The Feast: An Intimate Tempest (Chicago Shakespeare Theater/Redmoon)
Prospero has gotten difficult to like. An audience watching a production of William Shakespeare's The Tempest in, say, 18th or 19th century London might be expected to sympathize with a protagonist who, having been exiled from Europe, has spent the last 12 years lording it over the natives on some faraway island. In our postcolonial age, though, we're liable to wonder how the natives feel about the whole thing. And what was once considered a comic fantasy centering on an enlightened sage becomes an altogether thornier proposition.
Prospero strikes many modern playgoers as arrogant and peevish at best and, at worst, tyrannical and flat-out cruel. In particular, he's not a very nice boss. With the help of his magical powers, he holds two slaves in his thrall: Ariel the sprite and Caliban the brute. The former is Prospero's favorite, but the pixie longs for freedom nonetheless. As for Caliban, his master bullies and berates him mercilessly (this is partly because Caliban has attempted to sleep with Prospero's daughter, Miranda).
In The Feast, adaptors Jessica Thebus and Frank Maugeri limit the characters to just these three. Their Prospero (John Judd) spends all his time in a gloomy banquet hall outfitted with a large, cross-shaped wooden table. He forces Ariel (Samuel Taylor) and Caliban (Adrian Danzig) to act out scenes from a story he's written--a process they have to repeat over and over until it's perfect.
In his tale, Prospero casts himself as an all-powerful Svengali who shipwrecks and confounds his political enemies, choreographs a favorable marriage for his daughter, and thwarts an insurrection led by Caliban. This is, of course, what happens in Shakespeare's play, but since in this case everything is filtered through Prospero's own imaginings or maybe his memories, he comes across, variously, as a megalomaniac, a sadist, and a madman.
To tell the tale, Taylor and Danzig use a number of eerily lifelike puppets and masks. They're assisted by the banquet table itself, a marvelous contraption from which scenery seems to rise of its own accord.
This story-theater element combines with a bleak sensibility similar to that of Samuel Beckett. As Tony Adler pointed out in the Chicago Reader, the scenario calls to mind Krapp's Last Tape, in which another old man tells himself his own life story in a last, desperate bid to understand it. In its prisonlike atmosphere and inquiry into the master-slave relationship, The Feast also reminded me of Hamm and Clov in Endgame as well as Lucky and Pozzo in Waiting for Godot.
In the end, Thebus and Maugeri leave us wondering whether Prospero's tale is true, made up, or told merely to exercise his power over his servants. But this inventive and strangely beautiful distillation of the original is awfully satisfying anyhow, thanks in no small part to the adaptors' handling of the ending, when Prospero finally finishes his story, relinquishes his powers, and sets his bondsmen free. The gesture doesn't entirely redeem the puppet master, but it humanizes the man.
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