[In the following review, Isherwood acknowledges the difficulty faced by Barry Edelstein in directing a modern-day production of The Winter's Tale, but notes that the performance suffered not from the efforts to reconcile the two worlds, but from the lackluster acting of the cast.]

With their preposterous, often gruesome plots and occasional dabblings in the supernatural, Shakespeare's late romances do not take easily to modern-dress productions. In Barry Edelstein's sober but sapless production of The Winter's Tale at the Classic Stage Co., for example, the oracle of Delphi makes its pronouncement via a reel-to-reel tape recorder wheeled onstage—a deflatingly mundane image, even if the voice, amusingly, is that of the aptly august Walter Cronkite.

The kind of topsy-turvy worlds these plays evoke is not easy to reconcile with business suits and modern technology, although Edelstein's production finds reasonably intelligent ways to draw parallels between Shakespeare's ancient Sicilia and Bohemia and contemporary America. The kings of those countries, Leontes (David Strathairn) and Polixenes (Michael Gill), appear here like CEOs of allied business concerns. (Recent developments in the business world would suggest highflying CEOs may well be susceptible to the kind of irrational behavior that besets Leontes in the opening moments of the play and sets its fantastic plot in motion.) The play's pastoral scenes, meanwhile, might be taking place in Tompkins Square Park, with the shepherds and shepherdesses attired in the latest downtown togs, chunky boots and all.

The damage here comes not from Edelstein's often handsome stage images, which are underscored with elegance by Michael Torke's superb jazz-tinged piano score and the subtle lighting of Jane Cox, but from the drab delivery of some of Shakespeare's most challenging verse, which drains too much of the color from this exceedingly colorful play. Too many of the performers seem to attire the play's rich language itself in a business suit. The verse is interpreted with adequate skill and sense, but in a bland manner that robs it of its dramatic power and has a flattening effect on the production as a whole.

Strathairn's Leontes, who is gripped by a paroxysm of sexual jealousy to supersede Othello's in the play's opening scene, is something of a dry stick. This character's belief in his wife's corruption is so patently irrational that it needs to be expressed with a commensurately powerful depth of feeling. Strathairn's Leontes never seems to be in the grip of overpowering emotion; irritation and irony course through his mutterings, not deluded rage and erotic humiliation.

Barbara Garrick, who plays his wronged wife, Hermione, does not possess a particularly handsome stage voice; there's a touch of stridency in it that, combined with her uninflected delivery, robs the character of the piteous grandeur that makes her plight so moving.

The play's sudden shift from the gruesome to the frolicsome is always both a surprise and a relief. The outrageous excesses of Leontes' behavior and their terrible consequence:—Hermione's imprisonment and (apparent) death, the banishment of the babe, the death of the young prince—are so overwhelming that the play seems to reach an emotional dead end, which makes the reunification of the king's family (most of it anyway) in the final scene likewise overwhelming in its power.

Here, unfortunately, the comic antics that serve as an interlude before that astonishing scene of renewal wear out their welcome fairly quickly. Costume designer Mattie Ullrich has seriously miscalculated with Perdita's costume, a getup that might give even the sartorially wayward Bjork pause. The raggedy tutu and work boots are dreadful enough, but the butterfly wings are unforgivable. It cannot be easy for Elizabeth Reaser to communicate Perdita's artless goodness in this artificially whimsical costume. Gene Farber, as the prince who has fallen under Perdita's spell, is more appealing in his exuberant affection. Teagle F. Bougere plays the rogue Autolycus as a smooth, street-savvy operator with the usual goods on offer, but it seems perverse to cast so manifestly unmusical a performer in a role that requires quite a bit of singing.

Perhaps the only performer who really sings the verse itself as it should be sung is Mary Lou Rosato, who is a vocally and dramatically forceful presence in the pivotal role of Paulina. Rosato is obviously an actress with long experience in the classics. Because the language comes easily to her, she has freer access to the emotion that underlie it. The scenes in which she rages against Leontes' cruel and causeless behavior are the liveliest, by some measure, of the evening, the rare occasions when a spark of powerful feeling meets the tinder of Shakespeare's language, and a real conflagration results.