NEW YORK -- The threat of terrorism on American soil after September 11 changed the way many in this city saw their jobs: Being a postal worker or a downtown investment banker was no longer simply about delivering mail or making deals but also about refusing to give in to fear. And so it was for Barry Edelstein, director of The Classic Stage Company. September 11 was the unspoken subject of his deeply affecting production of The Winter's Tale, which closed in New York's East Village on Feb. 23. His purpose was much broader than simply proceeding with theater despite the terrorist attacks: By making this fantastical play about loss and redemption seem plausible to audiences, he hoped to make recovery from September 11 seem plausible, too -- and to offer a way to achieve it.
In the first half of Shakespeare's play, Leontes, king of Sicilia, is overtaken by a fit of jealousy. He thinks his queen, Hermione, has cheated on him with his boyhood friend, now king of Bohemia. His rage leads to the deaths of Hermione and their son Mamillius; an aide is also killed, clawed to death by a bear after taking Leontes' infant daughter to far shores to be raised in the wild.
With Shakespearean luck, Leontes' daughter is deposited in Bohemia, where she is raised as a shepherd girl -- and where the second half of The Winter's Tale takes place. Bohemia is a pastoral setting that is everything Sicilia is not: Love, rather than distrust, flourishes there. Leontes' daughter and the son of the Bohemian king become infatuated with each other; in order to marry, they return to Sicilia, where they find a contrite Leontes. Through 16 years of intense penitence, the once-jealous king has earned redemption: A statue of his wife, Hermione, comes to life, and the family is reunited. But the redemption is only partial because Leontes' son, Mamillius, is dead forever.
To Edelstein, the rebirth of Hermione -- through the sheer force of penitence and the grace of time -- is no more surreal than the possibility that the families of September 11 victims will, too, someday find their hearts healed. At the same time, even if 16 years of pain yields some relief in the play's second half, 16 years are gone. As with September 11, closure can never be complete, and some things can never be as they were before.
To that end, when Edelstein resurrects Mamillius at the play's end, the character returns only as a ghost. Mamillius waves goodbye to his reunited parents, a gesture Edelstein added to the play's conclusion. It is a statement of death's finality as stirring as The New York Times portraits of grief. Mamillius, the Times might have written, was a little prince who liked to tell ghost stories to his mom, who also died in the attack.
The Winter's Tale is perhaps Shakespeare's best play upon which to graft a present-day purpose. Several lines in this play simply make no sense. Their literal meanings are so occluded, so syntactically confounding, that what results is intensity rather than coherence. Editors have struggled to discern what those lines mean, but perhaps Shakespeare was intentionally baffling: The Winter's Tale, he seemed to be saying, was a play to be experienced with wonderment, not to be analyzed linearly. The particular circumstances matter less than the broad themes.
The play's malleability was important to the performance of Hermione in Edelstein's production. Because the original text is unclear about whether Leontes' jealousy might be justified -- the Bohemian king had been present an ominous nine months before the birth of Hermione's daughter -- it allowed actress Barbara Garrick to play Hermione as coolly coquettish but entirely guiltless. That choice was an important one: Given Edelstein's linking of the play to September 11, flirtation with the Bohemian king could have suggested, if only indirectly, U.S. culpability for the terrorist attacks.
Edelstein raises some provocative points by framing The Winter's Tale as a play about September 11. For one, Leontes and King James I (a foil to his predecessor, Queen Elizabeth, and presumably the real-life model for Leontes) both bear a certain resemblance to our current president: All three heads of state thought (or think) viscerally, ignored (or ignore) advice conflicting with their judgments and emphasized (or emphasize) the prerogatives of the highest official of the land. What King James I called "the mystery of the state" and "the divine right of kings" today goes by the name of "executive privilege" and whatever other terms Attorney General John Ashcroft can conjure.
When an aide defends Hermione's fidelity to Leontes -- remember, the king's jealousy has no real source besides his own inner Iago -- Leontes scowls:
Ha' not you seen, Camillo --
But that's past doubt, you have, or your eyeglass
Is thicker than a cuckhold's horn -- or heard --
For to a vision so apparent, rumor
Cannot be mute -- or thought -- for cogitation
Resides not in that man that does not think --
My wife is slippery?
Trade the Elizabethan vernacular for a Texas drawl, and one could imagine Bush barking similar sentiments -- were an aide, for instance, to question a neocon truism such as the Iraq-al-Qaeda connection: Your glasses must be Scud-missile thick, your ears must be deaf to the chattering of pundits, your mind must have oil wells that are no longer pumping if you do not acknowledge the Baathist-Islamist collusion.
It is interesting to imagine what would happen if Edelstein brought his interpretation of The Winter's Tale not to the victims' families but to the Muslim world from which the September 11 terrorists were dispatched to murder thousands of Americans. So far, much of that world has been short on the kind of pensive contrition to which Leontes subjects himself after coming to grips with the destruction wrought by his furious rage. Just as New Yorkers have struggled to understand what has happened, Muslims, too, must reconcile themselves to realities many still find beyond belief -- for example, that their own societies are in desperate need of liberalization and reform.
Still, Edelstein directed The Winter's Tale as a September 11 play for New York, not Riyadh. And New Yorkers seem to have accepted Shakespeare's advice: First, come to grips with the unbelievable reality of tragedy; then believe in the possibility that time will bring recovery. The key, Edelstein and Shakespeare suggest, is to "awake your faith" -- not a religious faith but rather a will to suspend doubt, something the 1,776-foot-tall spiral to be erected over Ground Zero may yet inspire. But Shakespeare, in his late age, understood that even miraculous healing can leave scars when -- in an infernal tantrum, whether of jealousy or hate -- time and lives are stolen away. The Winter's Tale reminds us that their loss can be redressed, but also that they cannot be brought back.
Jonathan Goldberg is a writer based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
