Both frosty, warm, ‘Winter’ is coming
Alley staging imperfect but imaginative
Imagination, a word to describe a person’s ability to conceive of worlds that don’t yet exist, might be a director’s most potent tool. And if “The Winter’s Tale,” at the Alley Theatre through Oct. 13, is any indication, Rob Melrose has troves of it. By setting this psychological drama of a Shakespeare play in a modern luxury apartment — a domain of glass walls and polished floors fitting for the jealous King Leontes — the Alley’s new artistic director has given this difficult play a sense of clarity and life.
Melrose does a lot with “The Winter’s Tale.” Not all of it is perfect. His transformation of Bohemia — the play’s coastal setting featured in the second act — into a “Love Letter to Texas,” as he describes it in the show notes, can come across as hokey, even stereotypical.
Bohemia is designed as a kind of Texas one might imagine if one has never set foot in this complex state, featuring haystacks, cowboy hats and overalls.
The Texan-ness here isn’t serious, nor does it try to be, thus avoiding the accusation that Melrose’s vision of Texas lacks authenticity — the show never sought to re-create reality in the first place. Yet why the Woody and Jessie (of “Toy Story”) treatment of Bohemia when Sicilia, interpreted as the downtown Houston abode of a multimillionaire, feels so real?
This is the work of a director who isn’t overly obsessed with perfection, which we already know from Melrose’s selection of “The Winter’s Tale,” a lateShakespeare amalgam of tragedy and comedy that poses a tonal challenge for any director. Melrose chooses imagination over perfection. The production thus showcases an audacity I’ve never seen in a Shakespeare play at the Alley.
The sense that Sicilia feels so real and that Bohemia feels so trifling — like a pink cloud or a child’s bedtime story — isn’t necessarily one of Melrose’s creation. It’s already built into Shakespeare’s play. Leontes, played by a broodingly magnetic Elijah Alexander, is the crux of this play’s tension. When he accuses his wife, Hermione (a sunny Tiffany Rachelle Stewart), of infidelity, his domain begins to crumble as loyalties are split and murderous plots are either carried out or foiled. A newborn child is carried to a nearby kingdom, left to die. The second act then does a 180-degree turn in tone, shifting into a “Midsummer” blend of joke-telling, identity-mixing and romancing that feels a bit incongruous when staged using a cartoonish take on Texas.
The issue is less that “The Winter’s Tale” is a tale both merry and sad — Melrose appears to relish in theatrical contradictions — and more that Texas is too vast and diverse to be treated like a Halloweenparty theme. Melrose offers a possible explanation for the cowboy-dress-up aspect. Beginning early in the play, Leontes’ son, Mamillius (a bubbly Juan Sebastián Cruz), sits in a separate corner of the stage, mimicking the actions onstage using dolls. How you literally interpret this staging in real time is up to you, but the suggestion is clear: This is just a tale, not to be taken too seriously.
But how can you not be serious when Alexander throws his power and fury around the stage, undergirding the toxic masculinity of his character with an all-but-hidden sense of desperation and self-hatred? These are weaknesses in his character that Leontes remains blind to until the play’s explosive climax. Dressing the characters in contemporary clothes, Melrose gives us immediate access to the power dynamics at play. He thus beautifully imagines the first half of this play as a domestic thriller, underscoring a feeling of dread by employing a low, menacing sound, which lingers in the air like a horror-film soundtrack.
“The Winter’s Tale” is meaty and challenging even by the standards of the Bard. If Shakespeare had written only tragedies, I suspect he might not have become the canonical Englishlanguage playwright he is. His greatness lies in his ability to reflect both humanity’s sins and merriments, to showcase evil while also delighting us with humor, wordplay and love.
In this way, Melrose has a fundamental understanding of Shakespeare. The uplift and redemption are as satisfying in “The Winter’s Tale” as the egodriven witch hunt is torturous. When the dark and the light meet in the end, Melrose gives us an ending that’s surprisingly inspiring. He offers his final directorial stroke, which is presenting not terror nor silliness but something perfectly in the middle — a warm, satisfying feeling of redemption.