SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN — I’d forgotten the verdant pleasures of southwest Wisconsin, a hilly part of the plain Midwest. And I’d similarly lost touch with the sensorial pleasure of Shakespeare surrounded by trees, Shakespeare under a moon, Shakespeare as the chill of the fall reminds you that nothing in our firmament lasts forever. But a September return to American Players Theatre in Spring Green, my first visit to an old haunt since before the pandemic, reminded me of all of that. And it all felt more precious for reasons that probably are more to do with me than the theater.
Director Shana Cooper’s truly gorgeous production of “The Winter’s Tale” is in many ways the consummate APT experience. The Bard’s plays were mostly written for an outdoor theater and Shakespeare was very much aware of the position of the sun in the sky and the coming of dusk. You can see this in “Much Ado About Nothing,” when the bright sunlight of an Italian afternoon gives way to the gloom of Hero’s tomb. But it is writ large in “Winter’s Tale,” when a harsh and hasty condemnation of a spouse is made in the rash light of day, only for the magic of redemption to be born in the twilight — of both a day and a man’s life.
I’m having a summer of “The Winter’s Tale.” I also saw it in July at the Stratford Festival, another of the very few North American theaters where actors are sufficiently skilled and versed as to make every syllable of archaic language feel freshly minted. If you don’t recall the play, the basic plot involves a king, Leontes (Nate Burger, in the Wisconsin production), who wrongly accuses his wife, Hermione (Laura Rook), of infidelity with Leontes’ best friend and fellow king, Polixenes (La Shawn Banks). Aside from Hermione, who appears to die of grief, there are two kids who suffer from Leontes’ foolishness. One, Perdita (Molly Martinez-Collins) survives thanks to some machinations from courtiers and loyal servants. The other, Mamillius (Elijah Quigley at my performance), dies from his own sadness at the loss of his mother. In the final scene, a woman named Paulina (Dee Dee Batteast), engineers the most remarkable redemption, bringing Hermione back to life in a scene that redeems Leontes’ folly and cheats mortality even as Perdita, she who is lost, is found.
Or does it? Mamillius stays dead.
Shakespeare does not bring the child back to life, a decision that vexes and disturbs me every time I see the play, especially when the actors are as unstinting as one finds here. Maybe he didn’t want to let Leontes fully off the hook for his folly. Maybe he wanted to suggest limits to the spiritual powers — Paulina, God, whatever — in which we place our beliefs. Maybe he just plain forgot about Mamillius; this playwright tended to make practical decisions based on the dramaturgical needs of each individual scene and it could well be that he was just done with Mamillius, the actor thereof having moved on to other roles in the company.
In the text of the play, and in most 20th century productions, Mamillius stays or stayed dead. But contemporary directors have a habit of bringing him back at the end. In Stratford, he was a ghostly presence, haunting his father who grabbed for him even as he slipped away (the buzz-heavy new movie “Hamnet” probes this theme, being about the death of Shakespeare’s own child). But in Spring Green, Mamillius rushes out of the woods and skips between his father and mother as the trees consume then once again.
Thus the end of the play was far more optimistic than in its Canadian staging; it was as if he is contained within his parents, tutoring them as they explore the contours of a new marriage where forgiveness will have to be a dominant theme and as they all disappear again into the Wisconsin woods. I don’t know what you were doing the other Saturday night, but I’d stack this deeply moving experience up against whatever it may have been.
The emotional poignancy of “The Winter’s Tale” was intensified for me by having spent the afternoon in the company of Noël Coward and his smug play, “Fallen Angels,” written when the erudite linguistic was still in his early 20s (talk about a contrast with “Winter’s Tale,” notwithstanding a shared theme of infidelity). This English soupçon follows the alcohol-assisted romantic misadventures of two itchy married women; there is much talk of what happens to a relationship once the initial passion has faded. As if Coward then had any actual idea.
Director Shannon Cochran’s lively staging, which stars Rook and Phoebe González with Colleen Madden as the know-it-all maid, has its moments. Playing drunk on stage is one of the hardest tasks for an actor, especially for this duration, so good for Rook and González for surviving. I think Cochran is playing with the idea of a subtext, that despite all the talk of husbands and a handsome (shared) Frenchman, the most important relationship of these two women actually is with each other as they flounce, flightily about, falling in and out of each other’s arms. Fair enough but more doable, to my mind, with Coward’s later plays. This one gets strangled by the lack of wisdom (and, frankly, of true wit) that goes with youth.
Coward figured it out later. “Fallen Angels” is pretty much one precocious note, as its title suggests.
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But Cooper’s staging of “The Winter’s Tale” fully leans into its sudden shifts in tone and mood, rather than trying to smooth them out, as have most productions I’ve seen over the years.
I ran into someone I knew at the end of the show, walking back down the hill to the car. I remarked on how everything veered so drastically and sharply from silly, pastoral, communal fun to the profound sadness of the deepest of guilt-inducing losses, albeit maybe with the compensatory wisdom of knowing yourself a little better. No soft fades. Just sharp edges.
“Just like life,” he said.
Indeed. Life in September. Halfway through the wood.
“The Winter’s Tale” continues though Oct. 4; “Fallen Angels” through Oct. 3, both in the Hill Theatre at American Players Theatre, 5950 Golf Course Rd, Spring Green, Wisconsin; americanplayers.org
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.