There would be less heartache and injustice in the world if more people had the courage of Paulina in Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale." As played with fearlessness and deep moral authority by Helen Carey at the Guthrie Theater, Paulina speaks truth to power powerfully.

This wife of a lord respectfully but determinedly challenges Leontes, the king of Sicilia, who has gone crazy with jealousy and has publicly -- and wrongly -- accused his pregnant queen, Hermione, of infidelity with Polixenes, the king of Bohemia. Like a delusional leader bent on a particular course of action -- he puts his wife on trial and banishes her -- Leontes (Michael Hayden) has made up his mind and cannot be swayed. He dismisses the pleas of Hermione (dignified Michelle O'Neill), his counselors and even the gods, whose oracle (Suzanne Warmanen) is wheeled out for a dramatic pronouncement.

With the help of Sicilian lord Camillo (Bob Davis), Paulina helps set things right in Jonathan Munby's lovely, lusty, and a tad overdrawn production that opened Friday.

Munby's staging seduces with its style and grace, from the unannounced pre-show New Year's Eve party onstage that greets milling audiences (it's worth getting into the theater early to see Christina Baldwin channel Billie Holiday), to the design (Alexander Dodge did both the white palace and the forest, while Linda Cho dressed the characters) to the performances by a handsome cast.

The director has set this play about opposites -- winter vs. spring, old age vs. youth -- in 1960s America, loosely contrasting a courtly sophistication that could be Kennedy's Camelot in the first act with the free-love, back-to-nature jollity of young love in the second.

The contemporary analogues largely work, helping to elucidate Shakespeare's time-jumping text, even if the gloss too glibly conflates hippie and bluegrass cultures. (Composer Adam Wernick's otherwise apt score includes a clever bluegrass version of Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.")

It took more than a minute to get used to Hayden's line readings on Friday. His Leontes has the slow deliberation of an incapacitated person trying to pass a field sobriety test. Yet I understand the choice, even if it's a bit belabored. Leontes has had some sort of breakdown. We are witnessing his gallant attempts to come back to consciousness. Hayden ultimately sells it.

O'Neill, who delivered a memorable Lady Macbeth a year ago at the Guthrie, is a pillar of this production, as well. Righteous and strong, she suggests Eva Peron in the trial (standing before a microphone on a red carpet, a curious choice). Even handcuffed, she channels an unbowed spirit.

Bill McCallum's Polixenes also is deft -- a wrongly accused character of handsome bearing. McCallum projects Polixenes' rightness without self-righteousness. There are memorable, if smaller, turns by John Catron as a young shepherd who gets robbed, Tyson Forbes as both a charging bear, a lover and a robust bluegrass rustic, and Michael Thomas Holmes as shameless songster/pickpocket Autolycus.

The fine cast also includes Christine Weber in an affectingly sincere scene as Hermione's daughter, Perdita; Juan Rivera Lebron as Bohemian prince Florizel; Raye Birk as a shepherd; Stephen Yoakam as lord Antigonus, and Ansa Akyea as Bohemian lord Archidamus. All deliver with the kind of power that adds sparkle to this "Winter."