The Tempest has an unclear setting: We know simply that it takes place somewhere in the Mediterranean, since Alonso and Antonio are on their way back from Tunis (where Alonso’s daughter has been reluctantly married off) to Naples. The Tempest is also one of the few Shakespeare plays not to have a clear literary source. It is thought to have been inspired by Shakespeare’s reading of a real-life event described by a voyager: On July 24, 1609 a fleet of nine English vessels was nearing the end of a supply voyage to the new colony of the Bermudas when it ran into “a cruel tempest,” presumably a hurricane. The vessels in the fleet couldn’t keep together, and two fared particularly badly. One of them, The Sea Venture, carrying the fleet’s Admiral, ran ashore.

"The Sea Venture in a Heavy Sea in 1609," painting by Christopher Grimes

How could they have survived such peril? Ariel conveys the amazement that Shakespeare probably felt in reading of the safe delivery of the sailors to the shore: “Not a hair perish’d,” he says to Prospero in wonderment. Exhausted by battling the tempest and suffering the effects of food deprivation, the sailors huddled on the battered ship in corners or, indeed, as one sailor put it, “wheresoever they chanced first to sit or lie.”[i]  This sailor’s account was most likely the basis for Ariel’s report to Prospero:

The mariners all under hatches stow’d;

Who, with a charm join’d to their suffer’d labour,

I have left asleep…

Moreover, Ariel herself (for whom there is no literary precedent) was probably inspired by what the sailors saw after the wreck of the Sea venture. The Virginia Company Secretary William Strachey, one of the survivors, reports seeing in the aftermath:

An apparition of a little round light, like a faint star, trembling and streaming along with a sparkling blaze,…shooting sometimes from shroud to shroud, tempting to settle as it were on any of the four shrouds:…half the night it kept with us, running sometimes along the mainyard to the very end, and then returning. [ii]

As you’ll read in my program article, what Strachey saw was a phenomenon called “St. Elmo’s Fire”—the luminous plasma created by an electric field emanating from a volcanic eruption or a storm. Ariel describes himself to Prospero, flitting around the shipwreck, “flam[ing] amazement,” “burn[ing] in many places: on the top mast,/The yards and bowsprit….” To the cramped streets of London, Shakespeare brought these images of a sparsely-populated island, a place whose existence had only recently been made known to Europe at all. Not unlike Prospero—whose art contracts the vagaries of life into his magically-controlled universe—Shakespeare contracted the far reaches of the known world to the perimeter of his dramatic stage, using the stage itself to infuse this world with its own far-reaching mysteries.

The Tempest is a “Romance” play, best illustrated in relationship to King Lear, written six years before in 1605. Lear is a tragedy that leaves its audiences in a diminished Britain amidst the wasteland of loss, with only Lear’s brief reunion with his beloved Cordelia to comfort us—and even that reunion is made bittersweet, since both are dead by the time the curtain falls. The Tempest affords a more elegant wrap-up. Its fairytale structure—the power of Prospero’s magic; the mysterious setting somewhere in the Mediterranean; and the satisfaction of final redemption and of a wedding to close things—allows Shakespeare to tie up the play’s loose ends and to make what many have seen as his farewell to London and the stage (although he did write The Two Noble Kinsmen after this, as well as contributing to a few other plays).

Michael Winters plays Prospero in our 2012 production of THE TEMPEST; photo by Kevin Berne.

The Tempest highlights several prominent themes and conventions. It is one of Shakespeare’s most spectacular plays, with its apparitions (Ariel/Harpy); its storm and shipwreck to begin the play; and the dance, the vanishing banquet, the songs, as elements of scenic display. The Tempest is also underscored by journeying: There is the interrupted journey made by Milan’s Duke Antonio and Naples’ King Alonso, which brings them to the island; the journey that Prospero has made from Milan to the island; the journey that Shakespeare the dramatist has often been said to be making as he gives us an artist (playmaking as a form of magic?) who, by the play’s end, says goodbye to his art; and the journey from activity to age, signaled by Prospero’s transformation from an artificer at the height of his powers to one wearied by his art.

What is the relationship between art and nature? We experience nature through our bodies, but perhaps it is through art that nature is more truly understood. Nowhere is this juxtaposition between art and nature more intensely felt—and perhaps more challenging—than in the relationship between Prospero, master of the island via his mind and magical practice, and Caliban, who claims ownership of the island via his birth and breeding. “This island’s mine, by Sycorax, my mother,/Which thou take’st from me,” Caliban tells Prospero, “For I am all the subjects that you have,/Which first was mine own king.” Yet while Caliban declares ownership via his birth, Prospero sees this self-appointed “king” as a perverse wretch, an “abhorred slave” whose proclivities have abused the laws of “nature.” Who has more claim to authenticity? Caliban with his unchecked appetites, or Prospero with his history of Dukedom, his rage, and the sophisticated arts that he uses to check and arouse Nature’s tides? “This rough magic I here abjure,” Prospero says near the close of the play. “I’ll break my staff,/Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,/And deeper than did ever plummet sound,/I’ll drown my book.” Why does he ultimately disclaim ownership and authority on the island? The Tempest teases us with this question.

The Tempest begins previews at our stunning outdoor Bruns Amphitheater in Orinda, CA, on Thursday, May 31, opens Saturday, June  2, and continues until Sunday, June 24.

A rare Shakespeare mother and child reunion: L-R, Sarah Nealis (Marina), Delia MacDougall (Thaisa), Ron Campbell (Cleon), and Christopher Kelly (Pericles) in PERICLES (2008); photo by Kevin Berne.

In Renaissance times the mother was the family member principally involved with her children’s education and upbringing. Yet in Renaissance drama older women were rarely represented onstage in what would obviously be one of their more sympathetic roles: that of the loving and nurturing mother. This lack is partly explained by the fact that women were not allowed to perform on the English stage: All of the female roles were played by young boys before their voices broke, so that a younger character part was obviously a better physical and vocal match. The lack of mothers in Shakespeare is notorious:  We have the noticeably absent Mrs. Prospero (of whom Prospero says merely that “thy mother was a piece of virtue”); the apparently nonexistent Queen Alonso; and the devilish witch Sycorax, Caliban’s dead mother.  Consider this lack of mother-nurturers in context with the three sisters in King Lear, Imogen in Cymbeline, Marina in Pericles, Portia and Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, Beatrice and Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, Ophelia in Hamlet, Desdemona in Othello, Isabella in Measure for Measure, and Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It, characters who are all deprived of mothers. Moreover, almost all of the older women Shakespeare does represent onstage offer negative images of motherhood: Volumnia in Coriolanus; Gertrude in Hamlet; and Lady Macbeth, who says that she would have been a terrible mother if she had had the chance to be one. And as for Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet, we can infer that, having herself been married at age 13, she depicts a former girl-bride who learned principally to please her husband.

Why does Shakespeare exploit this idea of the older woman as largely absent figure, or an unsympathetic one if she must be present, except for those few rare mothers who, like Hermione in The Winter’s Tale and Thaisa in Pericles, are effectively buried alive, losing their children either forever or for most of the play? (Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, for example, is forced into a 16-year banishment so that her husband can undergo a process of personal moral regeneration.) We might hypothesize about the playwright’s own life, married, as he was, to a woman eight years older than himself who reached middle age well before he did. We know that William Shakespeare spent most of his married life living in London, while his wife Anne Hathaway lived in Stratford with their children. We also know that Shakespeare’s plays were written in an extremely patriarchal period. But we can also see how useful a mother might be to a girl as, at a very young age, she comes face-to-face with the complexities of love and life.

And this is where there emerges a structural and thematic reason for the absence of mothers in Shakespeare. Aside from helping to solve the difficulty of finding boys who could plausibly play the parts of mature women, this lack allowed Shakespeare to create an important dramatic pretext: By taking away the mother (either, as in Romeo and Juliet, as a figure of real guidance or, as in many of his plays, like The Tempest, as a presence onstage at all), Shakespeare creates a gap in the young female characters’ lives, compelling them to develop that extraordinary independence and character that makes them so attractive. It is the completely sheltered and yet wise Miranda, after all, who first sees inherent nobility in the King’s son, of whom she knows nothing at all except that “nothing natural/I ever saw so noble.” Prospero might shape events in the world through his magic: But it is this young girl, Miranda, who shapes her own destiny through her heart.

The Tempest begins previews at our stunning outdoor Bruns Amphitheater in Orinda, CA, on Thursday, May 31, opens Saturday, June  2, and continues until Sunday, June 24.

Duke Ellington rehearsing onstage at the Savoy, 1948; photo © Wayne Miller / Magnum Photos.

What song helped you along your personal journey? The dynamic characters in Spunk, stories by Zora Neale Hurston, adapted by George C. Wolfe, embody the all-too-human experience of struggle, love, loss, and—perhaps most of all—finding a place to call home.

Submit songs that have inspired and fueled your journey—literally or metaphorically—no later than June 11 to marketingintern@calshakes.org, tweet it with the hashtag #spunkjourney, or post it on our Facebook wall. We’ll include a list of the most popular and our other favorites in the Spunk program, play them at our opening night post-performance party, and post the playlist online! Spunk’s characters “git to the git with some pain n’ some spit n’ some spunk.” What songs git you to the git?

Here are some songs submitted by the Cal Shakes staff to get you thinking:

Mumford & Sons “After the Storm
Simon and Garfunkel “Homeward Bound”
Cole Porter “Don’t Fence Me In”
Alex Kramer and Joan Whitney “Far Away Places”
Jolie Holland “Goodbye, California”
Genesis, “Follow You, Follow Me”
The Beatles “Blackbird”
James Taylor “Carolina In My Mind”
Pulp “Weeds”
Journey “When the Lights Go Down in the City”
Green Day “Christie”
The Goo Goo Dolls “Broadway”
The D.I.’s “Mohawk vs. D.A.”
Rusted Root “Send Me on My Way”
Coldplay ”Fix You”
Tom Petty “Learning to Fly”
Jack Penate “Pull My Heart Away”

Interns Katie, Jessica, Erin, and Alex at Haight-Ashbury.

I’m Alex and I’ve just completed my first week as an SM intern at Cal Shakes! Three cheers to Erin, Andrea, Katie, Jess, Kendall, and Jessica—all the other interns—for completing their successful first weeks!

And it has been such a fantastic first week. Just yesterday, we stumbled through all of Act I, and it looks fantastic. This comes as no surprise, but I am just overwhelmed by the talent and hard work everyone has thrown into this play. The play goes by quickly and is packed full of beautiful movement pieces, moving language, and lots and lots of charm and wit.

Since internships are about learning I thought I would use this blog to share the lessons I have learned at Cal Shakes so far.

Lesson 1: Cal Shakes folks are friendly folks! Smiling seems to be part of the dress code and everyone is extremely helpful (especially explaining how to properly use “Big Ricoh,” the printer).

Lesson 2: Percolators make weak coffee… I have yet to discover the ideal coffee- to-water ratio in a percolator, and for that I apologize to everyone who drinks the coffee I make. I’m working on it, and it’s getting better (I promise)!

Lesson 3: The nanosecond you take your eyes off the prompter’s script is the nanosecond that someone calls for line.

Lesson 4: Glitter is fun but it’s a bear to pick up. Folding the glitter makes it easier and faster to pick up (thanks, Corrie Bennett!).

Lesson 5: The universe—and Cal Shakes folks—are generous. If you mention that you are looking into buying a bike, someone may give you one for free (thanks again to Corrie!). That being said, the intern house would benefit from a vacuum …

Lesson 6: The songs in the play will get stuck in your head for three days straight. Singing Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer” is an effective if unpleasant way to get the songs of the play out of your head (Thanks Catherine Castellanos!)

Lesson 7: Actors are creative, witty people (see Lesson 6), and if you give them a prop of a roasted rabbit on a spit, they will do creative, witty things with it … primarily when they are on their breaks.

Lesson 8: Scamels are delicious if you know how to cook them correctly.

I hope you have found these lessons as valuable as I have; if there are any that you don’t understand, I hope you take it as incentive to come see The Tempest opening in just two short weeks! It’s going to be a magical show!

Philippa Kelly by Robert Friedman

Philippa Kelly, resident dramaturg for Cal Shakes and production dramaturg for The Tempest, shares her thoughts on the current production, and invites your questions. Happy Days runs May 30–June 24, 2012.

The Tempest is a “Romance” play, best introduced in relationship to King Lear, written six years before it in 1605.  Lear is a tragedy that leaves its audiences in a diminished Britain amidst the wasteland of loss, with only Lear’s brief reunion with his beloved Cordelia to comfort us, and even that reunion made bittersweet because both are dead by the time the curtain falls. The Tempest affords a more elegant wrap-up: Its fairytale structure—the power of Prospero’s magic; the mysterious setting somewhere in the Mediterranean; and the satisfaction of final redemption and of a wedding to close things—allows Shakespeare to tie up the play’s loose ends and to make what many have seen as his farewell to London and the stage. As Jonathan Moscone said at the Inside Scoop, the play is full of beautiful tropes—love, romance, loss, relinquishment—and we’re asked to open our hearts unguardedly to all of them via the production’s spectacle, movement, and beautiful poetry.

Are you going to see our  production of  The Tempest? Do you have questions or comments about the production’s themes, creative choices, or anything else? Please leave them in the comments, and I’ll be sure to respond.

What play has been produced the most at Cal Shakes since 1974? A Midsummer Night’s Dream, eight

What plays come in second? As You Like It, Twelfth Night and The Tempest, seven productions each

What plays by Shakespeare have not been done at Cal Shakes? Henry VI parts 1, 2, 3 and Henry VIII

How many plays have been produced at Cal Shakes since 1974? 156

How many people have/will have directed plays at Cal Shakes since we began in 1974? 63

How many different plays have/will have been produced at Cal Shakes since 1974? 60

How many plays has Jonathan Moscone directed at Cal Shakes? 16

After Jon, who has/will have directed the most plays at Cal Shakes? A.C.T. Associate Artistic Director Mark Rucker, five

How many people have/will have directed plays during Jon’s tenure (2000-now)? 19

How many women have/will have directed plays during Jon’s tenure (2000-now)? Nine

Of all the directors who have directed more than one play at Cal Shakes during Jon’s tenure (2000-now), who have only directed Shakespeare plays? Joel Sass and Daniel Fish, three each

Cal Shakes’ full production history can be found here; more details about our 39-year history can be found here.

Show art by Ilsa Brink

Cal Shakes recently revealed the upcoming Tempest production’s alluring show art designed by the fabulous Ilsa Brink. The poster art is surreal and provocative.

But enough about what we think. We’d rather know what YOU think.

What comes to mind when you think of Shakespeare’s The Tempest? Share a copyright-free image (your own or one found through Flickr’s publicly-held image archive The Commons) by either uploading it to our Facebook wall; tagging it “cal shakes tempest” on Flickr; tweeting a link to your image with the hash tag #calshakestempest; or emailing it to skalem@calshakes.org. Be sure and include your name and, if you like, why this image says “The Tempest” to you, and we may publish it in our Tempest show program! DEADLINE: 5/9

-Marketing Intern Katie McGee

I went to bed Monday night eagerly awaiting my return to Northern Light for another dose of middle school Hamlet adventuring. I woke up Tuesday morning to a gloomy sky and the wrong side of the bed.  Never fear, however; I threw on my most brightly-colored shirt in a pathetic attempt to lighten my spirits and dashed to my car with lukewarm coffee spilling in hand.

My mood began brightening as I pulled into the parking lot and scurried to meet up with the Director of Artistic Learning, Trish Tillman, for the day’s rundown: Start identifying action and clarifying textual meaning within each group’s assigned scene.

As class began, we warmed up our actor’s toolkit and made sure the group was functioning as a solid team.  Hallway, lunchroom, recess conflicts checked at the door, then ready, set, go, Hamlet.

We began digging through the textual trenches Shakespeare dug for his performers long ago.  As students tried on their lines for the first time, young voices began to grow louder and braver around the room.  The entirety of Hamlet was being voiced in a matter of minutes.  Questions were raised: What is my character doing in this moment? What motivated my character to do this? What the heck is a fishmonger?

By the end of the period students were feeling a smidge overwhelmed, but a dash relieved as they realized they were beginning to grasp each line’s meaning.

* * * *

Now let’s step back and get real here.  Artists and scholars have taken Hamlet and forced it under that lens, interpreted it this direction, argued it from the east to the west and reread it a kabillion times.  Now all of these efforts may have uncovered some revealing truths or spicy fresh takes, but are some of the story’s fundamentals lost in the process?  Watching the students at Northern Light find meaning in their lines for the very first time reminded me that Hamlet is often overcomplicated and the story’s bare bones alone dish up some titillating entertainment—keep it simple stupid.

Sometimes in life we just need to step back and stop ourselves from getting caught up in the dreary skies of Denmark (or the Bay), the coffee spilling over our hand as we hustle off for the day, and look at the greatness of our overall stories.

A Northern Lights student stepping into character before the show.

The final installment by Marketing Intern Katie McGee, documenting her participation in a Cal Shakes classroom residency.

“Ummm…where’s my costume?” “What if I forget my lines?” Ahhh. The sounds of final performance day have arrived. Eager jitters spreading around the performance space. Despite the exclamations of nervous dismay, these students are ready.

Why do I like the idea of youth performing Shakespeare? All the subliminal lessons that come with the experience, like a parent disguising servings of vegetables in delicious fruit juices. Some of these hidden lessons include: teamwork, stage presence, public speaking, and storytelling as a form of expression.

OK, but why Shakespeare? All of these lessons could be learned in a musical production of The Hobbit. Shakespeare, however, presents a seemingly greater challenge, thanks to the text’s richness and density. Shakespeare is often misperceived as literature for stuffy academics. This ridiculous notion, however, intensifies the empowerment a young student experiences once they have mastered the language and discovered the script’s meaning. Shakespeare is for everyone, not just your local, literary members-only club.  Shakespeare wrote for the masses—jokes and tragedies for all to relate to.  Shakespeare is for sharing.

Of all the lessons these students gained, sharing seemed the most evident. They shared costumes, props, space, stage, responsibility, characters, and, perhaps most importantly, they fearlessly shared what they had learned throughout the program. It was deeply apparent that the knowledge Cal Shakes’ Trish Tillman had shared had lit a fire under their desire for Shakespeare and storytelling. I enjoyed watching this flame grow steadily throughout my observation. One young performer, Avi’tal Wilson-Perteete, was especially frank about her new found hunger for the Bard, “I am 100 percent sure I will do Shakespeare again in the near future!”

A Northern Lights student portraying Ophelia shares flowers with the audience.

I am so tickled to have been given even a fragment of this experience with these young and passionate actors and academics.  I am hopeful and my fingers are quadruple-crossed that these students remember Shakespeare is for sharing, and continue to share and develop their love for his work. Maybe at the Bruns this summer? Heck yes to that.