Zane Williams photos. Top: Steve Wojtas and Tiffany Scott. Bottom: Colleen Madden, Steve Haggard, Marcus Truschinski and Andy Truschinski.
It doesn’t do to parse the details of A Winter’s Tale too closely. Gaze even momentarily into the parts of its sum, and you’ll find yourself in a haze of unapologetic preposterousness, tripping on plot holes stuffed with inconsistencies. The complex tragic-comic romance requires mile-high suspension of disbelief. Director David Frank makes that suspension easy in the American Players Theatre staging of Shakespeare’s genre-defying drama. There’s a method to the madness of The Winter’s Tale, and Frank – along with a top-drawer ensemble – illuminates it in a production that’s at once accessible, entertaining and thought-provoking.
In less than capable hands, The Winter’s Tale is a disjointed mess, a confusing collision of what seems like two entirely separate plays. For the first hour, it’s a grim tale of devastation and death wrought by paranoia and mistrust. Post-intermission, it’s a fairy-tale filled with jolly, dancing sheep shearers. Further muddling matters is the thing’s inconsistent timeline. The play takes place over 16 years – but only some of the characters age. The infant girl taken in by an adolescent peasant boy and his father in Act III returns as a winsome young woman in Act IV – but her caretakers come back precisely as we left them. There’s no magic spell to explain this wonder. It’s simply there, a glaring incongruity that stands out like a black bear doing calisthenics in a snow bank. At APT, the discrepancies are effortlessly forgiven. 
From the moment the wise storyteller Paulina (a regal Catherine Lynn Davis) ushers us into the court of the Sicilian King Leonates (David Daniel) and his noble Queen Hermione (Colleen Madden), The Winter’s Tale enchants.
Like a frost-covered Eden, the silvery white world of royals (rendered in icy gorgeousness by set designer Junghyun Georgia Lee and costumier Robert Morgan) is a paradise tragically lost. In the fall of King Leonates, Daniel paints an indelible and deeply moving portrait of paranoia and hubris. Willfully oblivious of his own, fatal flaws, Leonates indulges his corrupting inner demons like a evilly spoiled child. The results are heartbreaking, the infection of a single, foolish soul sickening an entire kingdom. Daniel’s Leonates is at once pathetic and tyrannical, so inwardly tortured you feel sorry for him and so brutally despotic that you despise him. When he finally breaks, blinders gone, truth apparent, it’s too late: Sicilia has become a land of dead children, banished lovers and crippling, relentless guilt.
But as sure as the seasons change and time heals all wounds, the bleakness of The Winter’s Tale is impermanent. The King, weeping and the chilly winter palette of Sicilia, gives way to a spectrum of warm purples and reds as the action moves to a land of springtime.
Frank marks the transition with visual aplomb and an evocative eye toward the eternal cycles that govern both flora and fauna, nature and people. Seasons of birth and death and redemption and sin flow past in lovely stage pictures: Bushel baskets of fresh fruit are sent cascading across the stage, strolling shepherdesses leave fresh flowers and later, autumn leaves, in their wake. Instead of the twisted, toxic obsession of Leonates, love is embodied by the selfless, innocent generosity of the young princess Perdita (Tiffany Scott).
The love stories of The Winter’s Tale – King Leonates and Queen Hermione, Princess Perdita and Prince Florizel (Steve Wojtas), Leonates and his life-long friend Polixenes (Matt Schwader) – eventually merge in a finale of spring-like sweetness tempered by the bitter lessons of a harsh, killing winter. Beyond that tri-part heart, The Winter’s Tale is bursting with a cornucopia of vivid supporting players. As the sneaky thief con-man Autolycus, Brian Mani combines the showmanship of a veteran vaudevillian with the charisma of a turn-of-the-century snake oil salesman; part Harold Hill, part Adolpho Pirelli and altogether hilarious. Also bringing home the comedy: Steve Haggard, as the (ageless) backwater rube who morphs into a somewhat proper gentlemen.
If the plot needs the Oracle of Delphi to show up in a tale that takes place more than a millennia after the fall of ancient Greece, oh well. Shakespeare can get away with that sort of thing. And so can APT’s production of Shakespeare.
The Winter’s Tale continues through Sept 26 at American Players Theatre, Spring Green, Wisconsin. Tickets are $38 to $62. For more information, click here (http://playinthewoods.org), or call 608/508-2361.
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