Word: tempests
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...women. Among the female Ariels one might cite Kitty Clive in the 18th century, Maria Foote, Priscilla Horton and Kate Terry in the 19th, and Fania Marinoff, Agnes Carter, Rachel Kempson, Elsa Lanchester and Margaret Leighton in our own. For the most famous American production of The Tempest (in which only Arnold Moss' Prospero attained distinction, but which still ran a hundred performances on Broadway in 1945), director Margaret Webster engaged as Ariel the ballerina Vera Zorina, who moved beautifully but could not handle the lines...
...most engrossing--and most gross--of the characters in The Tempest is Prospero's "savage and deformed slave" Caliban, the subhuman offspring of a witch and a devil. It is incorrect to regard Ariel and Caliban as polarities. They are undeniably contrasted; but they also share a number of traits, such as distaste for physical labor, a yearning for freedom, a delight in pranks, a love of nature, an appreciation of music, and a fear of their master. Ariel has some coarse language and Caliban some ethereal lines...
...Morton (whom Bostonians will remember for his central role of Mr. Geeter in the long television series Watch Your Mouth, shown last year on WGBH) is giving the one outstanding performance in the current Tempest. With the splotchy face and long nails referred to in the text, Morton has worked out a fully rounded characterization. He crawls on his belly, he walks with a special bow-legged gait, and he indulges in puling vowels and animalistic exhalations of spleen. He knows how to emphasize the explosive consonants with which the dramatist peppered his part, and he displays a splendid singing...