Theatre in Review: The Winter's Tale (Theatre for a New Audience)

	Anatol Yusef, Kelley Curran, Dion Mucciacito. Photo: Carol Rosegg

In her new production of Shakespeare's fascinating, famously troubled drama, the director Arin Arbus does something extremely daring: She opens the show with the bear. You remember him: He usually shows up at the halfway point, the subject of what is arguably the most famous stage direction in theatre history ("Exit, pursued by bear"), a bit of business that has bedeviled directors going all the way back to 1623. (I can just imagine Richard Burbage, at the Globe, rolling his eyes and wondering what his house playwright had gotten the company into this time.) At TFANA, the ursine one makes only a brief appearance up front, prowling the stage for less than a minute before the play proper begins. Nevertheless, this is, I submit, a statement of directorial intent.

With this gesture, Arbus embraces everything that, down through the centuries, has been labeled problematic about The Winter's Tale. God knows there's plenty of it: The plot is propelled by a leading character's sudden and thoroughly unmotivated plunge into murderous jealousy. At the halfway point, the tone lurches from tragedy to pastoral romantic comedy, leaving the original plot setup dangling until near the end. A happy ending is arrived at via a fantastic, fairy-tale plot twist that raises many more questions than it answers. And yes, there's the bear.

Some directors try to wave these problems away by satirizing them or overdramatizing them or wrapping them up in a big fairy-tale bow. Arbus takes them as they come, and she takes them seriously; there's nothing high-concept about this production (unless you consider a firm reliance on the text to be avant-garde, which, these days, it might be). Instead, she trusts that she and her company of skilled, eminently well-spoken actors will find a coherent psychological pattern in this maze of betrayals, separations, abandonments, assumed identities, and magical, mystical reconciliations.

The first challenge on this obstacle course comes in the first scene, in which Leontes, king of Sicily, entreats his bosom friend Polixenes, king of Bohemia, to tarry longer on his visit, urging his wife, Hermione, to add her voice in persuasion. (The atmosphere is cocktail-party elegant, in a mid-twentieth-century way, thanks to Emily Rebholz's chic costumes. The cast looks like it just stepped out of an episode of The Crown.) Hermione chimes in, Polixenes gives in -- and Leontes is instantly seized with rage, convinced that the two are having an affair. Indeed, he begins to wonder if the child Hermione is carrying may have been fathered by Polixenes. There is no evidence for any this; Leontes has, without warning, given in to his worst, most demonic, impulses. It's up to the actor playing him to make sense of this, and Anatol Yusef does so, slipping effortlessly into suspicion, speaking in a deadly quiet monotone that has an air of hemlock about it. (Arbus ups the stakes by having Kelley Curran and Dion Mucciacito, as Hermione and Polixenes, carry on in a distinctly flirty manner; even a reasonable husband might get a little put out at their behavior.)

Having lost control of his reason, Leontes moves swiftly to take revenge, raining disaster on those he loves, beginning with the deaths of Hermione and their son, Mamillius, and the abandonment of their infant daughter. Arbus and company chart the dissolution of order in Leontes' court -- and his transformation into a tyrant -- with a swift assurance that brooks no nagging questions. For once, these tragic events have the terrible ring of truth. And when Leontes learns from the Oracle at Delphi that his fears were entirely unfounded, he falls to the ground, his face a mask of anguish. In an especially graceful bit of staging, Leontes, rent with guilt, clutches Paulina, the noblewoman who defended Hermione to the last, and a handful of dead leaves falls from above. Winter has arrived in Sicily, both physically and psychologically.

Like most directors, Arbus chooses to break for the intermission a couple of scenes later, before the action jumps fifteen years into the future, where Perdita, the daughter of Leontes and Hermione, lives, unaware of her family history, as the adopted daughter of a Bohemian shepherd. She has fallen in love with Florizel, the disguised son of Polixenes, who comes to spy on his son's escapades. If you suddenly feel like you're in a different play, for quite a while you are: The Winter's Tale becomes a thing of music and romance, of clowns and impersonations. Still, a precedent has been set at the very end of the first half: Antigonus, a courtier, appears with the infant princess who is to be left to the elements in the Bohemian wilderness -- and in comes the bear. His intentions are deadly, but, as played by Arnie Burton in a furry suit, he isn't entirely menacing. Indeed, the whimsically choreographed sequence that follows -- even if it ends in an offstage death -- lets us know that the action is headed in a different direction. A connection has been forged between the two halves, something that isn't found in every production of The Winter's Tale.

Another challenge involves Autolycus, the play's chief clown, a kind of traveling con man who, until this production, has always struck me as one of the least amusing characters in the Shakespearean canon. In Burton's hands, the comedy is rescued: He presides over a series of amusing flim-flams in which he relieves most of the supporting cast of their wallets and valuables. At one point, he opens up a traveling case to reveal his extensive line of stolen goods, complete with flashing LED sign. Burton, who can get a laugh by greeting a pair of country fools with a simple "How now, rustics!", knows exactly how far to go. However, be warned: If, like me, the words "audience participation" make your blood run cold, don't even think about sitting in the first row of the orchestra; at the performance I attended, one poor patron was deprived of his leather jacket and had a false mustache and beard pasted on his face. Needless to say, these antics brought down the house.

From this point to the fantastical finale, Arbus guides her company with the steadiest of hands. In addition to those already mentioned, there are lovely contributions from Oberon K. A. Adjepong as Antigonus, whose life ends on an errand he is loath to perform; Eddie Ray Jackson, adding some presence, and spine, to Florizel, who often comes off as a wan ingenue; Mahira Kakkar as Paulina, telling Leontes off in no uncertain terms and stage-managing with élan the final family reunion; John Keating, looking like a scarecrow who stepped down from his perch, as the most delightfully dense of rustics; and Ed Malone as his equally thick-headed father. In an especially lovely touch, Robert Langdon Lloyd, cast as Time, giving the speech that bridges the play's two time frames, partners with Nicole Rodenburg's Perdita at a country dance; she is, literally, dancing with Time.

Riccardo Hernandez's set is marked by his usual economy: It's a three-sided thrust stage backed by white drops, a strategy that allows the action to move from scene to scene at a headlong pace. Marcus Doshi's lighting is chilly for Leontes in his spiritual winter and daffodil-colored for the rustic passages. Justin Ellington's music provides delicate underscoring, and the sound design, by Broken Chord, includes such key effects as a crying baby and thunder.

So much does this production exude an air of purpose that when forgiveness arrives in the surprise appearance of a statue that comes to life, it doesn't feel the least bit forced or tacked on. Indeed, one feels grateful that past sins have been expiated, parents and children are reunited, and young lovers have a bright future. Even so, Arbus contrives a final gesture that conveys, in a single, heartbreaking stroke, that some sorrows cannot be healed. As a long-dead prince once noted to his mother, before both of them were wronged, "A sad tale's best for winter." -- David Barbour