THE TEMPEST
"Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises." So says Caliban, the island native, monster, beast, orphaned son of a witch and a devil, or strange fish—depending who you ask—to a couple of the shipwrecked fools and princes struggling to find their ways about the uncanny, spectacular world of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Ruled by the "rough magic" of exiled duke-turned-despotic-sorcerer Prospero, who can freeze you, pinch you, and bewitch you with his spells (and the help of a fairy slave named Ariel he has promised to free by the end of the night), Shakespeare’s island of the imagination is a weird and wonderful place. Plots of revenge, romance, and adventure build to pitches of fury and then—poof—disappear, leaving us with the spooky, unsettling feeling that it was all nothing but an “insubstantial pageant”, and that indeed, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”
Director Emmy Grinwis believes in the power of her artistic team’s collaborative theatrical imagination to create what she calls "a constructed magical world" for the audiences who come to the Summer Cabaret's production of Tempest. With sound design by Amber Papini that will draw on traditional Balinese rhythms, a set by Lee Savage and costumes by Christine Mok that will allow all the actors to remain onstage for the whole show while mutating from one character to another, and lights by Bryan Keller that will rise up from the floor and from behind the walls to evoke the mysteries that lie beyond the borders of the island, Grinwis wants to embrace and enhance all the paradox and fascination of Shakespeare’s vision. "If you look closely at the text, the way that Shakespeare describes the island is full of contradictions," she says. "He tells us that there is a forest on the island, a jungle, barren places, pits of brine, a place where it is always stormy. To include all these different climates the island would have to be huge, but then it also must be small enough to be surveyed completely by Caliban. He tells us of so many different types of plants and animals that live there, and some of them are real, and some don’t even exist." The island, in other words, is a fantastic space, with its own peculiar geography; in order to navigate this world we must leave our rational logic on the boat and climb ashore as if we had landed on an unfamiliar planet.
The Tempest was first performed in 1611. Stages of this period were for the most part bare and simple, with little on-stage scenery, and limited possibilities for artificial lighting. Therefore, much dramatic effect was left up to the minds of the audience, stirred by the "tempests" of words and imagery that characters in this play let loose. Yet at the same time, The Tempest includes stage directions for a number of elaborate special effects: pageants, songs, and revels cooked up by Prospero and his spirit-servants. The Summer Cabaret’s production of The Tempest will live within this tension between simple storytelling on a bare stage and the complex dreamscape suggested by Shakespeare’s words, and made possible in a new way by the stage technology of today.