Director Edward Hall’s new Chicago Shakespeare Theater production of “The Winter’s Tale” looks like the beginning of an experiment: the establishment of a made-in-Chicago repertory company of performers ready and willing to work on more than one play at once.
This is good news for some venerable Chicago actors — they are getting a long stretch of consecutive work with trusted collaborators this fall and early winter — and is both a continuance of this director’s long-established interest in building Shakespearean stagings around an acting troop and of course a match for the manner in which these plays, with their relatively consistent cast sizes and repetition of character ages and types, originally were produced.
“The Winter’s Tale” had its opening Sunday afternoon but won’t be performed again until Friday night because the company is spending the week rehearsing “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” scheduled to open on Nov. 15 and then playing in what’s known in theater parlance as “rotating rep.” Come late November, you’ll have four opportunities to see both plays in a single day of theater. This is how the Stratford Festival of Canada operates, usually to an advantageous, deepening effect.
In terms of a full critical verdict on this Chicago Shakespeare fall, then, it behooves waiting until after that second opening.
But I will say this after seeing the first: I hope the company finds a more consistent and intense emotional landscape than currently is present in “The Winter’s Tale,” notwithstanding some rich performances and a plethora of fascinating and highly entertaining staging ideas.
For my money, “The Winter’s Tale” has to break your heart. I’ve blubbered my way through several past productions. This one? Not so much.
Like the rest of the works typically grouped as Shakespeare’s late romances, or last plays, this play imagines a world where we can be absolved from our most heinous mistakes, our most chronic misjudgments, and see those we loved and lost again. It has at its core an absurdly rash and ill-considered determination of infidelity, not unlike the one in “Othello,” only minus the diabolic Iago manipulating circumstances. Consequences ricochet, destroying innocent lives, but the universe conspires to offer the eventually repentant Leontes, King of Sicilia, played here by Demetrios Troy, a measure of a second chance.
I say a measure. One of the exquisite things about “The Winter’s Tale” is the bittersweet nature of its climax; Leontes’ ill-founded jealousy over the friendship of his wife Hermione (Jessica Dean Turner) for the King of Bohemia (Chiké Johnson) wrecks four lives, including those of his own, his wife, his daughter Perdita (Felicia Oduh), and his son Mamillius (also Oduh in this production). Only three live to love another day, a distinction that gets lost here because of that dubious doubling choice without a clear decision at the end.
At least for me, blending two kids with very different fates into one, mostly, blunts the complexity of the emotional impact of the final scene, especially since Hall, like some other directors these days, is clearly not comfortable with giving Leontes any redemption at all, even though, to my mind, that’s the intent of a play that does not equate the granting of a second chance as any kind of absolution.
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Just an aspiration that the mystical and unknowable aspects of life might save we sinners in the end.
The early scenes work much better here. The first scene of “The Winter’s Tale,” when Leontes unleashes his accusations, is a study in watching sycophants who know that their king is wrong but find themselves so consumed by fear that they cannot save Hermione and stop the subsequent cascading events. Watching the likes of Kevin Gudahl, Sean Fortunato and Erik Hellman playing courtiers all staring helplessly at their boss puts one in mind of contemporary political equivalents — situations where profiles in courage are hard to find and horrors are unleashed on innocents. In this world, only a character named Paulina (Issy Van Randwyck) has the nerve to stand by her convictions. Van Randwyck, surely not coincidentally, feels like the most focused and determined actor on the stage here. She is the one who drives the show and is the most interesting persona on the stage.
But, like the other last plays, “The Winter’s Tale” also has interloping scenes designed primarily to amuse. Here, Hall conceives of a hippyish Bohemia, replete with an ovine rock band (“Sheep Trick”) and, in the rollicking persona of Fortunato, a classic rocker; it’s all fun to watch but the production suddenly seems to reinvent itself for moment-by-moment effect when it ideally would be preparing us all for the miracles to follow.
It’s not easy, of course, to pull that off.
I don’t mean to minimize the many achievements here. This is a beautifully spoken show, crystal clear of plot, visually lean and elegant (the costumes by Michael Pavelka, who also designed the set, are gorgeous) and the piece is never dull for a moment. Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction, “Exit, pursued by a bear,” certainly does not get wasted here and, all around me, people clearly were having a good time.
But this is a tale of the heart with life-and-death stakes, born of agonizing error and lifelong regret. That has yet to fully enter the repertory.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
Review: “The Winter’s Tale” (3 stars)
When: Through Dec. 12
Where: Chicago Shakespeare’s Courtyard Theater on Navy Pier
Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes
Tickets: $65-$135 at 312-595-5600 and chicagoshakes.com