We saw a production of The Winter’s Tale at the Quintessence Theatre in Philadelphia this afternoon. It’s one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, but I’ve never actually seen it done, so I was especially eager to see this. Quintessence is a talented group and has in the past done stellar productions of difficult plays like Saint Joan and The Cure at Troy (Philoctetes). They pulled this one off too.
The stage was a rough approximation of a Renaissance English thrust stage; there was a facade with three openings at the back and an upper playing area used for occasional effects.
I don’t have the energy to give a full review. I do want to single out Jered McLenigan, who played Autolycus: it’s a brilliant, musical, insane part to begin with, and he pulled out all the stops, carrying a good bit of the second act single-handedly.
And there were two striking bits of staging in that last heart-rending scene: as directed here, Hermione’s statue was facing away from Leontes. When it came to life, her first movement was to turn her face toward him with a look of ineffable sadness and longing — and reach out a trembling hand toward him. And the last thing we saw was Perdita, the Child Who Was Lost, reminding us of that other child who was truly lost by picking up Mamillius’s old teddy bear from behind a doorway and gazing at it with a look that was at first puzzled and then shocked. It was a risky move, running counter to the celebratory mood of the closing, but for me it worked: it was an essential callback.
Update 28 March 2022. It seems unfair to single out only one of the leads in this excellent cast. Michael Zlabinger as Leontes, Hillary Parker as Hermione, Amari Ingram as Polixenes, and Eleni Delipoulos as Paulina all did an outstanding job. Zlabinger’s Leontes was somewhat more melodramatic than the rest of the cast, but it was still a powerfully affecting performance.
Then there were the rustics. Well… Joseph Langham played the Shepherd and Lee Thomas Cortopassi played his son, and they were straight out of Hee Haw, mugging and gaping and prancing around for all they were worth. It was disconcerting at first, but once I adjusted to the level of the comedy, it was fine — and it provoked plenty of welcome laughs. (Langham doubled as Antigonus, swallowed up by a huge bear-prop that rolled out of the central doorway and dragged him back in. Cortopassi also doubled as one of the Sicilian lords. In fact, pretty much everybody in the cast doubled as at least one other character.)
Travoye Joyner and Kristin Devine Jones were the romantics, Florizel and Perdita. They are not especially challenging parts — at least they didn’t seem so to me; they usually aren’t in Shakespeare; see Hero and Claudio for comparison — but they carried them off convincingly.
McLenigan’s ubiquitous guitar as Autolycus wasn’t the only instrument wielded by this musically talented cast: there were banjos and fiddles and something that looked like a makeshift bassoon. The first act is a stark tragedy. The second act is a nearly uninterrupted party. One of the remarkable things about the production was how lively the sheep-shearing scene was with only six or seven people on stage.
It was a lovely afternoon. Quintessence is alternating The Winter’s Tale with Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, which we’re scheduled to see next week — another one I’ve read a couple of times but never seen. Same set, same cast. I’m looking forward to it. Since I haven’t had anything to say about Ben Jonson here, I’ll try to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit when I write about it.
Tad's Shakespeare Diary 