The Tempest (2006)

Director's Notes

Dramaturg: Amanda Holden Suffering a Sea-Change When distilled to a few salient words, Shakespeare's last independently written play, The Tempest, is about a storm. This storm is concocted at the perfect moment, under the rule of "a most auspicious star", with the right people aboard a nearby ship. A storm, as our country learned in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, can literally transform a civilization, and turn daily life on its head, causing chaos, devastation, homelessness, unemployment and economic disaster. Although Shakespeare spares us from the dismal, more lifelike side of the tempest he raises in his 1611 romance, the transformative effects on each of the play's central characters are palpable. The horrific sight of the storm causes Miranda to "suffer with those that [she] saw suffer", much like the vicarious experience of theatergoer on first viewing a Shakespearean tragedy. Ferdinand's first encounter with the dazzling Miranda (and more probably, Prospero's magic) leaves him unable to control his own body: "My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up". Gonzalo's summation of the events indicate a spiritual and psychological change: "In one journey
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis, 
And Ferdinand her brother found a wife
Where he himself was lost; Prospero his dukedom
In a poor isle, and all of us ourselves
When no man was his own." (V.i.206-210) In addition to the political marriages and expected reconciliations, the characters have all "found" what they were looking for: Ferdinand found his supposedly drowned father, Prospero found his window for revenge, and Miranda found a wondrous world of humanity. Shakespeare has written for us, a play in which the characters are tossed into an unfamiliar world-not only in the storm, but also on the desert island-and in the process of finding their way out, they reconsider, evaluate, and discover themselves. In a world of nobility and courtly behavior, Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio, and Gonzalo find themselves confronted with strange sleepiness, imaginary banquets, eerily clean garments and ghostly apparitions. This is an island in which Gonzalo's attempts to preserve social decorum and courtly manners are laughably quixotic. The audience is reminded of the plea in Love's Labour's Lost: "Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves/Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths". The characters are confronted with the chance to throw away their former beliefs in favor of a newer, albeit more illusory, life. Caliban, a figure often interpreted in modern criticism as the oppressed population, is the first to discard his former master for a new one, shouting, "Ban, Ban, Cacaliban/Has a new master-get a new man!" (II.2.180-1). Like the forest of Arden, the woods of Athens, or the 16 year gap in The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare has once again offered up a space of transformation. Monsters are mistaken for fish, a drunken butler becomes a god, true goddesses are dismissed as "actors" in an "insubstantial pageant", and a prince is reduced to manual labor. Prospero's island flips the world as we know it on its head, leaving us all a little dizzy, a little seasick, and ultimately, a little more "ourselves".

Production Notes

World of the Play Patrick Kelly's 2006 production of The Tempest hinges on the meaning of the title: not simply the storm of the opening scene, or the wind-racked journey that brought Prospero to his desert island, The Tempest is the violent trajectory of the magician's own soul. Far from a gentle farewell to theatrical magic by a benevolent old sage, this rendition of Shakespeare's late romance offers audiences instead a taut and suspenseful story of revenge that turns at the latest possible point to something as surprising as it is emotionally moving. Central to this action is the island where it happens, itself almost a character in it: the terrain looks wildly different to each character who describes it, so of course the set's appearance must accommodate these contradictions. For this reason, this production approaches the island as a place of the imagination rather than of geography, or indeed of the physical world, so Robert Schmidt's set uses the sparest image to evoke this island feeling: a distant horizon line glowing where sky meets sea with an elevated platform for Prospero's "control room" of a cell. While the latest theatrical technology is brought to bear on the play's illusions, the period of the action is Shakespeare's own, expressed handsomely in Mary McClung's early 17th century costumes.