Shakespeare's canon contains parts for many fools, but none more foolish than obdurate, gullible upper-class men like Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Richard III. In his earlier plays, whatever form their foolishness took was a tragic flaw, and the perpetrators were usually snuffed out. But with his late dramas like The Winter's Tale, now at BAM as part of The Bridge Project, Shakespeare entered his own maturity, promoting forgiveness. Fortunately, no real forgiveness is necessary where Sam Mendes' lucid, tough-minded, and ultimately charming production of this problematic play -- which is ordinarily considered a play about death and rebirth but is just as much about the related importance of pen[...]