MONMOUTH’S SO-SO WINTER’S TALE
THE WINTER’S TALE
By William
Shakespeare; directed by Bill Van Horn and Kristine Ayers; sets by Daniel
Bilodeau; costumes by Patti Campbell; lights by Lynne Chase
With: Ian Austin, Mike Anthony, David Greenham, Dan
Olmstead, Jeri Pitcher, Tor O’Brien, Katee Brown, Heather Gorby, Mark S.
Cartier, Matthew Archembault, Janis Stevens, Frank Omar, Kristen Burke,
Anthony Arnista, Zach Greenham, Miranda Libkin, Dennis A. Price, Carl
Johannson, Dustin Tucker, and Anna Soloway
At the Theater at
Monmouth in Monmouth, Maine
Performed in
repertory from August 1, 2008 to August 21, 2008
Reviewed by H. R.
Coursen
The Winter’s
Tale (circa 1610) is one of Shakespeare’s last plays. It reflects the
trend of the first decade of the seventeenth century away from tragedy and
toward a mixed genre in which seeming tragedy swings at the end to
reconciliation and reunion. Shakespeare himself originates the tragi-comedy
in Antony and Cleopatra. After Antony’s fall—a tragedy of
world-shaking proportions—Cleopatra creates an alternative ending, in which
she and Antony will live free of Caesar’s interference: “I am again for
Cydnus,” she says, “to meet Marc Antony.”
Such endings rule
out inconveniences like gravity, politics, or the finality of death. They
exist in the world of glimmering shape and shadow that Hawthorne describes
as the locale of the romance. The god Jupiter appears in thunder and
lightning perched upon an eagle. Prospero summons up a wedding masque from
spirits dwelling on a magic island. The Winter’s Tale glides
past sixteen years in thirty-lines lines to waft us to an idyllic zone
wherein a prince woos a lovely shepherd maid, Perdita. She is, of course, a
princess, in this version of the Cinderella story, and her identity is
finally revealed. Her mother comes to life at last and all is happily ever
after—though the joys of the ending are muted by the time it has taken and
by the long-ago deaths of Antigonus (he’s the one who exits “pursued by a
bear”) and of the young prince Mamillius. But the boy actor who had played
Mamillius would also have played his sister, Perdita, so Shakespeare’s
audience would have sensed that time itself had a restorative finale in
mind. This play really does incorporate a tragedy—that of the
wrongly-jealous Leontes—and is the only one I know where Shakespeare
intentionally deceives us, in the case of the “death” of Leontes’ wife
Hermione. He usually lets us in on things—as when the Chorus informs us
about the traitors in Henry V or when Hamlet tells us (and Horatio)
about the play he is planning for Claudius, or in Cymbeline when
Imogen comes across a headless corpse of Cloten and believes it to be
Posthumus. We enjoy the privileged position known as dramatic irony.
Bill Van Horn’s
version of The Winter’s Tale for the Theater at Monmouth only
partially succeeds in moving us into the strange and unpredictable world of
the play. Strong performances like that of Janis Stevens as the vehement
Paulina, Dan Olmstead as the brooding madman, Leontes, Dennis A. Price as
the foolish Clown, and Miranda Libkin as Perdita are undercut by concept and
intrusive music. When music competes with language the language loses. Thus
is Leontes’ “Too hot, too hot” aside wiped out by a mournful accordion.
Antigonus’s magnificent transitional soliloquy is obliterated by music and
approaching storm. I could see no bear from where I sat. It just looked like
a dark shape, and Zach Greenham’s subsequent description of Antigonus’s fate
is incomprehensible. Unless we know the play, we do not know what has
happened to him.
The concept is—for
no useful reason—nineteenth century Maine. That eliminates Hermione’s
significant line about her father having been emperor of Russia, as she
(Jeri Pitcher) asserts her identity and implicates Leontes in the terrible
future he is inflicting on himself and—since he is king —on everyone else.
Ladies from Christmas Cove tend not to have Russian monarchs as parents. And
I doubt that many people in Boothbay Harbor in 1830 were awaiting word from
the Oracle at Delphi. The very-nice-clambake problem is less apparent in the
Bohemia scenes, simply because the concept is dropped. There, some judicious
editing would have kept Autolycus (Dustin Tucker) from becoming tedious in
his repetitious interplay with the rustics. Why Leontes loses his “What fine
chisel could ever yet cut breath?” though, is inexplicable. The line
reiterates the play’s consistent concern with the difference between nature
and art and its exploration of Shakespeare’s grand theme of appearance
versus reality.*
One excellent
directorial touch, however, in the second to last scene, finds the narrative
of discovery and reunion artfully distributed among members of the cast. And
Jeri Pitcher’s statue neatly recaptures her earlier assertion of stoical
resolve.
In Shakespeare,
the spoken line is the bottom line. Here, the words tend to compete against
sound and concept and, as must happen, the words lose out.
* I have been told that the line is in the performance
script. It was apparently dropped on the night I attended. 
