No Winter’s Tale: adapted by Gretchen Minton
No Winter’s Tale, an adaptation written by Gretchen Minton, will be performed at the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center on November 5th, and in the Black Box Theatre on the MSU campus on November 7, 2025.
No Winter’s Tale reimagines Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale through a climate-changed Intermountain West—a realm where vanishing winters reshape both landscape and lives. This adaptation preserves the original’s emotional core—jealousy, loss, and eventual reconciliation—while casting these themes into the urgent and fragile context of ecological collapse and renewal. It’s a deep, artistic fusion of Shakespearean drama with environmental science and hope.
This production is made possible by the generous support of Montana State University’s Center for Science, Technology, Ethics, & Society (C-STES). Special thanks also to the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center and the Black Box Theatre.
Tickets to these performances are free, but we do ask that you register your attendance, by clicking on this button:
Gretchen Minton based her adaptation of No Winter’s Tale on William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. In Shakespeare’s story, a jealous King Leontes falsely accuses his wife Hermione of infidelity with his best friend, and she dies. Leontes exiles his newborn daughter Perdita, who is raised by shepherds for sixteen years and falls in love with the son of Leontes' friend. When Perdita returns home, a statue of Hermione "comes to life", and everyone is reconciled.
Minton, with a background in eco-drama and writing adaptations of other Shakespeare plays, wanted to write a play that illustrated the seriousness of climate change and reflected real-world concerns about what humanity is facing, while at the same time, discarding doom and gloom and holding onto optimism for solutions and happy endings.
Production History
In May of 2025, the first half of No Winter’s Tale premiered in a production sponsored by the Western Snow Conference at their annual meeting, this year in Bozeman. Using four actors (three more actors are introduced in the second half of the play), this performance was a staged reading, presented to a large enthusiastic crowd.
