While there are a few commanding performances in the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival's current production of The Winter's Tale, the show's main attraction isn't any single actor. It is, rather, Shakespeare's art. What director Kathleen Akerley has put together is a thoroughly economical though elegant piece of stagecraft. Although Elizabeth McFadden's scenic design has exquisite features - including a backdrop designed to look like azure stained glass - and although Heather Lockard's costumes are appropriately lush for Shakespeare's royal characters, these elements never become distracting. Aside from a few well-placed strobe lights, the show abjures emphatic spectacle for the more subtle pleasures of the Bard's poetry - transforming, on occasion, into a self-reflexive examination of fiction and storytelling itself.
However, lines like "who mayst see/Plainly as heaven sees earth and earth sees heaven/How I am galled" don't make this a perfect show - or, for that matter, a perfect script. Shakespeare's plot switches swiftly, and perhaps too neatly, from a tragic to a comic register, only to oscillate uneasily between the two as The Winter's Tale nears its end. But the BSF's rendition is beset by a few destabilizing, ambivalent moves that are more case-specific. Akerley's show indulges in plenty of double-, triple- and quadruple-casting of single actors. After a very strong start, and in spite of a consistent clarity and discipline, this strategy starts to rob the characters in this Winter's Tale of the lived-in depth that they deserve.
The story begins in the court of the Sicilian king Leontes (Steven Carpenter), who is shaken by the conviction that his pregnant wife Hermione (Teresa Castracane) has been having an affair with his fellow monarch, Polixenes of Bohemia (Jonathan Watkins). After Polixenes flees his former friend's ire, Leontes imprisons his wife, alienates his nobles and provokes distress and sickness in his young son Mamillius (K. Clare Johnson). Even the child that Hermione soon delivers, a girl named Perdita, is banished from her father's sight. This tragic tone only breaks when the first half of Akerley's rendition draws to a close, as a group of kindly, comic shepherds discovers the infant Perdita. From there, the action moves into the adult life of the exiled princess (Lindsay Haynes) and barrels towards the kinds of recognitions and reconciliations that, in Shakespeare, are usually to be expected.
There are finer selections among Shakespeare's late plays. But if The Winter's Tale lacks the delicacy and brilliance of The Tempest, it is also spared the cloying potpourri quality of a work like Cymbeline. While a court drama might have invited a surfeit of pomp, the Festival wisely kept the staging fairly simple. A single throne and a single trapdoor are each enlisted in a wide array of representational purposes, allowing an exceptionally fluid progress from scene to scene.
Confining and recycling the actors, in contrast, wasn't a totally happy choice. Carpenter, for instance, toggles between Leontes and a rustic trickster named Autolycus throughout the second stretch. As a tragedian, he can be magnetic, while he approaches the comic material with an unctuous flippancy that eventually wears out its welcome. Operating as best she can within a sensitive pants role, Johnson makes Mamillius sweet but, beyond that, proves unconvincing. Yet a dose too much sugar can sometimes react nicely in Shakespeare's scenarios.
Just as Aklerley's rustic scenes begin to verge on saccharine pleasantry, a series of epiphanies - made all the more jarring by the preceding repose - shakes the mature Perdita's adopted world.
The occasional intractable fault didn't keep Akerley from approaching her material with an obvious intelligence. The Festival usually excels at working its shows into some complicated context, as the meditations on the use and abuse of power encouraged by recent BSF productions of Julius Caesar, MacBeth and Bertolt Brecht's Antigone nicely demonstrate. Even with the comedies - as last season's fine production of All's Well that Ends Well bears out - the company tends towards darkness. Storytelling and the imagination are naturally this Winter's Tale's choice discussion points. But the power of the imagination to "frame reality," as Akerley's director's notes remark, is exactly what leads to Leontes's dubious though cataclysmic accusations of infidelity.
While always intriguing, this emphasis on narrative itself doesn't always operate flawlessly. The early scenes that find Mamillius and a nobleman named Camillo (Theo Hadjimichael) reading together should be poignant, but come off as rather quaint. Though these sequences weren't mandated by the original script, The Winter's Tale is about the only place in Shakespeare's corpus where you will find a report of a bear attack, a detail that, as delivered by a dunderheaded shepherd (Christopher Ross), strikes a note not of gore but of the gloriously bizarre.
Nonetheless, The Winter's Tale is not, by the standards of the Bard's output, an extraordinary work. Nor is this an extraordinary production. Yet it is a tribute to the frequent intelligence and verbal energy of its material, often delivered with a competence and care that, in themselves, are a form of excellence.
The Winter's Tale will be showing at the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival until April 24. Call (410) 366-8596 or visit www.baltimoreshakespeare.org for more information.
