By Elisabeth Gaffney
This summer, Trent Stephens thought everyone could use a break.
“There’s a lot of conflict in the world. So we thought that our community might benefit from a romance, a story where everything turns out OK in the end,” said Stephens, who is the artistic director of the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival.
And that’s why the festival is bringing back The Winter’s Tale, one of Shakespeare’s late plays, for the festival’s 35th season, which opens in July. It last presented the play in 1998.
The Winter’s Tale is a romantic and dramatic comedy about love, betrayal and family spanning 16 years. The protagonist, King Leontes, suspecting his pregnant wife Hermione has been having an affair with his best friend Polixenes, gets lost in a sea of jealousy and anger. His marriage and relationship with Polixenes fall apart, and his newborn daughter disappears. When King Leontes’ daughter grows older, he reunites with her and finds the meaning of family once again.
Though the title The Winter’s Tale gives the impression of a story set in winter, it more so reflects the spring theme of renewal and growth. The title represents how the romance should be told: on a cold, dark night around a fire.
Stephens said the language of the play is elusive, and requires a good deal of effort to understand and perform. Indeed, the cast did table reads for five days, “just getting our minds around the text,” he said.
“There’s a rhetorical eloquence that you try to identify,” he said of Shakespeare. “Sometimes the rhetorical figures in the text, they’re a little dense for us. So part of [the table read] is trying to identify those rhetorical figures in the text.”
The play will feature many local actors and actresses, some of whom have performed in other Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival productions, as well as with other local companies including Palm Beach Dramaworks.
Darryl Willis and Carley George will star as King Leontes and his wife Hermoine, with Hannah Haley as their daughter Perdita, and Max Fonrose as Polixenes. Other cast members are Greta Von Unruh as Paulina, a noblewoman; Matthew Paszkiet as Camillo, an honest nobleman; Kyler O’Brien in the role of Antigonus, Paulina’s husband; Tristen Hooks as Florizell, Polixenes’ son; Lee Ritter will play Autolycus, a thief; Casey McNamara takes the role of the Clown; Kelly Hussey is Lord Cleomenes; Todd Masterson plays the Old Shepherd, and Keira Harper is Dion.
The Winter’s Tale will be performed at the Seabreeze Amphitheatre in Carlin Park in Jupiter for two weekends, July 10-13 and July 17-20. Performances are free, though the festival encourages a $5 donation per person. The shows begin at 8 p.m. and have a 15-minute intermission. For the first weekend of shows, Devon “The Sonnet Man” Glover will be providing a free pre-show performance starting at 6:30 p.m.
“The Sonnet Man was a huge hit last year, so we brought him in this year,” Stephens said.
The Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival is a nonprofit theater organization that first formed in 1988 as a collaborative event between the Chamber Theatre of the Palm Beaches and Young Audiences of Palm Beach County
The Shakespeare Festival’s first production, in 1990, was of the tragedy Macbeth, at Palm Beach Community College (now Palm Beach State College). It moved later that year to Carlin Park with a production of Twelfth Night, and has been performing at the park ever since, titling it Shakespeare by the Sea.
The festival draws about 10,000 people each summer for its productions. In 2008, it landed its permanent home at the then-new Seabreeze Amphitheater, where it performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The festival has since toured throughout South Florida and during the yearlong construction of the Seabreeze Amphitheater, the festival performed at the Mizner Park Amphitheater in Boca Raton.
The festival also produces its own award-winning contemporary plays and musicals, notably The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, believed to have been written by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. According to Stephens, the Shakespeare Festival founder Kermit Christman co-produced the play with scholar Charles Hamilton, who argued that the play, which had been attributed to Thomas Middleton, was in fact Cardenio, a lost Shakespeare play.
“In a way, we got to be a world premiere for a 400-year-old play,” Stephens said.
The festival presented its first wintertime performances in January and February of this year at Commons Park Amphitheater in Royal Palm Beach with a production of the comedy As You Like It.
Stephens said the Shakespeare Festival is always finding new ways to expand its offerings. Last year, it launched Sharing Shakespeare, an educational outreach program where the current touring cast performs at various local schools.
“That’s a program we’re really excited about, and we’re fortunate that Palm Beach County Schools is also excited about it,” Stephens said.
The Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival will present The Winter’s Tale at 8 p.m. each night from July 10-13, and again from July 17-20, at the Seabreeze Amphitheater at Carlin Park, 750 State Road A1A, Jupiter. A $5 donation is suggested. Call 561-543-8276 or visit pbshakespeare.org for more information.