Word: calibans
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...interesting quality of this work is that the author sounds like she loves her characters. They are a part of American folklore, the general culture and the Black one, a link which Morrison insists on. Son is placed in the legion of "undocumented men" like Huck Finn, Nigger Jim, Caliban, Staggerice and John Henry. Jadine becomes the flip side of a stereotype portraying light-skinned, long haired Black women. Her-Blackness and her womanhood are two gifts of beauty and richness to Morrison. Black women give birth to legends; their ghosts live forever as long as skins bear traces...
...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...
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...