In Thinking Cap Theatre’s Cymbeline, from left, Blaine Deberry as Posthumus, Nicole Hulett as the Queen and Breanna Michel as Princess Imogen
By Aaron Krause
“It’s Shakespeare’s most thrilling—and, in my opinion, his funniest—work,” said South Florida theater scholar and artist Nicole Stodard of Cymbeline, one of the Bard’s final plays.
Stodard should know. She witnessed a 2023 Royal Shakespeare Company production, directed and designed a staging at Nova Southeastern University this past January, and now brings a new professional production to Thinking Cap Theatre (TCT). The show opens Friday, Dec. 5, and runs for six performances through Sunday, Dec. 14, at the Hollywood Central Performing Arts Center.
Uncut, Cymbeline runs more than three hours. Stodard has shaped the text into a two-hour performance.
“When staging classical works, I work hard creating a cut script to ensure the play in performance is clear and shorter,” she said. “I always try to choose the iterations that will be clearest to audiences today and then prune accordingly.”
Scholars affectionately call Cymbeline Shakespeare’s “Kitchen Sink” play because of its wildly mixed genres—history, romance, tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale.
This late romance follows Imogen, King Cymbeline’s resolute daughter. Her secret marriage to the low-born Posthumus triggers a chain of deception, disguise, and danger. When the cunning Italian nobleman Iachimo manipulates Posthumus into doubting her fidelity, Imogen flees the court disguised as a boy—and unknowingly crosses paths with her long-lost brothers. Meanwhile, Britain faces a Roman invasion, villainy takes hold, and identities unravel. After betrayals, battles, and divine intervention, the tale concludes with one of Shakespeare’s most surprising and expansive final reunions.
Stodard said the play’s themes remain deeply resonant, including the parent-teenager conflict between Cymbeline and Princess Imogen. Today, she said, those themes should feel “universal and timeless.” The play also brims with fairy-tale elements that audiences will immediately recognize.
“The most striking theme in the play for me, and the one that strongly informs the design of our production, involves communication, deception, and the presentation of false evidence,” Stodard said. “Characters in this play communicate via letters, some of which are forged. Letters are powerful in the world of the play—just as text messages are today, they can uplift or devastate the recipient.”
TCT’s ensemble is deliberately diverse in age, race, gender, and experience. Peter Wayne Galman—veteran actor of stage, film, and television and founding artistic director of the South Florida Shakespeare Troupe—will play the title role.
By contrast, Cymbeline marks Blaine DeBerry’s first professional Shakespeare production. DeBerry plays Posthumus and has embraced the rehearsal process.
“The most rewarding part has been the time spent reading through and dissecting the play with the entire cast,” he said. “Every play is a puzzle, and I love working with the whole team as we try to answer questions the text brings to our minds.”
DeBerry auditioned because he felt it would be “a great next step in honing my craft and elevating myself as an artist.” His early Shakespeare encounters—such as reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream in school—left him cold. In college, an acting-for-Shakespeare class deepened his appreciation and “reverence” for the language.
Preparing for Posthumus has meant returning to those tools. “I also make sure to identify each individual thought Posthumus has and my scene partners have. That way, I always know where my storytelling beats are,” DeBerry said. “The language is never not intimidating, and I feel honored to be able to make it come alive.”
He praised Stodard’s “open-door policy,” noting her willingness to answer questions and make small textual adjustments for clarity.
Stodard said her approach embraces both the play’s “fairy tale ethos” and its winter setting. When directing Cymbeline at NSU, she encountered scholarship describing the piece as Shakespeare’s “Nativity play.” She clarified it is not about the birth of Jesus; the only historical connection is that King Cymbeline lived during that time.
“So much happens in this play, and ultimately, it takes the divine intervention of the Roman god Jupiter, riding on the back of an eagle, to bring things to a turning point; revelations, forgiveness, love, laughter, and harmony follow,” Stodard said. “I see Shakespeare commenting on the virtues of accepting differences, leading empathetically, and uniting people peacefully.”
Stodard praised her cast as well as movement and intimacy director Nicole Perry and stage manager Quinn Colon.
“Our process has been a delight from day one,” she said. “Everyone has embraced my call to action: communicate, collaborate, play. We journal, we discuss, we write letters in character, we tweak lines, we block scenes, we re-block scenes, we try things, we embrace the questions, we break bread, we perform rituals, we bond.”
Breanna Michel, who plays Imogen, said Stodard reminded the cast that “Shakespeare really cares about his female characters and writes them with depth. It’s nice to see a classical female character written with such boldness and grit, but also so much love and vulnerability.”
Michel said she once assumed Black performers “didn’t have a place in this environment.” Seeing a role like Imogen has been affirming. “It comforts me to know that there is room for people of color to shine in these roles.”
Like many actors, Shakespeare initially intimidated her. College study helped demystify the language. “It became clearer (‘Shakescleare’) to me when I realized Shakespeare wrote his plays so everyone, rich or poor, could enjoy or take something away from them.”
Her method involves watching other productions, checking modern-English translations, and sometimes translating Imogen’s lines into Haitian Creole to clarify meaning. “It guides me to ‘What am I saying? How can I make others understand what I’m saying?’”
Galman said his long relationship with Shakespeare began in college, where he was “bitten by the acting bug.” He has since played numerous Shakespearean leads, including the title roles in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet. Taking on Cymbeline feels “weighty,” he said—“a big responsibility to hold my own against other more massive roles. It’s fun knowing I can be, nay, will be foolish.”
He noted that while major Shakespearean title roles often carry many lines, some of the leads in the histories—Cymbeline among them—are “lighter in the line department.”
The challenge of Cymbeline, Stodard said, lies in its genre mash-up, which paradoxically makes it feel very modern—“a mashup of styles that is more familiar to us than it was to Shakespeare’s own audiences.”
Audiences, she said, can expect “to be highly entertained and pleasantly surprised at how much they understand.” She is eager to share the production with the community.
“We’re creating something beautiful and meaningful, and I can’t wait to share it with an audience,” Stodard said.
Cymbeline from Thinking Cap Theatre Dec. 5-14 at the Hollywood Central Performing Arts Center, 1770 Monroe St., Hollywood. Tickets from $49.87. Call (310) 500-6448 or go to https://thinkingcaptheatre.org
Sergio Tamayo as Iachimo
A PaperStreet Web Design
