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William Shakespeare's most troublesome stage direction occurs in Act 3, Scene 3 of "The Winter's Tale." It reads, "Exit, pursued by a bear."
Directors cope with the moment with tricks ranging from dressing an actor in a bear suit (ridiculous) to relying on growls and shrieks in the dark (cop out). Seattle Shakespeare Company director Mark Harrison and his puppet designer, Douglas N. Paasch, turn this often embarrassing moment into a high point in a production that is just one high point after another.
I won't tell you exactly how the bear business is handled. It is wonderfully ingenious. And so this show goes, wonderful in both senses: No. 1, generally excellent, and No. 2, full of wonders.
The story is bizarre. It starts with a jealous madman raising havoc. It ends with marvels, joy, incredibly good luck, reformations and love in multiple forms: filial, paternal, maternal, romantic, marital and fraternal.
As the madman, Paul Morgan Stetler illuminates a role that in most productions is merely dreary and preposterous. The jealous king that Stetler portrays could be a case history from a psychopathology textbook. He is sarcastic and contemptuous. His paranoia has a scope of 360 degrees. Everyone around him is suspect.
As a woman who breaks through the madman's circle of terrified and fawning courtiers, Jayne Muirhead is a dynamic combination of dread, desperation and rage. As the madman's son, 12-year-old middle-schooler Spencer Clark touchingly depicts a kid whose antennae are picking up signals that take him from jolly to confused to distraught.
Believe it or not, during the same scene in which a man has a horrendous run-in with a hungry bear, "The Winter's Tale" departs from nightmare terror and turns into a romantic comedy.
Troy Fischnaller is brilliantly dim as an innocent young shepherd. Similarly brilliant and dim is Troy Miszklevitz as a criminally cynical peddler/entertainer. Chris McKeon and Elena Wright do the boy-meets-girl honors. They are charming, never more so than during a robust dance choreographed by Wade Madsen.
The dancing combined with costumes by Melanie Taylor Burgess and music by Karl Fredrik Lunderberg place the action squarely in, um, Tibet. No, make that Turkistan. No, really, it must be the part of Outer Mongolia that abuts Paraguay. Anyway ... some really, really far away and long ago exotic place.
The one thing I have always disliked about "The Winter's Tale" is its inordinate amount of talk about torture. In that regard, the play goes way beyond Shakespeare's overtly horrific tragedies and histories. Since nothing comes of the appalling talk, it's just babble on the part of characters who range from slightly to severely wacko. But be warned. I, personally, would not like to answer a child's or anyone else's questions regarding an allusion to, for example, a person being immersed in molten lead or boiling oil (torturer's choice).
"The Winter's Tale" plays at the Center House Theatre, Seattle Center, through Nov. 19. Tickets are $18-$32, groups of 10 or more $16 a person; 206-733-8222 or www.seattleshakespeare.org
'Native Son'
"Native Son" is a matter of things being bad. And then they get worse -- for the characters, for the actors and for the audience.
Intiman Theatre's new stage adaptation of Richard Wright's 1940 novel about the misfortunes and misdeeds of a young black man in Chicago during the Depression is grim and grueling. Director/adapter Ken Gash's production is such a ruthless condensation that it omits the elements that make Wright's story fascinating.
Character is flattened and simplified. Dynamics of race, economics, society and history are schematic. The suspenseful tension between crime and punishment is collapsed. The vivid colors of picaresque adventure are drained. What is preserved is Wright at his worst. Storytelling becomes preaching. Dialogue gives way to essays. By the end, irrelevant answers are forced onto such unanswerable questions as, "What does it all mean?" "What is the lesson here?" and "What do these misfortunes and misdeeds signify?"
Brightening the bleakness just a little are some flashes of admirable acting. As Bigger, the protagonist, Ato Essandoh defines range with defiance that modulates into fear, rage that becomes sullenness and passivity that swells into frenzy. Also, he handles scenes of (totally gratuitous) nudity with aplomb.
Bigger is at odds with his mother, his sister and his cohort of petty thieves. His resentments spread to white people in general and to the daughter of his employer in particular. Bigger kills two women before his story ends. Wright's 400-page novel provides Bigger with motives and consequences. The murders seem implausible and capricious, however, in Gash's 90-minute, one-act synopsis.
As Bigger's girlfriend, Felicia V. Loud injects welcome vitality into a drama that is sometimes little more than a static series of brief tableaux. Loud's anger, disgust, excitement and terror are all lively and enlivening.
A sketchy setting by Edward E. Haynes Jr. and lighting by William H. Grant III are fully attuned to the prevailing grimness of this version of "Native Son."
In defense of Gash and Intiman, let the record show that "Native Son" is undefeated when it comes to evading dramatization. Two bad movies and one misbegotten stage adaptation have given the novel a solid reputation in that regard.
Intiman Playhouse is at Seattle Center. "Native Son" runs there through Nov. 18. Tickets are $27-$46, 25 and under $10, last minute rush tickets $20 15 minutes before curtain, discounts for students and groups; 206-269-1900 or www.intiman.org.
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