Word: tempester
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STRATFORD, Conn.--When the American Shakespeare Theatre opened here in 1955, it offered productions of Julius Caesar and The Tempest. Whether by coincidence or design, the current season consists of the same brace of plays, augmented by a revival of last summer's staging of Twelfth Night...
...between, there have been two other mountings of The Tempest--in 1960 and 1971. The version that Edward Payson Call directed in 1971 was largely a failure, but William Ball had managed in 1960 to turn out the finest Tempest I have ever seen, thanks to a strong cast headed by Morris Carnovsky's Prospero, Clayton Corzatte's Ariel, and Earle Hyman's Caliban. And this despite the ill-advised total omission of the opening storm scene...
This time around, however, director Gerald Freedman has not skimped on the titular tempest. The ship's crew stands on deck, swaying in unison. The foreyard and rope ladders are raised, and the sound of eight bells signals high noon. The sky darkens and one hell of a storm strikes. The crew and noble passengers are eventually pitched into the roiling sea, represented by the violent agitation of a huge black cloth, and are saved from drowning by a bevy of naiads in turquoise body-stockings...
...Tempest takes place in a single afternoon on an island in Bermuda (as the text itself informs us), which lay unsettled until Sir George Gowers and his crew were shipwrecked on its coast in 1609. Several accounts of the expedition and wreck circulated in England the next year, and these provided Shakespeare with much of his material. The dramatist, in order to make the island a way station between Africa and Naples, simply transferred his Bermuda from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean...
Playing in repertory with Julius Caesar (and shortly to be joined by The Tempest) is a revival of the production of Twelfth Night, set in the 18th century, that Freedman directed here last season, and about which I wrote at some length in these pages (July...