Word: calibans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...play's points that Caliban, for all his subhuman qualities, is superior to the civilized royalty who wilfully embrace a career of corruption and evil. Shakespeare distilled the idea in Sonnet 94, which ends, "Lilies that fester smell worse than weeds...
Prospero, so often described as omniscient, refers to Caliban as a creature "on whose nature nurture can never stick." But he is quite wrong. In the dozen years Prospero and his daughter have lived on the island, Caliban has striven to better himself and has learned how to speak well. In the course of the play he learns valuable lessons and at the end asserts, "I'll be wise hereafter, and seek for grace...
Morton superbly conveys the pathos, humor, pain and joy that make up much of this remarkable character. He is a worthy successor to our century's most celebrated Caliban, the late Robert Atkins--who first played Prospero but switched to Caliban and went on doing the latter for 40 years, portraying him as the kind of New World savage that Elizabethan voyagers liked to bring home for public side-show display; and to the extraordinary hippopotamian Caliban that Earle Hyman embodied on this very stage...
...Gonzalo (a weak retread of Polonius in Hamlet), Daniel Benzali gets an unintended laugh from today's fuel-conscious audience when he outlines his ideal commonwealth as having "no use of...oil." And it is a nice touch, at the end of the play, for him to bow to Caliban with a kindly smile...
James Harper and Jeremy Geidt deserve credit for getting more fun out of the boozing Stephano and Trinculo than the roles really contain. But it is Joe Morton's Caliban for which this production will be best remembered...