THE WINTER’S TALE
Delacorte Theater, Central Park.
‘THE Winter’s Tale,” one of Shakespeare’s last plays, is a dizzying journey through a world seen as tragic, then as farce and finally as a place of magical, sweet reconciliation and happiness.
A moving and amusing production of the play, written in 1610, inaugurates the 45th season of the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.
Director Brian Kulick successfully views the drama as a vivid battle of opposing forces. The court of Sicily, where the action starts, is a place where Botticelli paintings are split in half as a king in black and a queen in scarlet fight for their lives on a scarlet rug.
Keith David is excellent as Leontes, the king of Sicily – a man in the grip of madness, ripping apart paintings and destroying the happiness of his family.
Leontes suspects his queen, Hermione (Aunjanue Ellis), of loving Polixenes, the visiting king of Bohemia (Graham Winton), and puts her on trial. She, innocent, defends herself.
Suddenly, the world is devoid of painting, of joy, of sense. Polixenes has fled. Hermione gives birth to a daughter and Leontes, suspecting adultery, orders the baby be left exposed to die, but a kind courtier takes her to Bohemia. Leontes’ son dies, and Hermione falls into a seemingly deadly faint.
Thus far, things are grim in a savage world. But in Bohemia, the next scene of action, things change.
A shepherd (Bill Buell) and his dopey son (Michael Stuhlbarg) find the cradle with the little girl. Stuhlbarg is delightfully dense and inventive as the rustic son; he also plays Time, a figure who transports us 16 years into the future.
Bronson Pinchot, of TV fame, is Autolycus, a nimble thief who exploits the shepherd and his son. With all his songs and cunning, Pinchot is funny, but sometimes tries too hard.
Sixteen years later, the girl, Perdita, is grown. There is a spring festival where 12 youths of the country are all in white under 12 box trees (Riccardo Hernandez’s sets are minimal, but effective).
But the mood of fertility is spoiled when Polixenes invades the festival, suspecting his son of loving a poor, rustic girl.
The pair flees to Sicily, where all is resolved in a miraculous fashion. A journey from sin to joy, from winter to warmth, is enacted in this strange, abstract, very beautiful play.
Kulick’s staging makes the play seem at home in the green expansiveness of Central Park, taking us on a trip through the red and black of passion to the calm white of forgiveness and fertility.