The Winter’s Tale
By William Shakespeare. Directed by Darko Tresnjak. Set design by David P. Gordon. Costumes by Linda Cho. Lighting by Rui Rita. Sound by Jerry Yager. Music by Michael Friedman. With John Bedford Lloyd, Kate Burton, Torrey Brenner, Laura Benanti, Dylan Baker, Tom Bloom, Kristine Nielsen, Reg E. Cathey, Joel de la Fuente, Noah Bean, Bill Smitrovich, Christopher Fitzgerald, Stephen DeRosa, and Stacey Yen. At the Williamstown Theatre Festival through July 15.
The Wharton One-Acts
An International Episode, adapted from Henry James by Dennis Krausnick, and The Rembrandt, adapted from Edith Wharton by Alison Ragland. Directed by Normi Noël. Set and costume design by Govane Lohbauer and Bob Lohbauer. Lighting by Stephen D. Ball. Sound by Jason Fitzgerald. With Ben Lambert, Ethan Flower, John Rahal Sarrouf, Jeffrey Kent, Corinna May, Diane Prusha, and Kate Holland. Presented by Shakespeare & Company in the Spring Lawn Theatre, Lenox, through September 2.

Except that it takes longer and involves no Mass Pike exits “pursued by a bear,” driving from Boston to the Berkshires is not unlike whiling away the intermission of The Winter’s Tale. You move from the austere seat of government to a verdant land of song and rustication. Of course, the trip across the state takes a couple of hours, whereas the transition from Sicilia to Bohemia in Shakespeare’s late romance can seem like a hairpin turn. It’s more of a glide in Darko Tresnjak’s visually stunning Williamstown Theatre Festival production, where the mysterious person of Time guides us across the gap as if it were a change of seasons rather than a leap across 16 years. Moreover, the production, with its serious fairy-tale tone, makes the interlude feel as natural, if fantastical, as the protracted snooze of Sleeping Beauty.

Tresnjak helmed the recent Huntington Theatre Company staging of Amphitryon, and at Williamstown he is abetted by Amphitryon designer David P. Gordon — though their work here looks less like a Victorian valentine than like the zodiac hurled off its ecliptic. Fates and stars are invoked by a design whose colors are as vivid as those of a children’s-book illustration. Sharply lit by Rui Rita, treasure gives off a golden sheen and the Sicilian prince Mamillius’s toy ship turns from snow-white to blood-red as his father’s baseless, ultimately blasphemous jealousy causes the formal, primal world of the play to reel across space and time.

The curtain rises on New Year’s Eve at the Sicilian court of Leontes: a blue square backed by a round, horoscopic window to the moon and constellations. The king enlists his queen, Hermione, to cajole his boyhood friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia, to continue his visit to their country. Obediently, she refuses to take Polixenes’s no for an answer: “You put me off with limber vows, but I,/Though you would seek to unsphere the stars with oaths,/Should yet say, ‘Sir, no going.’ ” And as Leontes sinks into a feral, irrational jealousy of the queen and his friend, something does seem to “unsphere” the stars, putting the zodiac askew.

Tresnjak’s is an intelligent as well as sumptuous production, despite some jarring details (and an almost perverse snub of the play’s famously pursuant bruin). John Bedford Lloyd is a desperately needy, volatile Leontes: it takes only the sight of Polixenes playfully patting Hermione’s pregnant belly to bend him over with suspicion. Indeed, his body seems in the grips of his diseased mind, which sends it onto all fours with some regularity. The man is violently insecure, clinging to wife and son with childlike fervor. And he’s scary — a balding, black-clad figure at one point menacing the entire court with his cane before striking the pregnant Hermione in the back with it. Kate Burton, for her part, does not reinvent the wheel of her character, as she did last season with Hedda Gabler. She has the makings of a strong, unusually lusty Hermione, though. At first she thinks her husband’s accusation a joke: she throws back her thick-red-braided head and laughs. Then she tries to reason privately in public with Leontes, until he goes too far and she gives as tough as she gets.

Most interesting is Tresnjak’s treatment of the counselor Camillo, in Dylan Baker’s skilled portrayal an exasperated, effective bureaucrat who’s also a bit of a lush. Lying back on the stage, loose-tongued and enjoying his New Year’s wine, he does not at first realize the deep, pathological hole into which Leontes is plunging, dragging all he loves with him. Tresnjak takes Camillo too far in the bucolic fourth act, when he and Polixenes, the latter suspicious that his son, Prince Florizel, is courting the shepherdess who turns out to be the princess Perdita, attend a sheep-shearing disguised as an old general in a wheelchair and a nun in shades. Surely they’d stick out less as themselves! But the way in which director and actor balance “good Camillo” between comedy and dignity brings a new dimension to the role.

As for the more straightforward clowning of Bohemia, where the citizens are fleeced as regularly as the sheep, it’s as precisely performed here as dance. Christopher Fitzgerald is an adorably gullible Clown and Stephen DeRosa an Autolycus who’s part Puck and part Tevye, with a singing voice as bravura as his roguery. Reg E. Cathey is an exuberant Polixenes, and Kristine Nielsen, though her brassiness sometimes cuts against the production’s fantasy grain, is a formidable Paulina.

There is enough beauty and whimsy in Tresnjak’s staging that the play’s end, such a mysterious payoff, seems almost perfunctory (despite Michael Friedman’s effective music). The final image, however, of Mamillius in the lap of wintery Time, is a striking reminder that all’s not necessarily well that ends well. The Winter’s Tale is no comedy but a fantasy snatched from the jaws of tragedy. And neither years of remorse nor simulation of white magic can undo the collateral damage.

THE FOLKS AT SHAKESPEARE & COMPANY were mining gold from Edith Wharton and Henry James long before it became de rigueur in Hollywood to do so. This summer’s “Wharton One-Acts,” however, amount to more than the customary couple of short-story adaptations performed in Wharton’s one-time parlor at the Mount and accompanied by tea and cookies. The troupe celebrates its move from Wharton’s home to new digs that incorporate the turn-of-the-century Spring Lawn mansion with a satisfying bill comprising James’s An International Episode and Wharton’s The Rembrandt. As for the new performance space, it is an airier and less dilapidated version of the old — lacking only the authenticity lent by Wharton’s having entertained James in the very room.

Dennis Krausnick’s adaptation of James’s 1878 novella could stand on its own, except that as such it could hardly fill the traditional “Wharton” slot in the S&C repertoire. Alison Ragland’s adaptation of the mistress of the Mount’s The Rembrandt is full of teasing charm but feels a bit tacked on here. Its tale of a set-upon art expert hoist on the petard of his good heart hasn’t much to do with James’s more sophisticated themes of national character and social jockeying. But both pieces are enjoyable, and even in preview each was freshly, subtly acted, particularly given that the 99-seat space puts you right in the Newport drawing room, London hotel, or New York museum office with the characters.

Of the vintage of Daisy Miller, An International Episode also centers on a young American woman romantically caught up with Old World aristocracy; at its heart is the incompatibility, even among the privileged, of a social order built on wealth and enterprise with one built on “precedence.” Betsy Alden is a bookish daughter of Boston — and the first Jamesian heroine to turn down the proposal of a European swell, in her case the dense but affable Lord Lambeth. In his hour-and-40-minute adaptation, Krausnick captures the particulars of Betsy’s story and the oft-ironic idiosyncrasies of the characters, including Betsy’s well-married and more worldly sister and Lambeth’s cleverer if less well-born companion/babysitter.

Krausnick’s one misstep is to include the scene, which James places off stage, in which Betsy sends her suitor away, apparently because she will not ally herself, even in triumph, with a social system that regards her as inferior. One of the charms of this open young woman is that though she has an unjaded enthusiasm for Lambeth’s position as a “hereditary legislator,” indeed for all things English and baronial, she will not allow her country to be snubbed. And both Normi Noël’s production and the pertly radiant Kate Holland succeed in making sense of that contradiction. Corinna May is deliciously, elegantly feisty as the sister, and Ethan Flower, possessed of a believable accent, makes a sweet bozo of Lord Lambeth, whose principal enthusiasms are English dogs and American showers.

The Rembrandt is a more broadly comic piece, anchored by John Rahal Sarrouf as the frazzled, flummoxed museum curator who’s painted by an irresistible philanthropist cousin into the awkward corner of overvaluing a truly awful painting in order to avoid hurting its penniless owner’s feelings. And Diane Prusha draws a touching sketch of the worn, proud, innocent owner of the black-velvet Elvis of an alleged Rembrandt.

Issue Date: July 12-19, 2001