The Tempest at Northwestern University

Or: Tempest Fugit

You enter into a world alive. While Prospero (David Catlin) pours over his magic books beneath a canopy of ropes and vines, a thick and steamy atmosphere fluffing you with phantom humidity nine strongly clad, tattooed figures hang from the trees calling and echoing the birds, beasts, insects and sounds of an island jungle. This is Hannah Todd’s telling of the Tempest, a zesty, unpredictable faerie light that leads us through the bogs of and over the moors of marveling, a production as like to reach out and grab you as draw you in.

The peg upon which Todd hangs this production is the relationship between Propsero, the exiled Duke turned magician, bent on revenge and restoration of his title, and the spirit Ariel, the entity through which he works his magic. Rather than a single bendy body of air and fire, Ariels spirit encompasses the entire ensemble, a being of a dozen voices and a dozen forms who springs from the island; the genus loci of the place, instigator, storyteller, and adversary to the exiled Duke. Under Prospero’s orchestration Ariel conjures up the scene its master requires: sucking up and spitting out characters like the unbendable Alanso (Amira Danan), unflappable Gonzolo (Brett Warner), or the free wheeling Stephano (Isabel Thompson). Its hard to tell if the the castaways are being drawn into the Spirit, or the Spirit is possessing and playing dolls with the castaways. It’s really quite disturbing if you actually sat down to think about it.

But you don’t get time to sit and think because everything, aye everything, is rendered for us in dazzling feats of circus. Everywhere you look there is something stupendous going on, sliding, dangling, climbing and falling. Everyone gets the chance to show off their most impossibly bendy moves, though especial mention goes to the shades of Antonio (Anna Basile) and Sebastian (Sam Douglas) who’s enthusiasm and keenness both accentuate their antics as spirits and carry over to the Fey and Poehler-esque air they give to their mocking turned musing turned murderous ways as the two conspirators.

The physicality (and all its attendant hookups and snafus) puts a heavy emphasis on the comedic facets of the play. Laughter abounds in this forest, in every storyline. One of the more inspired strokes is to drain the romantic cyst from the Ferdinand (Kori Alston) and Miranda (Cordelia Dewdney). Foregoing the winsome waif tradition that makes Miranda such a featherweight among the heroines, Dewdney presents us is a boisterous creature, scraped and swole from growing up in the wilds. Absolutely besotted by Ferdinand she trips over her feet and her tongue in eagerness to make her affections known; and when she defies her father it’s not through puppy eyes and beseech-ments; she gets all up in his face. Alston in turn plays up the idea that Ferdinand, far from being prince charming, is in fact a shipwrecked trauma victim in the clutch of a mischievous supernatural power. He’s totally dazed and endearingly dim and unsure of his actions, though certainly not his feelings, around this maid unlike any one he’s met before. Their determination to court in as genteel a manner as possible, despite their limitations is a thick vine producing a fine wine of hilarity. When Ferdinad is pressed to carry some rather lively logs logs to prove his affections, I nearly suffered a conniption of mirth.

Though the show is undeniably alive and enticing. it can get caught up on it’s own feet. The reliance on Ariel’s antics, the cirque du slap-stick nature of the production means the pace of the lines is slowed and the lovely harmonizing (a honey-sweet glaze of song that glistens in the air) sometimes becomes less than harmonious. Most distressing of all the verse, that lilting, lifting language marking descents to madness and accents to grace, often goes completely by the board, and one or two of the cuts, intended no doubt to hasten the plot, hobble the story. It’s all undeniably wonderful (produces wonder by the pailful), and I would happily watch the acrobatics from Can to Can’t, but there’s a story, an important story about loss and mercy, that all the suspended curl-ups in the world won’t tell. Tempus Fugit. More Mater, less Art.

It is therefore a great joy when the fantastic feats of storytelling strike a tuning fork of the story, most resonantly with Catlin’s Prospero. Foregoing the traditional depiction of a storm and thunder sorcerer (though when his goat is gotten his outbursts are hair-raising), we are instead guided by a gentle, Dad-joking, nostalgist, haunted by impending loss. He holds his daughter close wryly guiding her actions, memorizing her manners before she sets out beyond him. And, more tellingly, his love and care is mirrored in the fastidious affection he pays to the instruments of his art. He knows his days as an omnipotent magician are numbered, and whether he is restored his rightful place or not, he will loose his genius, and become just another man in the jungle; humbled, powerless, but hopefully not alone.