Theatre The Tempest at the Ex and you missed it

Unfortunately, good theatre-like Cambridge romances, occasional impulses toward optimism, and New England spring days on which the sun doesn't dissolve into rain-is an ephemeral creature. And since David Boorstin's intelligent and suitably enchanting production of The Tempest has already come and gone (it played the Loeb Ex this past weekend), I am put in the unenviable position of sounding like a miser entangled in gloating recitation of secret joys and pleasures. But what other way is left us to recapture the moment lost? Shakespeare's Tempest, being full of such stuff as dreams are made on, obviously permits such retrospective consideration. And the self-assured direction and execution of this production make the task even easier.

It takes a great degree of theatrical skill to turn the box like dimensions of the Ex into anything other than one of Edgar Allan Poe's tomblike vaults-let alone invest it with the otherworldly aura of Prospero's mysterious island. Of itself, Robert McCleary's woodland setting, overgrown with mosses and shadows though it was, did not overcome this difficulty. But Boorstin's incantatory approach more than compensated. The first scene opened after a long, disoriented period of darkness during which three sprites, among them Ariel, introduced the audience to the magical qualities of their island world. The sprites-Ben Fitzgerald, Anne Pedersen, and Elin Diamond as Ariel-were able to animate the play's environment as they materialized out of, and disappeared into, the surrounding scenery throughout the drama's unwinding.

As Prospero, Bernard Holmberg properly dominated the plot's complications. His long soliloquies demonstrated the remarkable range of control-both as written and performed-that Prospero exercises over the other inhabitants of the island. Holmberg was affectionately tender to his daughter Miranda, firmly in command of the fairy Ariel; angrily severe in his orders to Caliban his slave. His Prospero possessed the strength and virility to make the aging character less concerned with his own leave-taking than with ensuring himself that those around him awake to the significance of their destined relationships in the proper spirit of awe and responsibility.

Elin Diamond's sensual Ariel complemented Holmberg's methodical Prospero by igniting in him those sparks of sexual creativity that, as much as much as anything else, trigger dramatic confrontations on the island. Interwoven with corresponding discussions of language's uses as well as interconnecting considerations of freedom and servility, the sexual energy of this production drew parallels among Miranda, her lover Ferdinand, Ariel, and Caliban in their individual comings-to-term with themselves.

As the two lovers, Mary Ennis and Michael Gury were appropriately love-struck. As Caliban, George Sheanshang spent most of the evening crouched on all fours-no easy trick, I 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.

In fact, possibly the only weak elements in this production were those scenes in which the shipwrecked nobles of Naples and Milan wandered through the isle. For their scenes were so naturally acted that they almost seemed underplayed-against Prospero's forceful presence, there was little doubt as to who was in control. To adept what Pasternak has written of Hamlet, the order of the acts has been schemed and plotted, and nothing can avert the final curtain's fall.

Yet, it is just this sense of control that makes this production, as well as the play itself, so appealing. For it's strangely reassuring to stumble upon a world in which the chance happenings and momentary pleasures contribute to the pattern of the whole. It even gives the miser's hoardatory role some semblance of justification.