has happened to her. Were it not for Shelley's plot summary in the opening scene, the main tension of the play might go undiscovered.

Karim's interaction with Lina Bryan-Toledo, who plays Cenci's wife, Lucretia, is stilted as well. There is no rapport between the only female characters in The Cenci; in fact, as Lucretia paces mechanically back and forth across the set, she seems to be quite unaware that Beatrice is standing, raped, violated and stiff-shouldered, in the center of the stage.

Gordon Vidaver (Cardinal Camillo) and Ted Caplow (Giacomo) do manage to instill their characters with more emotion. The problem is that throughout the production they consistently present the same emotion. While Caplow seems perpetually confused, Vidaver appears to be frustrated with every person that crosses his path.

What this all adds up to is a stiff, uninteresting performance, additionally hampered by technical problems. The action was slowed down enormously by laborious scene changes, which involved repositioning the black and white flats that composed the set. And the lighting was so poorly designed that actors not infrequently recited their lines while standing halfway in the dark. The Cenci's fundamental weakness is its script, and the talent of the cast did not succeed in overcoming it.