THE WINTER’S TALE
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Doing Shakespeare is like hitting a baseball. It doesn’t look hard and lots of people try, but even after years of practice professionals still have a hard time doing it. So when a young, relatively inexperienced company on a meager budget working in a stifling church auditorium take a crack at one of Shakespeare’s most problematic plays, you don’t expect miracles. Put simply, Two Planks Theatre Company–mostly made up of current and former DePaul Theatre School students–is not ready for Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.
Like all the Bard’s works it’s not an easy play, and certainly not for beginners. Simultaneously a dark lesson on the perils of jealousy and a happy-go-lucky romantic comedy, The Winter’s Tale juxtaposes the heartrending split between obscenely jealous King Leontes of Sicilia and Bohemia’s King Polixenes with the cheerful romance of their children that occurs 16 years later. Carrying off both story lines is a difficult task for a director to accomplish. In Eric Kerchner’s production, no overall unifying dramatic concept holds the play together, and the shoddy production values undermine the entire venture, which never succeeds at being anything other than a relatively decent college show.
