The paranoid despot is a familiar trope, in fairy tales and in fact. But what happens when a king’s delusions have real consequences? And can forgiveness ever sprout in the frost of grief? These are just two of the chilly questions at the center of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, staged this summer as part of the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park series in Central Park. (It runs through August 23.) Directed by Delacorte Theater veteran Daniel Sullivan, the forceful production stars Raúl Esparza as Leontes, the jealous king of Sicily, and Lily Rabe as his wrongly accused queen, Hermione.
The play opens with Leontes convincing himself that a pregnant Hermione has been sleeping with his friend Polixenes, the king of Bohemia (played by Gilbert Owuor). He quickly descends into madness, imprisons his wife, and banishes their newborn daughter, Perdita, certain she is a bastard. Hermione, overcome with grief from the sudden death of her other son, collapses and dies offstage.
“I studied videos of people with delusional jealousy. ‘Morbid jealousy,’ it is called,” Esparza says. (Another name for the condition is “Othello syndrome,” named after Shakespeare’s other, more famous delusional cuckold.) But who hasn’t been certain that the world, or at least the group chat, is plotting against them? “I recognize Leontes because I have had moments of extraordinary jealousy and anger that come out of nowhere,” he says. “You can’t stop the feelings. They just go out of control.”
Esparza plays the unhinged tyrant with a quickness, his bright eyes darting and weaving with each newfangled notion. The performance should whet the appetites of those eager to see him return to Broadway in Galileo, a new musical opening this December. It will be Esparza’s first role on the main stem in 14 years.
Photo: Marc J. Franklin
“Returning to Broadway is a very big deal. My last show, Leap of Faith, which I loved very much and loved doing, it had a great score but did not get a great production. It was a bit traumatic,” he says frankly. When Leap of Faith closed a few weeks after opening, Esparza took a beat to get some perspective on his career. Incidentally, he did television, with long arcs on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Hannibal. Some of his fans don’t even know that Esparza, a Tony-nominated Sondheim interpreter, can sing.
“I waited a long time. Galileo is so full of bangers and resonates with the times we are living in now,” he says. “Shakespeare wrote The Winter’s Tale when Galileo looked up at the stars. At that time, the state could tell you that what you were seeing wasn’t real—and you had to say that everything about science was a lie in order to simply survive.”
Rabe is also returning to Broadway after several years away for a revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, starring opposite Julia Louis-Dreyfus and John Benjamin Hickey. It begins previews in late September. “I have one day off!” she says with a laugh.
But for now, she is firmly in the swirl of this play. Rabe as Hermione is Tale’s ballast of truth, and audiences who first experienced her deftness with the Bard as Portia in 2010’s The Merchant of Venice (also directed by Sullivan at the Delacorte, then at the Broadhurst Theatre) will find her gifts evenly matched here.
Photo: Joan Marcus
