A Winter's Tale
Subject: Quicktake - "The Winter's Tale" by Wm. Shakespeare
Date: 01/27/07 9:30 AM
Quicktake on THE WINTER'S TALE
The ASP's second offering of the season is a brisk production of Shakespeare's late romance "The Winter's Tale" played in the round. Veteran actor/director Ricardo Pitts-Wiley from Rhode Island makes a forceful Leontes, the King of Sicilia consumed by jealousy. B.U.’s Paula Langton is a forceful and extremely pregnant Hermione, his adoring wife. Visiting artist Joel Colodner plays Polixenes, King of Bohemia and Leontes boyhood friend who Leontes imagines has cuckolded him. Veteran Boston actor Richard Snee is Antigonus, Leontes loyal advisor, forced to spirit away Hermione's newborn daughter. IRNE winner Bobbie Steinbach is his strong willed wife Paulina, who later saves the day. Almost all the actors play at least two roles. Thus when exiting, pursued by a bear, after depositing the child on the coast of Bohemia Snee reappears moments later as the Shepherd, herding members of the company who moments before played the bear as a group mime. This is the moment when the first sign is given that the play isn’t merely a domestic tragedy.
In the second half, things lighten even further when John Kuntz, noodling on his sax, appears as Autolycus and demonstrates his roguish ways by relieving Doug Lockwood who’s now playing the Shepherd’s clownish son of his possessions by pretending to be an Irish clergyman recently set upon by robbers. The young lovers, played by James Ryen and Cristi Miles, of contrasting heights but well-matched playing Florizel and Perdita, recall couples from the Bard's earlier romances. He's the Prince and she doesn't know she's really Hermione's daughter. At the festival which follows, just as they're about to be engaged by her father, Polixenes, who's there in disguise, halts the happy occasion and troubles loom. The young lovers abscond with the help of Camillo, Leontes' former adviser played by Doublas Theodore, who previously helped Polixenes flee from Sicilia and has been advising him these 16 years. The three return to Leontes' court.
It's now up to visiting director, Curt L. Tofteland from the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival, to sort out the finale. Through happy accident, the Shepherd brings proofs left with Perdita when she was abandoned. Autolycus has duped the two bumpkins into bringing them to Polixenes who's pursuing his son--and future daughter-in-law--to Sicilia. This goes smoothly enough but the real challenge is when Paulina leads Leontes et al to a supposed statue of Hermione and brings it "to life." As with most of the show this is accomplished with few frills. The acting area is plain with an abstract motif suggesting a bare tree on the floor, a design echoed on banners hung from the balcony in the tall hall at CMAC. Costumes suggest period garb but are largely utilitarian. It takes a dozen adults and one child to carry off this show, but ASP has added a fourth to their season, in which director Ben Evett will use just six actors to mount "Love's Labours' Lost". That should be worth seeing.
"The Winter's Tale" by Wm. Shakespeare, Jan. 25 - Feb. 17
Actors' Shakespeare Project at Camb. Multicultural
Bullfinch Courthouse, 41 2nd St, E. Camb. (866) 811 - 4111 (TM)
ASP
posted by will at 9:36 AM
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