But at the center of the play’s Machiavellian goings-on are a pair of innocents, Britannicus and Junia. Nero is barely out of adolescence, and Alfredo Narciso — whose first on-stage act is to take a shower, anointing himself with the contents of a beer bottle — brings to him a canny combination of sensual insolence and mama’s-boy insecurity. But he’s no innocent. By contrast, Kevin O’Donnell’s Britannicus is wrenchingly if belligerently vulnerable. His scenes with Junia — which include the painful interview in which, knowing Nero to be eavesdropping, she fears to show her loyalty — are like high-school lovers’ spats: full of the misery of first-time heartbreak. Janson’s Junia, snatched by Nero’s guards from her boudoir in the middle of the night, must play out the drama in a 21st-century teen’s “negligee”: a sweatshirt and athletic socks. And the actress is made more, rather than less, disarming by a slight lisp. Her expressive face, caught in looming triplicate by Nero’s camera, is like a deer’s frozen in the headlights of power.
A tyrant more suddenly formed is King Leontes of Shakespeare’s late romance The Winter’s Tale, the seasonally appropriate offering of Actors’ Shakespeare Project (at Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center through February 18). Although the play ends in reconciliation, it begins like Othello, with Leontes, on no evidence that does not spring from his own lurid imagination, accusing his pregnant queen, Hermione, of adultery with his childhood friend and fellow king, Polixenes. But the Bard is stingy with Leontes, providing no Iago to push him headlong into the jaws of the green-eyed monster; the king must push himself. It’s a difficult act of self-propulsion, and long-time Rhode Island stage stalwart Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, though he’s plenty formidable, does not really pull it off. He’s more convincing in Leontes’s somber contrition than in his flaring, intractable jealousy. I’m no contrarian like critic Harold Bloom, who holds that “The Winter’s Tale is far more realistic than Sister Carrie or An American Tragedy.” It’s a beautiful fairy tale whose ameliorating hero is Time. But for it to work, the audience does need to be convinced by the way Leontes turns on a dime from gracious host to despotic accuser, spun only by the power of negative thinking.
This Winter’s Tale is directed by Curt L. Tofteland, artistic director of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival and of the Shakespeare Behind Bars program at Luther Luckett Correctional Complex that was the subject of a 2005 documentary film. Whether invoking the Bard with inmates or professionals, he is a believer in collaborative creation, which may be why this production is so uneven, the performances ranging from excellent to amateurish. There are good turns by Paula Langton as a dignified yet playful, mostly dry-eyed Hermione and by Bobbie Steinbach, contained if fiery as Paulina, wife of one of Leontes’s lords, whose scolding of the repentant king is so scathing that its ebbing into tenderness, as she and the broken ruler kneel like children on the floor, is quite moving. Joel Colodner is a capable Polixenes, cordial and courtly until his outburst at his wayward son, Prince Florizel, for courting an ostensible shepherdess, recalls Leontes’s dictatorial ire. And Richard Snee does sturdy double duty as pained Leontes loyalist Antigonus and the empathetic old shepherd who takes up baby minding where Antigonus leaves off.
