Elan Zafir (left) plays Bohemian king Polixenes, and Karen Alvarado is a Sicilian courtier, Camillo, in the Bedlam production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.
Shakespeare’s late romance The Winter’s Tale poses two huge challenges to any director. One is that Leontes, the king of Sicilia who has been hosting his bosom buddy Polixenes, king of Bohemia, for nine months, suddenly and without reason suspects his pregnant queen, Hermione, of adultery with his old friend. The other is a jump in time between the first three acts—steeped in tragedy—to a fourth act of pastoral comedy, and a last act of redemption. Director Eric Tucker’s production of The Winter’s Tale for Bedlam seems to have taken its approach from the company’s title: it’s almost all bedlam.
Cuts are always made in Shakespeare, and the loss of the first scene, between minor courtiers, is to be expected. But the play doesn’t pick up with the lovely speech by Polixenes that begins scene 2, viz.,
Nine changes of the watery star hath been
The shepherd’s note since we have left our throne
Without a burden.
Katie Hartke plays Paulina in Shakespeare’s late romance at the Irondale Center.
Rather, an actor announces, “Alternate beginning to The Winter’s Tale, No. 1” and the seven actors high-five and dance to modern music. Then follows: “Alternate beginning to The Winter’s Tale, No. 2.” Clearly Shakespeare is not to be trusted. Interpolations, meta-theater, improvisation, and anachronisms abound.
John McDermott’s set for Sicilia’s royal court features a worn checkerboard floor, vinyl chairs and sofa, a coffee table, and strings of white lights—it’s a rural grange hall decorated for Christmas, with courtiers lounging or playing darts. Upstage Polixenes (Elan Zafir) and Leontes (Tucker) begin a drinking game in which they slap each other in the face with large tacos. Quickly it progresses to taking hard punches. As an explanation of Leontes’s irrational suspicions of adultery, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)—the brain damage that boxers get from concussions—is the most ingenious thing about this production.
But while the punching game goes on, a very pregnant Hermione goes to a refrigerator and pulls out an ice pack, turns and drops it. Other actions are repeated: hand-wrapping for the punching; Leontes having difficulty tying his tie and needing the help of courtier Camillo (Karen Alvarado)—even though Leontes is wearing a track suit! By the time Hermione drops an ice pack for the sixth time, the sense of an unmoored production is potent.
“Interpolations, meta-theater, improvisation, and anachronisms abound.”
The actors double in odd ways. Leontes initially conducts a dialogue with his son Mamillius by speaking to the center of the audience (or perhaps to a particular person) as if he were addressing Mamillius, but shortly after, the large, bearded Mike Labbadia appears upstage, taking over some of the lines and signaling he’s Mamillius by holding a stuffed gray dinosaur.
Scenes swirl with extraneous business. Leontes sends messengers to the oracle at Delphi, and they return, with much made of the two messengers’ eyes, all wrapped in white gauze, being unwrapped as they deliver the judgment: Leontes is wrong. It’s too late: he has already dispatched Antigonus (Shaun Taylor-Corbett) with Hermione’s newborn to be left in the wilderness, and Hermione has collapsed and her corpse carried away. Like a Fury, her loyal servant Paulina (a vehement Katie Hartke) keeps Leontes from seeing it.
As the story moves to Bohemia in Act IV, the Shakespearean joshing (admittedly impenetrable) is replaced with wholesale rewriting and postmodern raillery:
“I delegate counting to my underlings. I’m a vision guy.”
“Sir, you know I can’t hear you when you’re out on the veranda.”
“I’m a peddler so they call me Ped. I always wanted to be a recording artist like Elvis.”
Zafir with Shaun Taylor-Corbett as Antigonus. Photographs by Ashley Garrett.
There are a few high spots. Taylor-Corbett, playing the pickpocket Autolycus at a sheep-shearing festival, skillfully engages the audience in banter. And Tucker has an inspired scene to replace courtiers talking about the discovery of Hermione’s long-lost child and the return of King Polixenes to Sicilia. Here, the reports are heard on a television in a porn club; the audience watches the reactions of the sex workers putting on their black-leather bondage gear.
The great moment of redemption in Act V, with the unveiling and reanimation of a statue of Hermione into flesh and blood, is a bust, unfortunately. The statue is covered by a thick black veil, yet Leontes nuzzles its neck anyway, and then he says—before it comes alive, and while the veil is still in place!—“The fixture of her eye has motion in’t.”
On the whole, this Winter’s Tale is one for the deep freeze.
The Bedlam production of The Winter’s Tale plays in repertory with Hedda Gabler, at the Irondale Center (85 S. Oxford St., Brooklyn) through Nov. 20. Evening performances of these plays are at 7 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and 8 p.m. Saturday; matinees are at 3 p.m. Saturday and 1 p.m. Sunday. (Check listings for which play runs in each particular time slot.) For tickets and information, visit bedlam.org/bedlam-in-repertory or ovationtix.com.
