“The Winter’s Tale,” among Shakespeare’s final plays, is famous for being a multigenre work: tragedy for the first half, the comedy to follow and a sentimental tearjerker of redemptive reunification at the end.
Chicago Shakespeare’s artistic director Edward Hall’s production aggressively embraces the differences, with a decidedly mixed result. The show starts with extreme highs but recedes in success from there, and rather surprisingly can’t find an ending which, in my experience, often comes off as the most moving and memorable in Shakespeare’s canon.
The first half of this show, though, is unquestionably some of the most exciting Shakespeare I’ve seen in some time. After establishing a happy tone in its early moments, it shifts suddenly into a propulsive psychological thriller, as King Leontes (Demetrios Troy) has what we would call a mental break with the flick of a light cue.
Initially encouraging his lifelong best friend and fellow king Polixenes (Chiké Johnson) to extend his visit, he instantly becomes convinced that his guest is having an affair with his queen, the eminently virtuous and currently pregnant Hermione (Jessica Dean Turner). His paranoia — so wrong and yet so unstoppable — becomes a landslide of tyrannical terror, as one previously trusted aide after another attempts, and fails, to dissuade him from a determination to punish the innocent.
These scenes can come off as repetitive and even frustrating given how unjustified Leontes’ beliefs are, but here they couldn’t be more fully engrossing and frightening.
As Leontes, Troy genuinely listens to his advisers before rejecting them, which gives his character dimension. We see in his darting eyes the moment his mind hits a brick wall that blocks his executive functioning. In response, his advisers (all excellently played by Erik Hellman, Ronald L. Conner, Sean Fortunato and Kevin Gudahl) each must up the desperation of their pleas, giving every rejection a growing sense of dread.
Shakespeare grants the women the ultimate opportunities to make a case, with Turner finding the dignity in Hermione’s desperation and Issy van Randwyck, as Hermione’s strongest defender Paulina, delivering a certainty that almost competes with Troy’s Leontes, along with a decidedly spunky attitude.
By the end of this first half, Leontes has realized his error — an early deus ex machina does the trick — but the damage is irreversible. In this late, “mature” Shakespeare, some mistakes can’t be fixed, but can only be partially healed, and only with time. Thus, we jump forward 16 years during intermission.
After the break, we move into full-on comic mode, and Hall turns it up to 11, a “Spinal Tap” reference that’s apt here given that Autolycus (Fortunato), one of Shakespeare’s famous rogues, enters as an Ozzy Osbourne-type clad in leather and fur. We also get the ensemble dressed as sheep and playing in the rock band “Sheep Trick” (silly and amusing!) and an innocent shepherd (Gudahl) and his son (Dan Haller) donning Southern accents to represent their naivete (less amusing and overly stereotypical).
And we don’t just get a shift in tone, but in directorial approach, as if the two sides of representing life in this change also represented two sides to Hall as a director of Shakespeare.
The first half was stripped down yet fully realized, a single, clear concept executed with style and intensity. The comic section feels overburdened with ideas, albeit some extremely clever. Autolycus is a former courtier turned outcast, and here he’s a walking satire on glamour (not unlike Osbourne himself). It borders on brilliance as an idea, but as executed it’s just too much, producing a chaotically farcical rather than gently pastoral comedy. Fortunato in this case puts forth such a relentless, even desperate, need to please the audience that the antics end up clouding the many scenes he drives.
What’s lost is the underlying tale that we need to care about to get us to some form of integration. In this case, it’s the unlikely courting of Perdita (Felicia Oduh), who has been raised by the shepherds and doesn’t know she is actually Leontes and Hermione’s daughter, by Florizel (Estaban Ortiz-Villacorta), Polixenes’ princely son. But the couple feel like afterthoughts amid the chaos.
The effect of this cascades into what should be an emotional, fantasylike ending. Here, the production feels neither intensely focused nor idea-oriented, but simply perfunctory and bland. Even what seem like obvious opportunities established by Michael Pavelka’s quite lovely set, or Hall’s initial framing sequence of this show as a children’s story, seemingly get abandoned.
All that said, in addition to the outstanding first half of “The Winter’s Tale,” the good news here is that this same cast — really an excellent ensemble — will be back, running this play in repertory with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which opens next month.