The Play's the Thing

Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale is incredibly important to me. I wrote a paper about it as an undergraduate that eventually went on to win a criticism award and helped me get accepted into grad school. I rank it as second behind Hamlet as my favorite Shakespeare play. And it's not done very often (I think, correct me if I'm wrong, the last major production in New York City was the Shakespeare in the Park production in 2010), so whenever this play is produced, I try to make a point of seeing it. As someone who loves Shakespeare's work, I am always happy to see a production that isn't Twelfth Night or King Lear or Macbeth . Do we need an excuse to just stage a play by the greatest writer in the history of English language? I certainly don't want to think so. But because there is so much misguided Shakespeare these days, I'm beginning to think maybe we do need a reason beyond, "this man was a genius, this play is brilliant. If we don't do them,...