Author: Marta Rainer

“It is required you do awake your faith.” – Paulina

In The Winter’s Tale, Queen Hermione of Sicilia is falsely accused by her troubled husband Leontes of infidelity with his best friend, the King of Bohemia Polixenes, which ruptures all of their lives – sending some into exile, and others to their death. For sixteen years, Sicilia and Bohemia must find their way towards a seemingly impossible reconciliation – navigating tyranny, autocratic tantrums, “fake news” and punishing, irreversible regret. Eventually, through the discovery of love within the next generation, repair becomes possible. It is, truly, an amazing tale of frozen hearts thawing through time’s warm intervention. And it begs us to consider the question: is it possible to fight for hope when things seem bleakest? The Winter’s Tale weaves an elaborate and intimate tale of doubt and destruction – and then, stunningly, healing. One of Shakespeare’s final plays, he audaciously broke dramatic rules to reveal the humanity within its torment and magic. Often filed under the dismissive label of  “problem play” – for its buffet of styles, grand leaps of timeline and the joyful collision of the mundane and the epic, the murderous and the miraculous (his narrative displays a dizzying glee equivalent to action figures smashing into each other in a child’s bubble bath!)- its potential strengths might be overlooked. But I see the huge tonal shifts and Shakespeare’s blatant disregard for Aristotelian elegance to be invigorating storytelling opportunities for our entire international cast and creative team. Life is messy, surprising and often challenging. This play reflects that.When Professor Yu Jin Ko of Wellesley’s English Department brought the proposal for this project to me from his colleague – the global Shakespearian scholar and theatre practitioner Hyon-u Lee based in South Korea – I jumped at the chance to engage Wellesley students in this experiment (with deep thanks to my team of professional advisors for taking the leap with me!). Our one production was subsequently prepped, rehearsed and produced on two continents, through the bifurcated international engagement of our two undergraduate programs. What a caffeine-fueled collaboration! During our Fall 2024 semester, students in Wellesley College’s Theatre Studies Advanced Practicum course (both cast and student designers) interpreted the sections of the narrative set in Sicilia, while Soon Chun Hyang University’s English Drama Performance organization prepared Bohemia. Zoom calls at the top and tails of our days (divided by 14 hours of time difference) and a flood of emails, with attached photos and videos and group chats facilitated our cooperative learning.Our “Bohemian” cohort arrived in America the Monday after America’s presidential election and – their jetlag meeting our collective questions regarding the U.S.’s political future – we began four days of turbo-stitching together our two stories in one space. Building on this experience, our cast and creative team reversed the visit and adapted and performed our joint Winter’s Tale at Soon Chun Hyang University in wintry January 2025 for Korean audiences – as their own President was preparing to be arrested, in response to his brief December declaration of martial law in Korea. Had we not had this international collaboration, those headlines would not have been activated so vibrantly in our own awareness, as well as within our work. With each geopolitical update throughout our months of collaboration, we understood all the more deeply how this 400 year old text resonates with immediacy in our current lives – on both our continents.

To commit to this unusual and exciting undertaking where so much was unknown and unknowable (despite the intervention of technology), our students all have had to stretch their skills, focus, flexibility and intercultural awareness along the way. Their curiosity and generosity of energy and spirit have been remarkable. Our players’ practice on this project in some ways harkens back to the use of cue scripts in Shakespeare’s day, where each performer at his contemporaneous playhouses was given access only to their own lines and the cues which prompted them – not to the whole play. To succeed in that circumstance, they had to rely on the known as they discovered moment by moment the narrative of the play they were in through deep and active listening, concentration, articulation and reasoned and bold reaction. We also had to jointly evolve our consideration of the play’s narrative in the context of our shared contemporary moment – the dramaticized impact of autocracy on society, politics, family dynamics and intercultural relationships. We jointly presented on this topic at the first Wagner Center Symposium for faculty research; additionally, our students presented portfolios (and received national recognition, including the Don Childs Cross Discipline Collaboration Award) at the American College Theatre Festival. In April, our joint production will be presented by the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive, with accompanying discussion led by Hyon-u Lee and Marta Rainer. And it will be the subject of a presentation at the upcoming twentieth Arts in Society International Conference, focusing on the Art of Hospitality. So why tell this tale today? I come back to the question about hope in bleak times. Leading up to our own production, I turned for insight once again to the writings of the Czech playwright, dissident and politician Vaclav Havel, who through his life’s trials and tribulations and his own imprisonment came to define hope in all its defiant complexity in his essay Disturbing the Peace. “Hope,” he wrote, “is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.” We practice this principle whenever we are in artistic process, so that we can be prepared to reflect this goodness in the wider world.  In challenging times in our current world, we sank our teeth into this very story which challenges expectations, and offers the hard-fought suggestion that even the worst rupture can – with time, care, honesty, love, bravery, labor, defiance, patience, and yes: awe – be worthy of repair.

See this behind the scenes video for more information about the production.