A TALE FOR ALL SEASONS.(Theater Review)

On April 29, 1968, "Hair" ("The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical") opened on Broadway. In those faraway days, when a show tended to reflect something of the Zeitgeist and not, as more often happens now, our love of nostalgia, "Hair" was a happening--not only for its popularization of the hippie myth but also for its multiracial staging. The casting of black actors with white marked a new attitude in the theatre, one that was not self-consciously "liberal" but, rather, urban and culturally diverse; it played off the inevitable tensions and surprises that arise among actors when their differences are given a stage. "Hair" had its start downtown, at the Public Theatre, where the founder and director, Joseph Papp, had instituted what one might call the New York school of casting. At the Public and at the Delacorte Theatre, in Central Park, where Papp staged Shakespeare under the stars, the poor and the rich watched Raul Julia and Clifton Davis mugging their way through "Two Gentlemen of Verona"; the unforgettable Gloria Foster starred in Ntozake Shange's translation of Brecht's "Mother Courage"; and David Alan Grier, the black actor and comedian, performed with sly wit in "The Merry Wives of Windsor." For Papp, there was nothing to be gained from restricting blackness to the same old song-and-dance routine. How could one create theatre--a living theatre--in a city where Jews and blacks, Puerto Ricans and Chinese, Indians and Native Americans had lived on top of one another for decades, without acknowledging the different characters of its inhabitants? Of course, black singers and actors had been appearing for years in opera (Leontyne Price in "Turandot," in 1959, for instance) and on television (Cicely Tyson in the 1963 series "East Side, West Side"). But, watching those performances, one was often aware that the casting was intended as a "breakthrough," a step forward in the dreary politics of civil liberties. Papp helped make the multiracial cast feel natural to the enterprise, thereby establishing a tradition that such brilliant New York-based directors as George Wolfe, the late Reza Abdoh, and Jo-Anne Akalaitis continued.

Barry Edelstein, the director of a new production of "The Winter's Tale" (at the Classic Stage Company, where he is also the artistic director), has cast Shakespeare's play with a number of black and Asian actors. But Edelstein here exhibits none of Papp's Macher pride or subtlety. He has Teagle F. Bougere, for instance, play the wily Autolycus--the singing rogue who opens the second half of the show--first as a street guy and then as a fast-talking Rastafarian, to disastrous effect. Bougere's "blackness," rather than Autolycus' cunning, becomes the joke, and it's an offensive one: Stepin Fetchit meets Redd Foxx. Angel Desai, an Asian actress, is relegated to two small parts, used more for her sprightly gameness than for what one guesses is real talent--a Madame Butterfly without the tears.

Autolycus first appears, in Act IV, in Bohemia, where Perdita (Elizabeth Reaser) and Florizel (Gene Farber), the son of the King, Polixenes (Michel Gill), are living in a kind of Elizabethan version of "Hair"--an Eden for the young. But this Eden was established after a fall. At the beginning of the play, sixteen years earlier, Polixenes loses his dearest friend, Leontes (David Strathairn), the King of Sicilia, by seeming to be too close to the King's wife, Hermione (Barbara Garrick). One afternoon, at Hermione's insistence, Polixenes describes his youthful friendship with her husband:

We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk i' th' sun, And bleat the one at th' other. What we chang'd, Was innocence for innocence; we knew not, The doctrine of ill-doing nor dream'd, That any did.

Leontes, unfortunately, has no such illusions about innocence. As he watches Polixenes and Hermione talk, he is consumed by jealousy ("Too hot, too hot"). He is Othello without the intellection, which is to say, without Iago. He's filled with rage, but he doesn't know where to focus it--on Hermione, for loving his "twin," or on Polixenes, for loving his ...