The Tempest Review

The Tempest
By William Shakespeare. Directed by Jack Tamburri. Scenic designer: Kristen Robinson. Costume designer: Mark Nagle. Lighting designer: Alan C. Edwards. Sound Designer/Composer: Nathan A. Roberts. Performed by Brenda Meaney, Adina Verson, Tim Brown, A.Z. Kelsey, Paul Lieber.

Through August 12 at the Yale Summer Cabaret. Performed in repertory with As You Like (which begins previews July 1) and Rose-Mark’d Queen (begins previews July 7).

It’s not always clear who’s wearing the pants in Yale Summer Cabaret’s season-opening traipse through The Tempest. But everybody gets to wears Prospero’s robe, and read his books.

Knocking Shakespeare’s island-bound romantic revenge drama down to eleven characters, essayed by six actors, is both fraught and freeing. What you lose in fluidity you gain in transparency. Character work is not as strong, but the construction of the play gets a fresh clarity. With each of the actors covering two roles each, plus a part of Prospero, Jack Tamburri’s production becomes one quick style experiment after another. Which works just fine with a script which, just to mention its film versions, has inspired such radically diverse visions as Paul Mazursky’s, Julie Taymor’s and Forbidden Planet.

In trying to explain the plot of The Tempest to my daughter the other day, I found myself saying “he’s angry at his family, so he goes off and discovers his own island and does whatever he wants there—the way a lot of people might want to.” I’d never considered Prospero as having an urge that could be called common until I expressed it that way. This Tempest, however, is all about Prospero’s impulses being understandable and universal. He’s not the imperious individual we usually see him as. He represents emotional choices, often extreme ones, that a lot of us might dream about: removing ourselves far from our problems, magically forcing people to fall in love (or fall asleep), curling up with a good book for eternity. His slave and lightside-personality-extension Ariel comes off as more practical than whimsical here.
In a land where actors change character simply by donning a different hat—or casually acknowledge the audience, despite being stranded on a remote island—the supernatural, mood-changing mood of Shakespeare’s script is diffused. Everything here is potentially transformative. A sorceress is just a trickster with some personal hang-ups.

This is not one of those slimmed down Shakespeares which builds itself around a single strong concept. It plays freely with a lot of different ideas. Romantic scenes are played for laughs. The servant scenes are played for laughs upon laughs upon laughs. Class conflicts get downplayed when the servants are such endless buffoons, but gender roles here are openly explored: Adina Verson plays Ariel just as gender-bendy as Verson was when being Yitzhak in Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the Yale Summer Cabaret last year. Caliban is played by a woman (Brenda Meaney, the girliest of The Tall Girls at the Carlotta Festival of New Plays this past May); to some is a departure, though when I look back at all the Tempests I’ve seen at Yale over the years, I think I’ve seen more female mooncalves than male.

With actors switching parts with such alacrity, scenes of imminent death don’t come off as all that dangerous. Suspense is lacking. The acting styles clash constantly. Some roles are believably portrayed while others are shallow wallows of surface and artifice. In the very first scene of the show, I worried that the cast’s initial air of good-natured goofiness—The Tempest done as Godspell—would pervade the whole production. But the forced buoyancy soon breaks up.

This Tempest is best approached as a scenework exercise, where key exchanges exist in the moment and don’t necessarily propel later scenes. In a land ruled by an amorphous presence with a passion for books and storytelling, such roleplaying is appropriate. When the actress playing Miranda takes a turn in the golden robe that denotes that she’s now playing Prospero, she rips pages and pages out of one of the self-exiled intellectual’s favorite tomes. The volume turns out to be a Collected Works of William Shakespeare.