[In the following excerpted review, McNulty reviews the Classic Stage Company's 2003 production of The Winter's Tale, claiming that while Barry Edelstein's modernistic staging of the play was elegant and unhurried, the acting failed to display authentic emotion, leaving the audience unable to connect to the far-fetched story.]

Shakespeare may be remembered for his great lines, but it's the characters that make us want to revisit his plays. If the matter were simply quotations, a Bartlett's would satisfy in place of an evening out. Maybe this is why Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and not Frank Kermode's Shakespeare's Language, has become the most widely cited Bard reference among active theater critics. Bloom, for all his dogmatic asides and crankiness, certainly clarified the “peculiar gift of inwardness” bestowed on Shakespeare's protagonists. What draws us—and by extension actors—to the plays is the chance to encounter consciousness in dawning recognition of itself, grasping for answers where only questions reside, and testing the capacity to rethink what has previously been held as certainty.

Shakespeare in performance lives or dies by the quality of its acting. If two recent modern-dress productions—Theatre for a New Audience's Julius Caesar and Classic Stage Company's The Winter's Tale—achieve only mixed results, it's largely because their casts seem more intent on keeping pace with directorial maneuvers than following the hairpin turns of their characters' interior logic. When will it be understood that Shakespeare is only distant or boring when the human nuance of his work is eclipsed by lively shenanigans desperate to entertain us? …

Barry Edelstein's direction of The Winter's Tale allows the overstuffed drama to unfold at an unhurried tempo. Often elegant in its spare, imagistic 21st-century design, the production as a whole demonstrates an impressive understanding of Shakespeare's parable of reckless loss and partial redemption. Yet, for all the resonantly artful tableaux, there's a strange absence of authentic emotion preventing the far-fetched story from igniting into felt life.

One of the trickiest challenges posed by this late romance lies in the unaccounted phenomenon of Leontes's sexual jealousy. Why does he turn so quickly and rabidly against his wife Hermione (Barbara Garrick) and childhood friend King Polixenes (Michael Gill)? Bloom offers the memorable sound bite that Leontes is his own Iago, though an actor needs to delve deeper to find clues into the pathology of vision that keeps the King of Sicilia perpetually confusing true and false. This is precisely what David Strathairn does not do, offering instead a generic portrait that growls and foams without psychological insight—he acts like a character trapped in a dark fable rather than a man haunted by the “spider” of his own fetid imagination.

More damaging still, the marital connection between Strathairn's Leontes and Garrick's Hermione has an impersonal air, which gravely lowers the stakes for all that ensues. As Paulina, the irreplaceable moral watchdog of the court, Mary Lou Rosato evokes genuine sympathy, though like everyone else around her, she's forced to press a bit hard. This is especially the case when the action moves to a color-burst version of Bohemia, where Teagle F. Bougere's Autolycus strains to sell the comic effect of his con games and the young attractive lovers, Perdita (Elizabeth Reaser) and Florizel (Gene Farber), prance around as though in a surreal Gap ad.

Still, there's something unfailingly moving about the final reconciliation scene, where Shakespeare resurrects the supposedly dead Hermione and lends Leontes another chance to appreciate what he almost entirely destroyed. The magic, of course, is the author's most reliable enchantment: character truth.