by Joe Miller
Last week, Caroline and I saw “The Tempest” at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia.
I’ll confess that I don’t love “The Tempest.” The play can’t quite decide what it wants to be. It has too many jokes to be a drama, too happy an ending to be a tragedy and too much suffering to be a comedy.
Caroline observed afterward that “The Tempest” always leaves her feeling that it is really two different plays pretending to be a single thing.
The performances highlighted that dual nature. K.P. Powell’s Stefano would be at home in a 20th century farce. The tonal clash when he meets up with Ronald Román-Meléndez – who brilliantly showcases Caliban’s othering by delivering a third of his lines in Spanish – is jarring.
Angela Iannone’s Prospero towers over the proceedings, sometimes literally looking down on the proceedings from the second floor, other times simply overpowering her castmates with her commanding presence—this despite often being the smallest person on the stage.
Iannone’s ability to switch seamlessly between aggrieved noble and exasperated father is the highlight of the first act.
Her delivery of the play’s most famous line gave me actual chills. Indeed, the line resonated in a way it never has before.
I’d spent the week in between wrapping up The Pocahontas County Drama Workshop’s production of “Catch Me If You Can” and our trip to ASC feeling a bit melancholy.
Don’t get me wrong: I was glad to have the time back. We had rehearsed three nights a week for the past six weeks, and I spent an additional hour or two each day reviewing my lines.
Dropping my flash cards in the trash on Sunday evening was very satisfying.
But there was sadness, too.
Seven people came together in late July, several of us having never before met. We worked together, cheering successful performances, offering encouragement when things went awry, covering for missed cues or dropped lines, slowly building trust.
There’s a real thrill in putting that work in front of an audience, hearing people laugh at the jokes, gasp at the plot twists.
It’s not something I ever expected to do once. It’s certainly not something I planned to do a second time.
It’s an incredible experience. It’s also ephemeral.
Even if we all return for future productions, it is unlikely that it will be exactly the same group for a single play. And even if it were, the play itself would be different. For that matter, we could reprise the same play in the same roles and it would be different, as all of us would be in different places in our own lives by then.
That experience is over. It will never again be recaptured.
I’ve devoted a lot of words in this column to the importance of the written word. Books capture knowledge, preserve it, transfer it across distant points in space and time. Books are the foundation of science, mathematics and philosophy.
In short, books created the modern world.
But some things cannot be captured. You can record a performance, be it a play or a concert. You can’t record the feeling of being there. The flavor of the performance. The specific combination of little things that makes that performance happen in that space in front of that audience.
The Rustic Mechanicals – West Virginia’s professional Shakespeare company – describe each performance as a “Shakespeareance,” emphasizing that never again will this exact group of people be in this exact place to see this exact performance. Each performance is literally a once-in-a-lifetime event.
“The Tempest” is itself a play about the ephemeral. Prospero ensnares his enemies in visions created by invisible spirits he controls through magic. Later, he stages an elaborate – and illusory – theatrical performance to celebrate his daughter’s wedding.
In the end, Prospero renounces both his revenge and his magic, burying his staff and drowning his book of magic. Prospero’s iron-fisted reign over his island, its spirits and unlucky inhabitants proves ephemeral.
Shakespeare beautifully captures the fleetingness of human experience in Prospero’s most famous soliloquy:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Take away the written word and Prospero fades away as surely as one of his illusions. Remove the performance and “The Tempest” is a homework assignment. It’s in the meeting of the timeless and the ephemeral that the real magic happens. Prospero’s staff is just a prop, after all.
