The Perfect Storm
I'm usually as excited as I am wary of a director testing a concept — usually a new setting that redefines characters and situations — on a Shakespeare play. The line between illuminating a 400-year-old script, and distorting it, is thin. So I was not only pleased, but relieved, that Shawn Kairschner's The Tempest not only makes sense, but is also insightful and inspiring.
The Tempest can play like a fairy tale if one chooses, but at Villanova University Theatre it resembles a nightmare: A doctor in a repressive 19th-century asylum marshals his drooling, babbling, filthy inmates for a makeshift rendition, using battered furniture, raggedy costume pieces, group percussion and vocalization, and occasional corporal punishment to nudge his charges through the play.
Brian McCann's Prospero, exiled duke and sorcerer, conjures a tempest, shipwrecking his usurper and crew, including the King of Naples (Shane Borer) and his son Ferdinand (Charles B. Illingworth IV), on the island Prospero shares with daughter Miranda (Jessica Dal Canton), beast Caliban (Chris Braak) and spectral servant Ariel (Kristi A. Good), who teases the castaways. "Hell is empty," Ariel screams, "and all its devils are here" — neatly describing the asylum's actor-inmates. Prospero directs these devils, charging about, scattering pages from his overstuffed script all over Meghan Jones' gritty set, more prison than hospital. Michael Worth's haunting score is played by actors on cello, flute, violin and piano.
Confusing at first is whether these addled inmates are performing The Tempest, or becoming it. Braak plays a poor soul so violent he's chained to a wall; clearly unwilling to participate, he's nevertheless chosen to play the equally rebellious Caliban, sparking an all-out riot — a terrific Act 1 finale that leaves the doctor fearing his entire production is lost. Other inmates are portrayed as poor actors, posing stiffly and speaking awkwardly, and we wonder why we're watching this occasionally graceful, but often amateurish, play-within-a-play.
Audience members who jumped ship at intermission missed how Kairschner convincingly merges these layers: Miranda and Ferdinand become genuine characters, and as the rough-hewn production gels, tension increases as we realize that the inmates' tortured personalities might burst through ruinously at any moment.
Midway through this brisk, busy production, I was rooting for these struggling souls to succeed, and rewarded with a beautifully transcendent ending fusing the script's soaring themes with the inmates' desires for freedom and creating a whole greater than the sum of its parts — no mean feat, when one of these parts is Shakespeare's most personal and original play.
The Tempest
Through Nov. 19, Villanova University Theatre, Vasey Hall, Lancaster and Ithan aves., Villanova, 610-519-7474, www.theatre.villanova.edu
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