THE TEMPEST     By William Shakespeare
Directed by Ron Daniels
Starring  Paul Freeman
At the American Repertory Theatre
Reviewed by G.L. Horton

This seems to be the year for ambitious new directorial interpretations of "The
Tempest". Director Ron Daniels says in his American Repertory Theatre
production notes that he is staging "The Tempest" as an encounter between Old
World "nurture" or "culture" and New World "nature",  from which encounter the
European exiles will return to their homeland  "enriched by a greater
understanding of themselves".  But self-understanding, here, turns out to be a
counsel of despair. This "Tempest" is a tale of disillusion, wherein both old
and new world are drained of human warmth.  Friendship, kinship, romance,
degree and courtesy, learning and wit, poetry itself -- all are but phantasims,
brave and diverting while new,  but to the eye of the poet's hard-won wisdom
mere masks for lust and domination.   Power is so corrupting that even the
power of art must be abjured, and the poet-magician resign himself to a state
where "every third thought shall be my grave". The production's design elements
and acting style cooperate in this bleak vision. John Conklin's stark set is a
sun-baked beach, on which a segment of some gigantic marble construction arches
up into the vivid blue sky  "as if a huge instrument for the study of astronomy
has landed violently." All signs of the Pastoral are banished from this version
of Nature.  There are no sheltering caves, no green and leafy bowers, no
blameless rural joys.

The Italian nobility is costumed by designer Gabriel Berry in stiff dark
damask, with carapace ruffs and cothurnic heels.  Cast ashore, they skitter
about looking more like cockroaches caught in a sudden light than like human
beings.  The actors say their lines facing out, as if  in soliloquy or aside.
They don't listen: these are either the most wooden actors ever to strut the
stage, or they are portraying a set of characters who find their fellows of no
interest unless they are planning to make use of them.  Stephano, the King of
Naples' drunken butler (Charles Levin), and Trinculo the jester (Thomas
Derrah), seem at first to be an exception to the wooden standard. Levin and
Derrah are masters of physical comedy working together like a well-oiled
machine, their coordination the closest thing to a realized relationship in the
production.  But what looks at first like friendship is only a drunken parody
of a relationship; and the relationship they parody is the central one of the
play, that of master and slave.

Ariel (Benjamin Evett), the ethereal spirit who is Prospero's first slave,
looks like an albino Aborigine: nearly naked, reddish skin with white markings,
long wild locks of pale blonde hair.  Evett somehow manages to look graceful
and dignified in this undress, mostly by employing a physical characterization
that is more fire than air. Composer Bruce Odland has set Ariel's familiar
lyrics to unearthly music, which Evett performs in a.pure white- toned voice
that ranges from baritone to countertenor. Caliban (Jack Willis), the original
inhabitant and ruler of the island, has been reduced to Prospero's second
slave.  Willis is costumed -- like Evett's Ariel -- in painted flesh. His
shaved head is rust red, with big yellow spots.  Shakespeare's  text says that
Caliban looks like a fish. Hulking Jack Willis, his body painted salmon-pink,
looks nothing like a fish.  He might pass for a huge desert lizard, in some
red-rocked Australian outback. There is a wonderful bit of foolery where, when
Trinculo has crawled under Caliban's cloak,  Thomas Derrah's four foot high
pointed dunce cap becomes the lizard-monster's tail, waggling along  in mutual
panic.  Willis has played some notable heavies for the ART company, and
Willis's Caliban has a full malignancy.  He, "who once was mine own king" has
added a few European lessons to the amoral sensuality that is his state of
nature. But Caliban is the only character here that is allowed anything like a
full range of human response:  Willis uses to wring every drop of humor out of
his lines.  Caliban's poetic imagination, his childlike eagerness, gives a
relief that is more than comic to the grim stereotypes that surround him.

Director Daniels has cast as Prospero Paul Freeman, an actor whose specialty is
larger than life villainy -- Moriarty, Belloq in "Raiders of the Lost Ark",
Claudius in "Hamlet", Ivan Ooze. Freeman's Prospero is all pride, lust and
anger, held in check by an iron will .   His hair and beard are graying, but
the body is not the fragile shell of an aging scholar, but the firm musculature
of a disciplined warrior.  Prospero, too, is stripped to a loincloth,  his
"magic garment"  a towering feather headdress rather than the traditional
wizard's robe. When this Shaman of a Prospero delivers his long speeches,
ostensibly to Miranda, he does not look at his daughter, but takes up a ritual
one-legged crane posture, bracing himself with his staff and fixing his gaze
upward as if in a prophetic trance. In the twelve years they have spent on the
island, Prospero would have been Miranda's whole world: father, mother,
playmate, teacher, master and servant.  Yet of these roles, only that of master
is brought into play in this interpretation. There is no element of eventual
equality in Freeman's relationship with his daughter, none of the sort of
nurture whose goal is to create a companion and friend. Prospero has hidden
their common past from his daughter to mask the vengeful rage inside him.
Jessalyn Gilsig's Miranda fears him. She addresses him as "sir" with downcast
eyes, kneels to him, scampers to do his bidding, dutifully tries to stay
attentive through speeches which are incomprehensible and boring to her.

Freeman's Prospero seems to recognize that he has stifled Miranda's curiosity
and crippled her will. Since the girl is likely to obey her husband with the
same unquestioning subservience she gives her father, Prospero's best hope for
his daughter's happiness is to make certain that the master he turns her over
to is kind and self-controlled. But time is running out. Miranda is ripe for a
mate.  Her foster brother Caliban has already tried to "force her innocence",
and "people the isle with Calibans" -- it was for this that Prospero reduced
him to a slave. Incest lurks everywhere on this island, and nature, like a
man's own kin,  is not to be trusted.   Prospero raised the tempest to blow
onto the island the one bridegroom whose marriage to Miranda might satisfy her
father's vengeance: Ferdinand (Scott Ripley), the son and heir of that King of
Naples (Jeremy Geidt)  who plotted with Prospero's wicked brother Antonio (Remo
Airaldi)  to steal the dukedom of Milan.

The direction and costuming of the young lovers seems to support this bleak
interpretation. Gilsig's Miranda wears a skimpy yellow rag decorated with
doodles like tattoos, girt round with a metallic bodice wrap that flattens out
her curves.  She has been blocked into the attitudes of an insecure adolescent,
all awkward knees and elbows.  When Prince Ferdinand hails her as a "goddess",
one can only feel that some potent enchantment of Prospero's has been at work
-- or that Ferdinand has been far too long at sea.. The prince himself is no
prize.   Pasty complexion, spindly limbs, a constricted voice -- Ferdinand's
mighty effort to mold himself into something worthy of the object of his
infatuation is endearing, but he is not a hero to inspire confidence. The
masque that Prospers orders up to celebrate the betrothal is where the themes
come together. Daniels has "deconstructed"  the play's Iris, Juno and Ceres,
and substituted his own "insubstantial pageant" featuring personifications of
Europe, The Americas, and Africa---La Raza Cosmica, Daniels calls it.  The
pageant combines present-day South American Carnival with explorers'
impressions of the New World.   Abundance and desirability take the shapes of
bared dark skin bathed in magical moonlight and backed by glittering silver
parasols,  singing and dancing seductively in Amy Spencer's choreography until
Prospero himself breaks from his rigid self-control and "goes native". The
magician takes up a drum and gyrates madly, obscenely. ---then cuts the pageant
short, with the excuse that he has forgotten the plot against  his life. But
Prospero has seen in these shapes a sudden monster, that he must "acknowledge
mine". The rest of the play is wound up in a perfunctory fashion.  The plotters
appear in penitential white undergarments, but there's no evidence that any of
them regret their crimes, or have learned anything from their punishment.
Milan and Naples will be as full of betrayal and conspiracy as before, once the
voyage is over.

It is strange that this play, in which no grown women appear to demand a
hearing, and in which the "natives" are not a separate culture but merely the
projection of the ruler's own mind, is being used as a mirror for the crises of
legitimacy presently working themselves out in the societies that grew up out
of the voyages of exploration and conquest that inspired Shakespeare to write
it. Possibly the utopian visions of the sixties (reprised this week in France)
bear some relation to Gonzalo's speeches in praise of Edenic equality --" no
use of service, of riches or of poverty".  But this  production goes to some
length to discredit Gonzalo,  and render his mouthings mere hypocrisy and hot
air.

In the opening scene of the storm at sea,  the Boatswain orders his "betters"
to go below, on the authority of his superior seamanship, and he curses the
nobility when they don't snap to and obey. The Boatswain is usually played by
the sort of actor who is cast as the old gravedigger in Hamlet-- a working
class cuss who can hold his own with the noble star, his face a map of hard
territory. Gonzalo (Alvin Epstein) calls the Boatswain's complexion "perfect
gallows",  and tells the nobles that the ship and all must survive, because a
man with such a face as the Boatswain's was born to be hanged, not drowned.
But there is nothing out of the ordinary, nothing suggesting the criminal,
about the face of  D'metrius Conley-Williams, the handsome first-year student
from the ART Institute who plays the Boatswain -- except that his face happens
to be black. Gonzalo, the benevolent, wise Gonzalo, is shown up as a racist.
This Tempest blows us into troubling territory, where the assumptions of power
have corrupted  beyond the reach of forgiveness.

G.L.Horton
Newton, MA, USA
ghorton@tiac.net