'The Winter's Tale' needed more time to thaw

By Alexis Soloski

PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH 'The Winter's Tale' is not all discontent

Ah, spring. The sun shines, birds sing, bulldogs bark, Frisbees fly, co-eds cavort, and Yale, for a brief, brilliant week or two, actually resembles the photos in its promotional catalogue. Yet despite its diverse delights, spring may have sprung too early this year, at least for the cast and crew of The Winter's Tale. This problematic play (one of Shakespeare's last, it suffers from some improbable tonal shifts), presented in a problematic space (the JE dining hall), has some rather pressing problems--but nothing an extra week of rehearsal wouldn't have fixed. This weekend's production, directed by Stephen Aleman, PC '98, and produced by Steven Holochwost, CC '01, offers a perfectly serviceable rendition of Shakespeare's romance, but underneath its innocuous exterior are glimmers of a far more accomplished show. Would that it had been allowed a few more weeks of hibernation.

Set in the court of Sicilia and the countryside of Bohemia, The Winter's Tale spins out a story of love, loyalty, jealousy, and grief. It opens with Leontes (Nick Bagley, ES '00), the King of Sicilia, grown irrationally incensed at the amity which has arisen between his Queen, Hermione (Michelle Bush, JE '98), and his boyhood friend, Polyxenes (Reggie Austin, BK '01). Overcome by rage, he arranges for the murder of his friend and the imprisonment of his pregnant wife. Although Polyxenes escapes unharmed, thanks to the timely assistance of his courtier, Camillo (Roya Shanks, PC '00), Leontes' wife, son, and infant daughter fare far worse.

The difficulties which the actors experience in these first acts haunt them throughout the play. The expository first scene, a "let's-bring-the-audience-up-to-speed" dialogue between Camillo and Archidamus (Celina Bustamante, JE '00), rushes past the spectator so quickly with such garbled enunciation that it fails to communicate much at all. Though the actors seem, intrinsically, to have a firm grasp of the language and the playworld, they prove inexpert at bestowing these sensibilities upon the audience. The failure to locate the viewer within the playworld is only exacerbated by some of Aleman's directorial choices. When it suits him, Aleman has quite an eye for creating an evocative stage picture--watch as the ladies gather around the young prince to hear the eponymous winter's tale--yet he rarely uses this talent. Aleman misses the chance to suggest the normal atmosphere of the court, a fragile normality which is rent and ravaged when Leontes succumbs to jealousy.

As Leontes, Bagley proves a far more able actor when he's not succumbing. When he reins in his emotions or voices his remorse, Bagley possesses a delicate and searching pathos. But his fits of rage seem insufficiently motivated and somewhat overindulged by Aleman. (The blood-red light cue doesn't score big in the subtlety department either.) Bagley is at his best in his scenes of atonement. He's strongest when Leontes is at his weakest.

Hermione, evoked beautifully by Bush, provides a fitting counterpart to Leontes' mercurial tantrums. At first good-humored and gay, she reveals a core of great strength and resolution when accused of infidelity. Restrained power and dignified bearing serve Bush well in the celebrated statue scene. Also excellent is Maiya Murphy, CC '98, as the lady, Paulina. She delivers some of the most brutal, scathing speeches in the play, but Murphy never lets the force of her rhetoric interfere with her clarity of diction or pursuit of her objective.

Though several other actors turn in noteworthy performances (Shanks deserves special mention for her cross-gendered Camillo), the cast as a whole suffers from a certain muddiness of diction and sloppiness of gesture. All the words and blocked movements are present and accounted for, but most of the players could have used more time to fix motivation to motion and ease to expression. Of course, sometimes this off-the-cuff quality works to the performance's advantage. The imprecise choreography in the sheep-shearing scene somehow adds to the rustic charm of the festivities. It's a great pity that Aleman didn't have time to stage more such crowd scenes: the sight of more than a dozen players, decked in resplendent patchwork doublets, bodices, skirts and breeches, courtesy of Francesca Myman, TD '98, is a wonder to behold.

Of course, some time might have been purchased by making more extensive cuts in the script. Though several chunks have been excised and, in a bold and lovely choice, an entire scene replaced by mumming, larger sections might have been jettisoned with little harm to plot or theme. The pacing might have been spurred along as well. Running nearly three and a half hours, The Winter's Tale could have shorn a few of its more trifling layers. It is springtime outside, after all.

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