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[Theater reviews]

Winter green
The Publick makes this Tale bloom

BY JEFFREY GANTZ

The Winter’s Tale
By William Shakespeare. Directed by Diego Arciniegas. Set by Janie Howland. Costumes by Toni Bratton Elliott. Lighting by Craig Brennan. With Diego Arciniegas, Susanne Nitter, Nancy E. Carroll, Derry Woodhouse, Steve Barkhimer, Nathaniel McIntyre, Stacy Fischer, Gerardo Franklin, Bill Salem, Richard La France, Helen McElwain, Kathryn Pierce, Gabe Goodman, and SiouxSanna Ramirez-Cruz. At the Publick Theatre Wednesday through Sunday through September 16.

A sad tale’s best for old age — at least that’s how some people play Shakespeare’s late work. Two Noble Kinsmen (whose composition he’s thought to have shared with John Fletcher), with its dolorous story of friends Palamon and Arcite and their love for Emilia, is a shade or two darker than his previous romances. For all that The Tempest is a pageant of redemption and forgiveness, Antonio never gets around to apologizing to his brother Prospero, whose Milanese dukedom he usurped; and Prospero himself allows that, in retirement, " every third thought shall be my grave. " There’s redemption and forgiveness too in The Winter’s Tale, yet 16 years elapse before Paulina can reunite the insanely jealous Sicilian king Leontes and his wronged wife, Hermione — and it needn’t go unnoticed (certainly it didn’t in last year’s ART production) that their son, Mamilius, is gone forever.

Shakespeare lost his own son, Hamnet, at about the same age at which Mamilius dies, so he’s not putting Leontes and Hermione through anything he didn’t suffer himself. Still, the opening of The Winter’s Tale is as bleak as he gets. It’s not hard to understand why Leontes’s best friend since childhood, Polixenes, wants to return to his Bohemian domain: life at court is about as much fun as a month of Protestant Sundays. (Contrast the lively goings-on in Will’s previous Sicilian play, Much Ado About Nothing, or the shenanigans best pals Hal and Falstaff get up to in Henry IV.) And there’s a chill in the air between Leontes and Hermione even before he accuses her of consorting with Polixenes. This winter king has lost all his mirth; if he couldn’t believe his queen was unfaithful, he’d be panicking over the plague. Sixteen years pass between acts three and four because that much time is necessary to heal the wounds he’s opened. Time eventually restores Hermione to him, and it grows green in the royal marriage of his lost daughter, Perdita, to Polixenes’s son, Florizel. But Hermione is wrinkled and Mamilius is dead; the flowers that bloom in the spring are never the same ones that withered the previous winter.

The current Publick Theatre production stints on neither the dying nor the resurrection. Janie Howland’s modular set, with one stair and an open area underneath, is as brown as naked tree limbs, and Time appears as a stagehand who sweeps up, Puck-like, before turning the hourglass that’s left downstage to remind us that our sands are running out; she reappears, dressed variously, to turn the glass throughout, in what seems a needless conceit. Much better is Publick artistic director Diego Arciniegas’s notion of having Leontes (the role he himself plays) brood in his throne atop the stair through act four, as if Florizel’s courtship of Perdita were but a dream.

But the true greening of this Winter is in its acting. Nancy E. Carroll is a lesson in logic as Paulina, who in defense of Hermione stands up to her husband (Antigonus, who’s eaten by the famous bear at the end of act three) and her king, putting the lie to the Jacobean nonsense that an outspoken wife is an unfaithful wife — she’s Shakespeare’s dea ex machina in human form. Susanne Nitter balances weight and spontaneity in a superb Hermione who at the outset is a wellspring of high spirits — it’s as if Leontes were jealous of her because she knows how to have fun. Arciniegas is a more than passable Leontes, at times stiffly tragic, but palpitating when he cries like a baby in Paulina’s arms.

The rest is variable: Steve Barkhimer much too callow a Camillo to be given Paulina at the end (he does better by Antigonus); Derry Woodhouse a dour Polixenes; Nathaniel McIntyre a sincere but bland Florizel; Stacy Fischer a light-voiced, self-conscious Perdita who scarcely seems to believe all her acts are queens; Gerardo Franklin a restrained Autolycus (his part severely cut — even so the production runs two and a half hours plus intermission); Richard La France a winsome Clown who with Helen McElwain (Dorcas) and Kathryn Pierce (Mopsa) mimes an eye-catching mini soap opera in act four. No matter: when at the end Hermione puts her arms around Leontes and then Perdita, the entire stage blooms.

Issue Date: September 6 - 13, 2001