" I didn’t know Shakespeare wrote a circus, " remarked an amazed spectator at the intermission of Andrei Serban’s mixed-media Pericles for the American Repertory Theatre. Indeed, the first half, generally believed to be the weakest part of the play and probably not written by Shakespeare, suggests Boston’s Revels as directed by Federico Fellini. But if in Serban’s rendering the bad bits are never boring, the more transporting ones are never sublime. The " music of the spheres " may be heard by Pericles when, toward the end, he sits in a rowboat looking like Gandalf in an amateur production of The Lord of the Rings. But for this viewer, any celestial sound had been drowned out by the camp cacophony that preceded it on stage and screen. In his memorable The Taming of the Shrew, Serban created a zany free-for-all from which, at the end, he plucked a lyrical moment of mutual surrender that resolved the arguably sexist play without winking. Here, he tries a similar turn on a dime and doesn’t make it.

Pericles is, of course, no easy assignment. And Serban, inspired by the Wooster Group, which has mixed film and video into its avant-garde stagings for years, takes an intriguing run at the play, using those media to pull the peripatetic work together and illustrate its images of good and evil, tempest and calm. In particular, footage of the ocean, roiling or peaceful, serves as a barometer of the mental state of the title character, whose most important journey is internal.

The director reads the work, he has said, as an allegory in which Pericles is a sort of Everyman moving from corruption through loss to transcendence. Trouble is, there’s little transcendence in the production. It uses variously effective film imagery to address the symbolism and beach-to-beach trajectory of the work, which moves around the ancient Mediterranean like a mediæval mystery play crossed with a travelogue. But Serban also uses a backstage camera to make grotesques of even the play’s good characters. And ART stalwarts Thomas Derrah, Will LeBow, and Karen MacDonald create such lurid screen caricatures — from red-eyed human serpent to Mommie Dearest — that they often upstage their live counterparts. It doesn’t help that neither the nondescript Pericles of Robert Sella nor the piqued Marina of Pascale Armand has the power to move us.

Shakespeare wrote Pericles around 1607, probably as a revision of someone’s else’s work or with a collaborator; his hand is more apparent in the latter half of the play, which offers nimbler language and not one but two revivals of characters thought dead, à la The Winter’s Tale. The story is told by the poet John Gower, a contemporary of Chaucer who told the tale of Apollonius of Tyre (from which the play is drawn) in his Confessio Amantis. At the ART, to up the revival count to three, Gower himself is brought back to life by the magician Cerimon (a neat trick since Yolande Bavan plays both roles). He emerges from the folds of history an impish persona, as creaky as Pinocchio and gotten up very much like Shakespeare. Along with the goddess Diana and Pericles’s elder adviser, Helicanus, the risen poet will serve as a director of the action, calling attention, sometimes with the aid of puppets drawn from a trunk, to the fact that we’re watching a performance. (At one point, Gower even steps in as prompter, only to be told, " That line’s been cut, Mr. Shakespeare. " )

The fairy-tale story of Pericles is as far-fetched as it is splintered. Tainted by his courtship of the daughter of King Antiochus of Antioch, whom he discerns is involved in an incestuous liaison with her father, the Prince of Tyre hightails it home with a murderer hired by Antiochus on his trail. Convinced by Helicanus that he must vamoose to protect the rest of Tyre, he then travels to Tarsus, which is in the midst of a famine that Pericles ameliorates, bringing a hold full of grain. Learning by letter that he is not safe there, he once again sets sail, only to be shipwrecked at Pentapolis, where he gets lucky and wins the more G-rated hand of Thaisa, the daughter of good King Simonides. More letters arrive telling him to hie himself home; Antiochus has died, but there’s trouble in Tyre. At sea, the prince endures another perilous storm, during which Thaisa apparently dies giving birth to daughter Marina and is buried at sea. Possibly rattled by the corrupt image of Antiochus and his daughter, Pericles turns Marina over to Cleon, the ineffectual governor of Tarsus, and his Lady Macbeth of a wife, Dionyza, to be brought up.

Years pass, and Dionyza, incensed that Marina makes her own daughter look second-rate, plots to have the young paragon killed. But before the hit man can wield his weapon, Marina is kidnapped by pirates (!) who sell her into prostitution at Mytilene. This allows the Bard to have some scabrous fun, à la Measure for Measure’s Pompey and Mistress Overdone, but Marina’s purity acts as a sort of spiritual chastity belt, and she escapes both defloration and the whorehouse. By this time, Pericles has been told his daughter is dead. Despondent, he turns from life, speech, religion, and the world, drifting to Mytilene, whose governor, a convert to the healing charms of Marina, decides she’s just the thing to cheer him up. At last Pericles, having endured suffering and self-questioning, starts to get his dead back.

Abetted by set and video designer Dan Nutu’s shimmering geometric scenery and watery visuals, Serban’s production begins promisingly. The incestuous doings at Antioch are creepily rendered on both stage and screen, their nastiness brought home by an image of Thomas Derrah’s red-devilish Antiochus holding an infant that’s immediately followed by footage of his erotic canoodlings with the nude and beauteous grown child portrayed by Georgia Hatzis. But the " assassin " Thaliard, whom Antiochus unleashes on Pericles, is personated by Curtis August as a knife-wielding, eye-bulging thing out of Monty Python. And the Cleon and Dionyza of LeBow and MacDonald are similarly over the top, he tremulously balanced on two red sticks and trailing what looks like a billowing igloo, she looming on screen vampirically tucking into a dead bird still wearing its feathers.

What’s even more inexplicable is the way Serban follows a funny scene in which a Robinson Crusoe–esque Pericles is rescued from a rock by a goofball trio of fishermen with a commedia dell’arte–tinged rendering of our hero’s adventure in Pentapolis. Looking like a mustachio’d Teletubby, Derrah turns the amiable but wise King Simonides into a maniacally jovial cartoon that’s amusing but hardly apt. Apart from Hatzis’s stately Diana, Mia Yoo’s Thaisa is the most graceful element in the production. Her symbolic descent into the briny is the most poetical thing on film, and her resurrection by Cerimon the most beautiful thing on stage, the actress’s body-suited form rising balletically from a Snow White–like glass coffin. But in this her first scene, Yoo’s Thaisa, looking more like Minnie Mouse, must seduce Pericles garbed in what seems an orange bell, with approximations of cantaloupes on her shoulders, nevertheless making lyrical, vaguely Asian music as she dances with bells about her ankles.

There are a number of Asian elements in the production, including ritual-like dances performed by actors in white pants and tunics. These are overshadowed, however, by gambling grotesques, random old-film footage, and breathless dumb shows filmed at Crane Beach (featuring Serban as the messengers). The director seems more interested in all the overlay than he is in the transporting powers of the play’s famed reconciliation scenes. The slowly perceived mutual recognition of Pericles and Marina is indifferently played, with Armand’s Marina expressing more exasperation than wonder and Sella’s Pericles revealing himself almost mischievously. The restoration of Pericles and Thaisa to each other ( " Oh, come, be buried/A second time within these arms " ) should be exquisite. Here it’s all but lost to a sequence of family-photo antics as Gower does the moral summing up.

I’m an admirer of Serban from way back, and there are some captivating elements in this his first sea dip into mixed media. But the experiment takes precedence over the play, which has its strengths as well as its difficulties. In the end, the director does as much as wind and weather to sink Pericles.