THE WINTER’S TALE

By William Shakespeare; directed by Bill Van Horn and Kristine Ayers; sets by Daniel Bilodeau; costumes by Patti Campbell; lights by Lynne Chase

With: Ian Austin, Mike Anthony, David Greenham, Dan Olmstead, Jeri Pitcher, Tor O’Brien, Katee Brown, Heather Gorby, Mark S. Cartier, Matthew Archembault, Janis Stevens, Frank Omar, Kristen Burke, Anthony Arnista, Zach Greenham, Miranda Libkin, Dennis A. Price, Carl Johannson, Dustin Tucker, and Anna Soloway

At the Theater at Monmouth in Monmouth, Maine

Performed in repertory from August 1, 2008 to August 21, 2008

Reviewed by H. R. Coursen

The Winter’s Tale (circa 1610) is one of Shakespeare’s last plays. It reflects the trend of the first decade of the seventeenth century away from tragedy and toward a mixed genre in which seeming tragedy swings at the end to reconciliation and reunion. Shakespeare himself originates the tragi-comedy in Antony and Cleopatra. After Antony’s fall-a tragedy of world-shaking proportions-Cleopatra creates an alternative ending, in which she and Antony will live free of Caesar’s interference: “I am again for Cydnus,” she says, “to meet Marc Antony.”

Such endings rule out inconveniences like gravity, politics, or the finality of death. They exist in the world of glimmering shape and shadow that Hawthorne describes as the locale of the romance. The god Jupiter appears in thunder and lightning perched upon an eagle. Prospero summons up a wedding masque from spirits dwelling on a magic island. The Winter’s Tale glides past sixteen years in thirty-lines lines to waft us to an idyllic zone wherein a prince woos a lovely shepherd maid, Perdita. She is, of course, a princess, in this version of the Cinderella story, and her identity is finally revealed. Her mother comes to life at last and all is happily ever after-though the joys of the ending are muted by the time it has taken and by the long-ago deaths of Antigonus (he’s the one who exits “pursued by a bear”) and of the young prince Mamillius. But the boy actor who had played Mamillius would also have played his sister, Perdita, so Shakespeare’s audience would have sensed that time itself had a restorative finale in mind. This play really does incorporate a tragedy-that of the wrongly-jealous Leontes-and is the only one I know where Shakespeare intentionally deceives us, in the case of the “death” of Leontes’ wife Hermione. He usually lets us in on things-as when the Chorus informs us about the traitors in Henry V or when Hamlet tells us (and Horatio) about the play he is planning for Claudius, or in Cymbeline when Imogen comes across a headless corpse of Cloten and believes it to be Posthumus. We enjoy the privileged position known as dramatic irony.

Bill Van Horn’s version of The Winter’s Tale for the Theater at Monmouth only partially succeeds in moving us into the strange and unpredictable world of the play. Strong performances like that of Janis Stevens as the vehement Paulina, Dan Olmstead as the brooding madman, Leontes, Dennis A. Price as the foolish Clown, and Miranda Libkin as Perdita are undercut by concept and intrusive music. When music competes with language the language loses. Thus is Leontes’ “Too hot, too hot” aside wiped out by a mournful accordion. Antigonus’s magnificent transitional soliloquy is obliterated by music and approaching storm. I could see no bear from where I sat. It just looked like a dark shape, and Zach Greenham’s subsequent description of Antigonus’s fate is incomprehensible. Unless we know the play, we do not know what has happened to him.

The concept is-for no useful reason-nineteenth century Maine. That eliminates Hermione’s significant line about her father having been emperor of Russia, as she (Jeri Pitcher) asserts her identity and implicates Leontes in the terrible future he is inflicting on himself and-since he is king -on everyone else. Ladies from Christmas Cove tend not to have Russian monarchs as parents. And I doubt that many people in Boothbay Harbor in 1830 were awaiting word from the Oracle at Delphi. The very-nice-clambake problem is less apparent in the Bohemia scenes, simply because the concept is dropped. There, some judicious editing would have kept Autolycus (Dustin Tucker) from becoming tedious in his repetitious interplay with the rustics. Why Leontes loses his “What fine chisel could ever yet cut breath?” though, is inexplicable. The line reiterates the play’s consistent concern with the difference between nature and art and its exploration of Shakespeare’s grand theme of appearance versus reality.*

One excellent directorial touch, however, in the second to last scene, finds the narrative of discovery and reunion artfully distributed among members of the cast. And Jeri Pitcher’s statue neatly recaptures her earlier assertion of stoical resolve.

In Shakespeare, the spoken line is the bottom line. Here, the words tend to compete against sound and concept and, as must happen, the words lose out.

* I have been told that the line is in the performance script. It was apparently dropped on the night I attended.