Tempting the Bard

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat The cast of The Tempest

The Tempest is one of Shakespeare's most inspirational plays. In this century alone, T.S. Eliot borrowed from it the line "those are pearls that were his eyes" for his modernist masterpiece, The Waste Land. Artist Jackson Pollock drew from it the title Sea Change for one of his first drip paintings. And Aldous Huxley used a line for the title for his modern Utopia Brave New World.

Part of the fun of going to see a Shakespeare play is learning how his language has come to be absorbed into modern English and finds its way into contemporary thought. So I expected to be left craving allusions when I went to see Cityplayers version of The Tempest in a form drastically rewritten by director John Gunn. Yet, despite its liposuctioned text, it is a meaty production.

The Tempest is a play about exile. The lead character Prospero (here played as Prospera by Colleen Kelleher) was once a Duke before being usurped by his brother Alonso. With a few books and his daughter Miranda, he was set adrift on a small bark and landed on an enchanted desert isle. Twelve years later, the actual start of the play, Prospero conjures a storm with all the magic he learned from his small library and causes his brother Alonso's ship to wreck just offshore the same island he dwells upon with Miranda and two odd savages named Ariel and Caliban. With Alonso now in Prospero's kingdom of magic and exotic music, Prospero directs a theatrical experience to teach him the error of his ways.

Stand-outs in this performance are Marissa Shaffer, who plays Miranda, Prospero's daughter, with an awkward innocence expressive even during her long silences; Charles D. Prokopp, who plays Gonzalo, the play's comic relief who emphasizes the absurdity of monarchical rule when he poses the idea of a new golden age in the island realm where he would be the conductor of idleness; Eini Johnson and Gail Sinclair, who play Sebastian and Antonio with a pensive dialogue that invests an uncommon urgency in their action of attempting to murder the sovereign Alonso.

As for the Bowdlerized text, Shakespeare fanatics like me still have a nearly intact "We are such stuff as dreams are made on" speech and a beautifully rendered plot that doesn't deviate from Shakespeare's primary intentions. Given the primitive theater conditions and the soft murmur of cars on 6th Street just outside the north wall, this is an impressive performance, one that promises more from this budding young theater company.