Wacky delights scattered in 'Winter's Tale'

CAMBRIDGE -- The Actors' Shakespeare Project brings a few nutty, inventive ideas to "The Winter's Tale," which seems only fitting for this nutty, inventive bit of Shakespearean category-smashing. Comedy, tragedy, a miraculous statue and a ravening bear -- they're all here, along with clowns and con men, shepherds and sweethearts, in this wide-ranging tale of jealousy and forgiveness. ASP's energetic production finds ways, more or less successfully, to deal with all of them.

One success is that bear, which reportedly grew out of actors' ideas in rehearsal: Most of the cast members, clad in black, creep into a single lurching mass, then growl and snarl as they pursue Richard Snee's poor courtier to his offstage death. It's Shakespeare by way of Mummenschanz, and it feels odd but right.

It would feel more right, though, in a production that had more invention in a similar vein. As it is, this is just one quirky moment in a staging that is generally more literal and straightforward, so it sticks out as a gimmick rather than flowing in the current of a larger and stranger dream. The pivotal statue in the final act, for example, could have benefited from some more imaginative device than simply being thrust clumsily through the curtains onto some noisily erected sawhorses.

To be sure, there are other odd delights -- especially John Kuntz's sax-playing, hip-swiveling beatnik Autolycus. Kuntz is funny and sharp enough to make you forget the usually glaring fact that Shakespeare seems to have dropped this swindling sycophant into his story for the sheer fun of it, without bothering to connect him in any but the most tenuous ways to the plot.

As for the plot, it's one of many obstacles that confront any company trying to weave a sustained enchantment out of this play. It starts off tragic, with Leontes casting off his queen and infant daughter when he wrongly believes Hermione to have been unfaithful with his friend Polixenes, then turns more or less comic as "what is lost is found," but there are also a pastoral interlude and a few deaths along the way. The language, too, ranges from high poetry to low pun, so the thorniest problem may be to find a coherent yet flexible tone in which to convey all these wildly diverging events and moods.

Visiting director Curt L. Tofteland heads the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival and is best known for his work with prison inmates, as chronicled in the documentary "Shakespeare Behind Bars." Here, he seems to have attacked the play's many challenges by encouraging each actor to find his or her own way through.

That yields some fine work, including Ricardo Pitts-Wiley's blazing Leontes, Joel Colodner's suave Polixenes, Paula Langton's glowing Hermione, and, especially, Bobbie Steinbach's spitfire Paulina. But it also gives us some incomprehensible passages, some goofily broad clowning, and, more damagingly, a sense that all these people have landed on the same stage by chance.

The production design doesn't help, as it's no more unified visually than the performances are dramatically. Even on a tiny budget, surely Charles Schoonmaker could have given the actors less awkward capes and robes -- or just let them stay in black jeans. And surely his costumes could have looked more related, in color and style, to Caleb Wertenbaker's Matisse-like designs of bare trees, which hang from the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center's filigreed balconies to create a simple but effective set.

"The Winter's Tale" is not Shakespeare's most coherent work. But it's most enchanting when it finds a director who treats it as if it is.