Worlds apart

Putting together the ART's Winter

by Scott T. Cummings

The final offering in the American Repertory Theatre's 21st season is Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, a production ringed by coincidences -- too many to go unnoticed. The play is staged by Macedonian director Slobodan Unkovski and designed by Slovenian scenographer Meta Hocevar. Ten years ago, when Macedonia and Slovenia were both part of what is now "the former Yugoslavia," Unkovski and Hocevar teamed up on an ART production of Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Brecht's play is the point of departure for Charles Mee's Full Circle, which just finished its run on the Loeb mainstage late in March. Mee's play takes place in Berlin 10 years ago, at the end of the Cold War, an event that contributed to seismic geopolitical shifts throughout Europe, including declarations of independence in 1991 by both Macedonia and Slovenia.

On the verge of serendipity, I sit down with Unkovski and Hocevar to talk about The Winter's Tale and their careers since they last visited the ART. In 1996, Unkovski became the head of Macedonia's Ministry of Culture, a position he held for three years before resuming his directing career and his teaching post at Skopje University. Hocevar, a distinguished director as well as designer, is currently the dean of the Academy of Theatre and Film at Ljubljana University. Over the past 15 to 20 years, the pair have collaborated on more than a dozen productions, the most recent being Molière's The Misanthrope at the Slovenian National Theatre in Ljubljana. So what language do they use to communicate? They laugh. "Meta can understand Macedonian, and I can understand Slovenian, and we both speak Serbian," says Unkovski, "but sometimes we speak English." "It depends on the situation," echoes Hocevar. "Sometimes English is easier."

Written around 1611, near the end of Shakespeare's career, The Winter's Tale is like two plays rolled into one. The play starts off as tragedy. Leontes, king of Sicilia, suspects Hermione, his wife and queen, of committing adultery with his best friend, Polixenes, king of Bohemia. His jealous rage triggers a series of catastrophes that destroys his family and leaves him in a repentant despair. The play then shifts to Bohemia, jumps ahead 16 years, and becomes a pastoral comedy that takes place during a sheep-shearing festival. Florizel, son of Polixenes, falls in love with the country maiden Perdita and resolves to marry her, despite her low-born status. With Polixenes in pursuit, the young lovers take flight for Sicilia, where a series of reconciliations transpire, one of which touches on the miraculous.

Given the irrational violence of Leontes's jealousy, is this Winter's Tale is informed at all by the madness that has ravaged the homelands of Unkovski and Hocevar over the past decade? "In all the plays I am doing," says Unkovski, "I am trying to articulate part of my life, but not in a simple way. The play has many elements of what has happened in my country in the past 10-15 years, what has happened to me in the past couple years, what my connection is with American culture and this theater, but in a specific way I don't think I could get out a hi-liter and underline all these things." Hocevar is more direct: "When you are working on a play, you must be touched somehow. And it has nothing to do with a political situation or the country where I live. It has to do with my personal feelings."

The fantastic nature of The Winter's Tale and its sharp contrast between Sicilia and Bohemia invite directors and designers to create two distinct visual worlds for the play. Hocevar explains that she set out "to make a hard space and a soft one. We could say that the first one is for standing. You cannot sit, you cannot lie down. You can just walk or stand. And the other one is for lying about, for enjoying. This was the first idea."

For Unkovski, "the most specific decision in the beginning was `Where is Bohemia? What is Bohemia?' " Bearing in mind that Shakespeare's geography is always a bit sketchy, he decided to look at Sicily's Mediterranean neighbors for an idiom or a milieu that would be the opposite of all that Sicilia represents in the play. "So we moved our Bohemia into North Africa or Morocco. The exact location is not so important as the soul, the spirit, and the energy of the culture. That was the first major decision."

Since then, the designs have evolved and changed, but the basic idea has remained the same. Hocevar has created two towering black walls for Sicilia and a huge patchwork carpet for Bohemia that covers much of the stage floor. Unkovski is cautiously optimistic about the results. "With 10 days before opening," he says, "I think we are on the way to doing a brave and radical mixture between two worlds and two energies with a strange, beautiful development from pure tragedy to pure comedy and back to tragedy."

The Winter's Tale is at the American Repertory Theatre May 12 through June 11. Tickets are $24 to $57. Call 547-8300.