Picture playwright-adapter Aaron Posner sitting around a table over beers with the magician known today as Teller, beat-blues songwriters Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, and Pilobolus dance choreographer Matt Kent, all planning to put on a show together. When somebody suggests that a framing story might be useful, Posner remembers one by William Shakespeare that might serve.
Whatever you want to call this production of The Tempest, what it certainly is not is your classroom classic tarted up with cute decorative shtick, but instead a whole, freshly imagined project employing its venerable 17th-century source as one—but only one—of its components.
The predominating ingredient is the "conjuring" hinted at in the original script, in this case replicated by familiar stage illusions—teleportation, levitation, body-part displacement, a snippet of Houdini's underwater-breathing stunt and manipulation of cards, spring and wires—courtesy of co-director Teller, "magic designer" Johnny Thompson and Chicago newcomer Nate Dendy as a whiteface Ariel. Another exercise in body-part displacement is Kent's depiction of the misshapen monster Caliban as a creature composed of two humans conjoined in permanent grapple-stance, a feat of physical coordination accomplished with agility and a lurching grace by Zach Eisenstat and Manelich Minniefee. Let's not forget, too, Shaina Taub's arrangements of Waits and Brennan's gritty melodies for the onstage spooky-tunes orchestra ( also mentioned in the Elizabethan playbook ) dubbed—what else?—the Rough Magic band. So many different attractions could easily dissolve into an entertaining, but ultimately chaotic, circus—which is where Posner comes in, him of the daring Chekhov and Potok makeovers. Recognizing that increased time in the spotlight for non-verbal elements reduces that allotted for spoken dialogue, he pares down Shakespeare's text—already a fusion of such period literary fashions as vengeance dramas, fairy-tale fantasies and lost-voyage travelogues—into a streamlined narrative retaining all of the major themes while dispensing with verbiage rendered unnecessary by the aforementioned sensory diversions. On board to ensure that every word uttered by a cast ranging in expertise from iamb-crunchers like Larry Yando and Barbara Robertson to the anonymous crow-masked ringers falls trippingly from the tongue is verse coach Kevin Gudahl, while Daniel Conway's quasi-Victorian scenic design connects land and sea in visual harmony. Oh, and did I mention that it requires a mere two hours for everything to be resolved to everyone's satisfaction? If you see just a single play this autumn, you won't find a more conceptually integrated or seamlessly realized production than this.
