High concept seems low-budget in Great Lakes’ ‘The Tempest’

Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics

Like the storm at sea that kick-starts “The Tempest,” the entire play – believed to be one of Shakespeare’s last – is a turbulent and temperamental force of nature. 

The play is an assemblage of cross currents that toss together tragedy and comedy, generate winds that blow warm with romance and cold with revenge, and provide a torrential downpour of mysticism, spectacle and the potential for imaginative stage craft.  If not one of Shakespeare’s most popular works, it is certainly one of his most intriguing.

It begins with Alonso, the King of Naples (Dougfred Miller), his son Ferdinand (Patrick Riley), Antonio, the Duke of Milan (Jonathan Dyrud), and others (Aled Davies, Nick Steen, M.A. Taylor) being shipwrecked on a mystical island due to a storm created by the magician Prospero (David Anthony Smith) and his ethereal, indigenous spirit-servant, Ariel (Ryan David O’Byrne).

Twelve years ago, the sometimes cruel, often controlling but still compassionate and paternal Prospero was, himself, marooned on the island with his young daughter Miranda (Katie Willmorth) when he was deposed by the same Antonio now trapped on the island, who is his brother.  Prospero manipulates the movements and haunts the dreams of the castaways, but he cannot control the love that sparks when Ferdinand and Miranda set eyes on one another.

Meanwhile, two other survivors – the ship’s cook, Trinculo (Dustin Tucker), and a butler, Stephano (Tom Ford) – form an alliance with a less-than-human native named Caliban (J. Todd Adams) and plot to take over and rule the island.  That they are thoroughly inebriated from the shipment of wine that washed ashore makes all their plotting and posturing the primary source of comedy in the play.

The conceptualization of the island on which all this unfolds – where the worlds of the native inhabits, the Europeans in exile, and the shipwrecked courtiers and crew collide and where the realms of magic and mankind intersect – is fraught with creative possibilities and theatrical risk-taking.  But while past Great Lakes Theater efforts to bring Shakespeare’s worlds to life have soared – including previous productions of “The Tempest” – this version, under Drew Barr’s direction, stumbles.