Word: sicilia
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Shakespeare divided his text into almost equal halves by introducing Time (Powers Boothe), who serves among other things to bridge the (much criticized) gap of 16 years. In the first half we witness the wintry tragedy of King Leontes in Sicilia, prefaced by the prose duologue of lesser figures. The second half, similarly introduced by a prose duologue, brings us pastoral comedy in Bohemia. But the playwright goes on to take us back to Leontes and Sicilia at the end, where all the seemingly disparate elements are miraculously tied together with a triple knot. Kahn underlines this by having Time...
...structure of The Winter's Tale is not bipartite, as usually maintained, but tripartite, a fine example of the Hegelian dialectic. In the first three acts we have a thesis: the chill, sterile, tragic life of Leontes's middle-aged court in Sicilia. In the fourth act, we have the antithesis: the pastoral and exuberant life of the young commoners in Bohemia. The fifth act brings us a synthesis, in which the two components are brought into mellow harmony with each other...
...this production director Michael Kahn has made all this especially clear, with the help of Jane Greenwood's costumes and Ken Billington's lighting. In the first Sicilia scenes, everyone is in snowy white. In Bohemia, John Conklin's handsome cyclorama of hanging Lucite tubes is lit with the green of vegetation, and the actors wear colorful yellows and greens. When we return to Sicilia for the last act, the whites have been softened with patches of light grey. In addition, the character of Time (Powers Boothe), whom Shakespeare brings in only to bridge the celebrated 16-year hiatus, appears...
...Sicilia sailed into the Bay of Naples, its decks were crammed with 677 distraught and dispirited Italians, many of whom had never seen Italy before. They were part of a wave of refugees from Libya, where the military regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is celebrating its first anniversary in power by expelling the last 6,000 members of an Italian community that numbered 25,000 only a year...
They are getting it back with interest, as the passengers of the Sicilia testified. For two weeks before their departure, they had been forced to stand in long queues at government offices, where they had to submit detailed inventories of their entire holdings. After Libyan authorities were convinced that the lists were accurate, they confiscated all the properties without so much as a single Libyan pound in compensation. Then the Italians were given exit visas and allowed to take with them only the personal belongings they could pack into suitcases and trunks...