Word: stephano
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While a very roughhewn justice is dealt the plot, Trinculo, the jester, has become a blowsy demimondaine (Lola Pashalinski), and her companion, the drunken butler Stephano (Louis Zorich), looks like a disheveled French chef with a torn toque blanche. The pair do a crude parody of Mae West...
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...
...true test of a play's quality lies in the performances of the supporting cast, and the actors of The Tempest all put a maximal effort into their parts. Particularly noteworthy are Johanna Defenderfer and Eva Simmons as Stephano and Trinculo, a pair of fear-stricken, drunken and very funny sailors. Ralph Zito turns in a macho, manic performance as Ariel, the spirit forced to do Prospero's blading. Joe White, as Sebastian, gets off some well-delivered lines, and Paul Rosta is a perfectly doddering, if one-dimensional, old fool as Gonzalo. The rest of the sailors and nobles...
...would suspect-while also managing to inject a certain amount of pathos in his position as the dumb mutant whose momentary aspirations only serve to force him lower to the earth. And all the while, Richard Kravitz, playing the jester Trinculo, and W. C. Fuller as the drunken Stephano, contributed a number of nice comic bits without, thankfully, appearing to strain for the laughs...
...scenes in which Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo, the King of Naples' drunken jester (slightly overplayed by Dan Hermann), conspire to wrest the island from Prospero's control are especially humorous. Since Bergreen has chosen to direct the play as a comedy, the celebration of Ferdinand and Miranda's marriage in the fourth act, at which Prospero displays his magical powers by creating a host of spirits, is played in a light and frivolous vein, Iris and Ceres reciting their lines like girls in a sixth-grade English class. This parody of the wedding hymn, necessary to maintain the exaggerated acting...