I recently played Prospero in the new adaptation by John Schmor
at the Lord Leebrick
Theater.
Check out the cached review here
A Note From the Director
I believe at the heart of Shakespeare's The Tempest is a paradox from which
we are invited to discern the uncertain outlines of our own islands, our
own divided powers, each of us learning, in failing force, to discover forgiveness.
I have condensed and re-ordered Shakespeare's play to focus on its riddling
dream-like nature, to intensify its shifting definitions of power and love,
its mysterious balances and disruptions, as open questions, not answers.
This production has been inspired by engaging Shakespeare's main metaphors,
from shipwreck to release of Ariel, as expressions of alchemy – that
mix of science and mysticism which reached its zenith in Shakespeare's time,
notably in men like John Dee and Giordano Bruno. John Dee, Queen Elizabeth's
conjurer, was famous for his library and for a crystal in which appeared
a spirit named "Uriel," who offered Dee the "language of Adam," which,
Dee believed, would reconcile all knowledge. Dee's learned work as astronomer
and mapmaker provided Elizabethan justification for claiming English rights
to northern parts of the "new world" and so initiated the dream
of British Empire. He may well have been a model for Shakespeare's Prospero.
But by the time he wrote The Tempest, Shakespeare would likely have known
how the lives of seers like Dee and Bruno ended. Dee died in shame and obscurity,
his library ransacked and burned, for believing too fiercely in his eccentric
studies. Bruno, for the celestial truths he'd published, was brought back
to Rome, horrifically tortured under inquisition, and then finally taken
to Naples to be publicly burned at the stake.
Alchemy was a centuries-old pursuit of essences and mysteries which, it was
hoped, might reunify the sciences and religion through principles driven
by obsession with dualities, separations and conjoinings, always towards
an ideal distillation and release of essence. Shakespeare's play has many
such dualities, which generate a mysterious movement towards essences and
release. As we watch Prospero's progress, from vengeful magic he believes
he can control to the unpredictable formations which unravel his motives,
we witness possibilities unknown to his books or his power: enslaved in every
obedient daughter there may be a tempestuous spirit yearning to be set free,
in every prince may be a monster, in every man of power an exiled need for
vengeance, in every man enslaved a potential assassin, in every hard-won
wisdom a necessary acknowledgement of the dark. I hope our production can
re-mystify Shakespeare's play for you, offering a poetic dream of mysterious
dualities and separations, of conjurations from which each of us must make
our own meanings.
To separate the subtle from the gross, spirit from body,
love from possession, one must work softly, patiently, with great ingenuity,
in expectation only of adaptations – never endings.
-Anonymous, 11th c. alchemical text
