Tempest Creates Bleak Landscape

Rain trickled down through the open windows of the Cabot Underground Theatre on Sunday night; it was raining in the hearts of the cast, too. To add to the downpour, the audience before long was weeping tears of frustration. The Cabot House Drama Society production of The Tempest sports some fine acting, thoughtful direction and engaging drama. But these faint mitigating rays fail to illuminate the bleak landscape of the show.

The actors must all have been on molasses and valium. They paused for five seconds between each speech, allowing the show to drag excruciatingly. The director, Leo Cabranes-Grant, ran the production according to the principle that anything said slowly enough is high drama. Not content with one intermission during the two-and-a-half-hour extravaganza, he threw in a second, just to flesh things out. Perhaps he wanted to give suicidal viewers an opportunity to make a bid for freedom. The acting was usually wooden, and the transparent attempts to throw in the odd whimsical flourish served only to emphasize how staid and slow the production was. No amount of thought-provoking direction and visionary acting can compensate for the basic dramatic necessity of maintaining brisk and lively delivery.

Everybody knows the story of The Tempest: the magician Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, have lived on a desert island ever since Prospero's brother, Antonio, usurped the Dukedom of Milan and banished them. But now Prospero conjures a tempest to wreck Antonio's passing ship. Antonio and his fellow conspirators fall into Prospero's hands. With the help of the sprites that he controls, Prospero dictates the subsequent events on the island, cunningly arranging a reconciliation and improving his political standing. The play toys with our notions of reality and illusion, and presents an engaging debate about power and exploitation.

Cabranes-Grant attempts to read the play as a meditation on colonialism and social oppression. He prefaces the show with an excerpt from Ellison's Invisible Man, and replaces the masque in the middle with Cervantes' The Magic Theatre. As Cabranes-Grant notes in the program, "Both texts share with The Tempest a particular interest in the contrasts between the invisible and the visible, the shifting boundaries between illusion and reality." But he allows this interesting dramatic analogy to dissipate into meaninglessness by failing to follow it through.

Chicu Reddy, as Prospero's exploited slave, Caliban, would naturally dominate a production organized on these lines. For the opening few scenes, he looks like he will. He acts with presence and confidence, playing Caliban as the downtrodden but spirited revolutionary. But that interpretation just doesn't work. Caliban's situation strikes the viewer as poignant because, by our society's terms, he is only semi-human. To transform him into the streetwise troublemaker that Reddy portrays is to dodge that most pressing issue. Before the weaknesses in Reddy's Caliban become obvious, the director loses interest in his brainchild, and brings the focus back to Prospero.

This fresh foray into the realms of interpretation meets with even less success. Brian Kim plays Prospero like a used car salesman. Disaster threatens each time the shiny-suited Kim stands under a spotlight, but the dreaded meltdown never occurs. Instead, he melts the icy hearts of the Italians with his friendly smile and firm handshake.

Kim sells his finest model, Miranda (Maria Padilla) to an entirely unfamiliar Ferdinand (Spyros Poulios). Far from the tender young prince we know and love, Poulios' Ferdinand was a sex offender in another life. 90210-style, he's cool, he's cut, and he wants just one thing. God knows what inspired this revision, but it sure wasn't textual support or artistic merit.

One or two characters resemble their textual selves. Padilla's Miranda captures the naive schoolgirl, gushing effusively in the face of her "brave new world." Two actors, Blanca Hovey and Alice Ristroph, following timehonored technique, divide the role of the spirit, Ariel. Their petulant, childish rendition fit the bill perfectly.

Marco Torres turns the pompous old Gonzalo into a raging queen. Campy as a row of tents, he injects humor without losing sight of his original character.

An occasional redeeming factor interrupted the monotone of bad direction. The energy of the storm scene, and the agonized crawling to evoke the landing on the island both impressed with their improvisational power and dynamism. The comic interchange between Caliban, Stephano and Trincula sometimes rose above cliche, with original blocking and choreography.

But absurd conceits like the crude alienation technique of arguing over whose line is whose, or bringing the musicians onto the stage to perform with the actors mid-scene better indicate the general standard of direction.

The cast and crew of the Cabot production of The Tempest fail not only to pull off their grand ambitions of reinterpretation and "contrapunctual texture"--they fail even to fulfill the basic demands of drama. So the endless time and effort necessary to put on a play all go to waste. If you decide to brave the rains to see The Tempest, be prepared for a wet fish.