There are dozens of such touches in director Kevin G. Coleman’s fine production. With many clever bits of business and a smooth, purposeful flow of action, the energy is contagious and carries one through the play’s baroque profusion of plot twists and thickets of dense, fragmentary verse.
“The Winter’s Tale’’ is one of those final plays, called “romances,’’ that fuse elements of Shakespeare’s great tragedies with the romantic and erotic play and moral self-discovery of his earlier comedies. In the tragic scenes that open, we are focused on one man, Leontes, King of Sicilia, played with a brilliant intensity here by Jonathan Epstein. It’s Leontes’s sudden jealousy, seeing his wife and the visiting king of Bohemia in affectionate play, that leads to a cascade of betrayals. Marriage and friendships are destroyed. Deaths multiply. Leontes’s wife, Hermione, is put on trial, an oracle speaks, and Hermione and Leontes’s newborn baby is sent away to the wilderness.
That’s a lot in one crammed act. However, a good Leontes can make it all work, and Epstein is riveting. He takes his time, letting the emotions register, stressing the broken syntax that so brilliantly represents Leontes’s psychic breakup, and always keeping a reserve of tenderness. Before long, we share his state of mind.
The play is about redemption. In the final act, we meet Perdita (Kelly Galvin), the outcast infant, now a beautiful lass of 16. Dropped off on the Bohemian coast in swaddling clothes (don’t ask how or why), she has been raised by an old shepherd and now finds herself happily (if chastely) in the arms of the son of the Bohemian king. See where this is going? A sheep-shearing festival serves as a kind of prenuptial feast. Coleman and company make this into a riotously funny slapstick romp, with wenches fighting in the dirt, dropped trays laden with fruit, dances and ballad singing, and a visiting company of satyrs who do a Chippendales strut and carry off the girls to some hay.
