At its heart, The Winter's Tale is a meditation on sex but, as a bonus, it contains the best stage direction Shakespeare ever wrote: Exit pursued by a bear. The first half of the play is a tragedy about the horror of jealousy—Leontes, king of Sicily, drives himself mad thinking that his wife is cheating on him with his childhood friend, the king of Bohemia. When Leontes says "it is a bawdy planet," it is not a cry of erotic liberation, but a lament. The second half of the play is a comedy about the glories of young love—and, more explicitly, young lust. In one thrilling line, Perdita, the estranged daughter of Leontes, offers her lover a bed of flowers in which to writhe in passionate embrace. Yowza.
The Winter's Tale is a hodgepodge of riffs on pagan stories of sex and regeneration: There is a statue-turned-human (Pygmalion), an abandoned royal child raised by shepherds (Oedipus), woman-fish transmogrification (the Little Mermaid), a lost daughter who returns to and revives her mother (Persephone), and half a dozen more. Seattle Shakespeare's production is slow and lovely, with an Indo-Japanese aesthetic (the floor looks like a burlap imitation of a tatami stage) and a few strong performances: Paul Morgan Stetler as King Leontes, an Othello who is his own Iago; clowns Troy Miszklevitz and Troy Fischnaller; and Jayne Muirhead as Paulina, the lone courtier unafraid to speak truth to paranoid power.
There is, of course, a political resonance to The Winter's Tale—an autocratic ruler who, in a flush of conspiracy mindedness, invents a nonexistent threat and wreaks death. Thankfully, no American flags are unfurled, no heavy-handed video montages projected. We are allowed to note it, nod, and dive back into the agony and the ecstasy of love.
