[In the following review, Isherwood assesses the Public Theatre's version of The Winter's Tale directed by Brian Kulick, arguing that the production is not successful in handling the shift from the tragedy and drama of the first half of the play to the pastoral comedy of the play's second half. Isherwood additionally comments on the shortcomings of Keith David's Leontes and Erica N. Tazel's Perdita.]

All of Shakespeare's plays pose formidable challenges for actors, but perhaps none are tougher than the upheavals and reversals that pepper the Bard's late “romances.” The Winter's Tale, for example, boasts a king whose emotional eruptions seem to arrive and recede by authorial fiat, and a doomed queen who disappears for a good hour, only to resurface posing as a statue in the play's final moments. Most surprisingly, the play's true heroine doesn't appear until the fourth act, and then spends most of her time talking about flowers. Rare, indeed, is the production in which all the emotional convolutions of the play—including a gear shift from high drama to pastoral comedy midway through—are negotiated with complete finesse. The Public Theater's new version in Central Park's Delacorte Theater is not, alas, that rare triumph. Despite a handsome design and largely competent, smooth staging, Brian Kulick's production fails to transmit much of the play's powerful attraction; it's a “lite” version of this rich and strange play, a pleasant midsummer's tale more than a fiery hot and icy cold winter one.

Challenge No. 1 is the task facing the actor playing Leontes, king of Sicilia. In the play's opening minutes, Leontes is possessed by a fit of jealousy that surpasses anything in the Shakespeare canon for sheer irrationality. After imploring his boyhood friend Polixenes (Graham Winton), the king of Bohemia, to remain as his guest in Sicilia, and receiving a gentle rebuff, Leontes prowls among his courtiers as his wife, Hermione (Aunjanue Ellis), sees her admonitions rewarded with success. With little provocation, he goes ballistic, mistaking friendliness for a more dubious intimacy. Kulick's Leontes is Keith David, an actor of authoritative stature and voice whose naturally regal demeanor gives significant force to his every utterance. When he raises an eyebrow upon observing the friendly talk of his wife and friend, it's like a curtain lifting on an abyss.

What leaps from that abyss is a monster of sexual jealousy that threatens to destroy the kingdom. After navigating the sudden switch from benevolence to rage, the second challenge facing David is to give sufficient variety and emotional power to the verbal paroxysms of misogyny and irrational hate that follow, which take up much of the play's first three acts. He doesn't quite succeed. His Leontes never reaches the emotional crescendo that gives sufficient horror—or fascination—to his bloodthirsty acts. (These ultimately claim the life of his young son and, it appears, his wife, and lead to the 16-year exile of his baby daughter.) David's diatribes are convincing enough, but one too often hears forcefully declaimed poetry rather than madness itself versified.

Kulick's staging of these scenes is likewise too stately. We should see chaos descending upon the Sicilian court, and while darkness falls on Central Park in nicely timely fashion, Kulick's courtiers continue to array themselves with elegant symmetry, with placid court faces set atop Anita Yavich's tastefully sumptuous, vaguely Edwardian finery. Riccardo Hernandez's attractive set design relies on long, gilt-framed panels of a jumbo reproduction of Botticelli's “Venus and Mars” that are wheeled around in precise formations to suggest various royal localities.

Set against Leontes' irrational cruelty is the beautifully cool wisdom of his wounded wife. The Winter's Tale is about the unnatural madness into which man's excessive passions can lead him, and the regenerative force of woman's more wisely tempered emotions. (Later, Polixenes, too, will suffer a fit of emotional excess that needs curing.) This contrast is somewhat muddied in Kulick's production, because Ellis' Hermione tries to beat her husband at his own game: Humiliated by his accusations, she happily descends to his level, becoming angry and eventually hysterical. Where is the heartbreaking resignation that's to be found in every line of Hermione's beautifully written speeches? “I am not prone to weeping,” she says at one point, but Ellis' Hermione apparently is. (Shakespeare provided a more hot-tempered but no less wise alternative to Hermione's piteous martyrdom in the person of Paulina, played here with earthy wit and fine spunk by Randy Danson.)

Also obscuring the play's contrast between man's hasty hate and woman's healing patience is the sweet but ineffectual Perdita of Erica N. Tazel. Sixteen years pass between acts three and four of The Winter's Tale, and when the play resumes it's in a pastoral paradise in Bohemia, where Perdita, the daughter of Leontes and Hermione, who has been raised by a shepherd, is being courted by Florizel (an appealing Jesse Pennington), the son of Polixenes, as it happens. Perdita is one of those no doubt maddening-to-play Shakespearean heroines who must exude spiritual wisdom and grace from her first entrance—in this case a decidedly late one. On one level she is simply a symbol: the power of nature and its beauty personified. But she is also an earthy figure who shares her mother's pragmatic wisdom.

Tazel, certainly a lovely girl, doesn't yet possess the technique to quickly and instantly command the stage and to communicate all she must through the verse. Her Perdita gets lost in the shuffle here, and her already dangerously small part is reduced further by some puzzling cuts taken in the text, including the debate with Polixenes on the qualities of art and nature. This is considered by some to be the thematic heart of the play; no less a Shakespearean authority than Harold Bloom calls it one of the most profound passages the Bard ever wrote. It's a somewhat obscure passage to everyday ears, of course, but its excision is unfortunate, to say the least, as is the loss of one of Florizel's loveliest speeches in praise of Perdita's beauty, furthering the diminishment of this pivotal character.

Overall, Kulick's production is most successful at the breezy comic business that fills much of the latter half of the play. Bronson Pinchot is an appealingly sly and vocally strong Autolycus, the petty thief whose shenanigans ultimately aid in the reunion of Perdita and Florizel with their parents. (He treats us, however, to perhaps one funny accent too many.) The performances of Bill Buell and Michael Stuhlbarg as Perdita's adoptive father and brother were warmly appreciated by the Central Park audience, as was the waspish wit of Danson's Paulina and the occasional wisecrack of her husband Antigonus, played by Jonathan Hadary.

But the evening's crowning comic moment was supplied by a presumably inadvertent sight gag. In the play's last scene, Paulina brings Leontes, Perdita and the assembled court to view the “statue” of Hermione she's been tending for 16 years. The gilt-framed Botticelli panels parted to reveal the, er, statuesque (and African-American) Ellis standing on a pedestal in a clinging white chiffon gown, its fabulously flared skirt fluttering in the breeze—in short, the living image of Diana Ross, sans Supremes! As Leontes approached in wonder, marveling at the lifelike nature of this statue, one half hoped Hermione would fling out a hand and launch into a chorus of “Stop! In the Name of Love.” She didn't, of course, and it may have been the evening's bitterest disappointment.