A curse of some kind

Nothing screams for a good interpretation more than Shakespeare. Hang around the theater community for any amount of time, and you’ll have a chance to see everything from authentically Elizabethan pronunciation to 21st-century modern-dress updates with smart phones. Sometimes, the market seems saturated with directors trying to make their mark with a new and innovative take on a classic.

And then there is the rare and somewhat horrifying experience of seeing a production of a Shakespeare play that seems to have no interpretation at all.

The Classical Actors Ensemble makes Shakespeare its bread and butter; going to one of their performances, I expect a well-crafted production that brings out the best from Shakespeare’s rich language. The opening night of “The Tempest,” however, left me aghast not only by the lack of cohesion of many of its production choices, but by the seeming inattention paid to the most important part of a Shakespeare play: the text.

“The Tempest,” if you aren’t familiar with it, was Shakespeare’s last play and also one of his most thematically rich. It deals with a magician, Prospero, whose brother has usurped his dukedom and sent him and his daughter, Miranda, into exile on an island. Twelve years later, as Prospero’s brother and members of the royal court are passing by in a ship, Prospero conjures up a tempest in order to shipwreck them and get his revenge. The role of Prospero, who uses magic to stage his own little drama on the island, is often seen as analogous to that of the playwright or director, but interpretations of the play often go beyond meta-theatrics. Feminist critics have made much of the play’s lack of female characters, while Prospero’s enslavement of the island’s native inhabitants has provoked a number of postcolonial reactions to the play. In other words, this is a juicy text for a good director to mine.

Uneven and off-kilter

Unfortunately, Daniel Ian Joeck, who directed this production, has followed up on none of these thematic threads, as evidenced by both uneven performances and off-kilter technical elements. Chava Curland’s puppets are a perfect example of the need for a stronger editorial hand. Curland has a beautiful vision for Ariel, a disembodied island spirit, whom she creates out of a mask made of petrified wood and an assemblage of flowing fabrics. In the best moments, Ariel is played by three different actors simultaneously to generate a cool disembodied-voice effect. But Curland also makes missteps that a well-articulated artistic vision could have helped avoid. For instance, there is a scene where characters operate Indonesian wayang puppets that represent themselves – so, rather than Prospero being the puppet master, it seems as though the characters are pulling their own strings (very confusing).

Curland is not the only one in the production team that suffers from a lack of directorial oversight. There are odd costuming choices, including an awkward use of silk scarves draped over leather jackets. The musical interludes are thematically appropriate and mostly sung well, but are amplified to painful levels. And the mostly very lovely set features a patch of sand – which makes sense, except the actors kicked up so much dust that my friends and I were scratching our eyes and holding back sneezes by intermission. The most frustrating of all this was how easy it seems as though it would have been for an attentive director to fix any one of these problems.

As far as the actors are concerned, many seem to be at sea (no pun intended) with their line readings, but the most glaring issue was in George Muschamp’s performance of Prospero. Although Muschamp has a very respectable list of theatrical, teaching, and TV/film/radio credits to his name, I have never before seen a performance where it was so clear that a leading actor did not know his lines. In his first scene with Miranda, I interpreted his stumbles as an intentional choice to portray Prospero as a doddering parent, but his continued errors and protracted pauses were evidence that these fumbles were not an artistic choice but a failure of memory – and this, as a character who is meant to represent a sort of playwright.

What might have been

It was sad, because a number of the cast members clearly could have been very good. I saw moments, particularly by Marika Proctor (as Miranda) and Nicholas Nelson (as Stephano), that brought out the text in clear, engaging, and funny ways… until another actor stepped in whose intuition of their role was less innately well-defined. I use words like “innate” and “intuition,” because I am convinced that most of the cast members have plenty of skill, if they had only been given more time or a firmer interpretive ground on which to base their performances.

Finally, I can’t go without mentioning this production’s treatment of Caliban, Prospero’s slave. Given Prospero’s arrival as a white man on an uncharted island, his relationship to Caliban and Ariel has inspired a long tradition of postcolonial critique, including a number of adaptations of the play by Caribbean and African writers. This production overlooks this tradition entirely, with utterly uncritical portrayals of Prospero as master and Caliban as a pure uncivilized brute. There are many great ways to interpret Shakespeare that don’t need to involve outright political commentary, but these days, such a thoughtless staging of an overt master-slave dynamic is at best tone-deaf and at worst racially ignorant.

Minnesota Playlist has been featuring a series of conversations where directors talk about their craft. This is an instance where that sense of craft – of an intentional meaning animating a rich theatrical text – is woefully absent in nearly every way. Give this one a pass, and the next time you see a brilliant production of Shakespeare, pay extra special attention to the directorial vision that brought it all to life.