Ashland Theatre Note: Winter's Tale

A word now about the Ashland festival performance of of Winter’s Tale, which prompted my little jeu d’esprit about Shakespearean creativity, infra. I said earlier that in its presentation of King John, Ashland did a fine job with an unpromising play. In Winter’s Tale, they did a lot less with a lot more.

I’ve got great affection for this play, and in fact, Ashland did a really satisfying job on it just a few years back. But this year, they fell victim to the Ashland vice: they weren’t willing to trust the text.

You got this almost from the opening note in William Langan’s Leontes. Langan knew he was jealous, alright, and he wanted to tell us about it: he pranced, he waved his arms, he scuttered across the stage, and most of all, he shouted—oh, dear, how he shouted, in a part, that cries out to be played with cold fury and restraint. At first I thought he was trying to play Richard III; by the end I wondered if he was stretching for Groucho Marx.

Leontes pretty much dominates the first half of the play, so the presence of other creditable performances (there were several) wasn’t really enough to distract attention from him. Something harder to anticipate occurred in the second half. Ashland usually does better with the lighter stuff, and at low comedy, they can do really well. And indeed, Christopher DuVal as Autolycos could pull tricks out of the script as fast as his character could pull goodies out of a mark’s pocket.

The trouble is, Autolycos is not supposed to be the main event. He’s a change of pace, a foil, a sly and wry critique of the pastoral world around him. Here, they let him run away with the whole thing. The great sheep-shearing, which should be the centerpiece, ended up being a kind of side show (and as an aside, the odd little “folk ballet” looked for all the world like a Thomas Hart Benton painting of a slave auction).

The giveaway was the performance of the young lover Perdita, played by Nell Geisslinger. She has some of the best lines in the play (not to say the entire Shakespeare canon). She didn’t seem perfect for the part, but she seemed to give it a good shot. Or so it was until what I take to be the high point of her role. She speaks of:

Daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,

But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes

Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses

That die unmarried ere they can behold

Bright Phoebus in his strength.

To my taste, this is breathtaking: the perfect combination of lyricism and black irony that gives Shakespeare his particular tang. Yet for some reason, god knows why, they had her sing them—and not all that well, either, to a not particularly memorable tune. Why in heavens’ name one would want to stamp on one of the grandest of all Shakespearean lyrics is beyond me—unless, as I suggested before, they just don’t get the point.