Ben
Brantley

December 12, 2014

You can talk all you like about ideals and class resentment and visions of the future. But the ingredient most essential to getting a revolution off the ground is energy, the kind that incinerates as it moves. And the place you’ll find the highest concentration of that precious entity is in the restless bodies of the young. Judged by these criteria, the Motus Theater Company of Italy is the most truly revolutionary troupe in town. Seen to scorching effect in 2012 with Alexis. A Greek Tragedy, which translated the rage of Sophocles’ defiant Antigone into the 21st century, Motus is now channeling the pent-up lifeblood of two slaves out of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, chafing at their bondage to an imperial magician named Prospero. Ariel and Caliban, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. Nella Tempesta, which runs through Sunday at the Ellen Stewart Theater at La MaMa, is a full-throated cry to the young and disaffected to get off their collective duffs, shake off their shackles and do something. Conceived and directed by Daniela Nicolò and Enrico Casagrande, this production turns a cast of six and an assortment of blankets into an 80-minute youthquake that seems likely to leave even cynical audience members shaken and stirred. There was a time, a half-century ago, when such rough-hewed, kinetically charged, politically aggressive theater was common in New York. And Nella Tempesta quivers with vibrations from that time. It seems only right that the production should be staged at La MaMa, which has a history of convention-flouting theater in the raw that dates to the early 1960s, and that its soundscape includes the recorded voice of Judith Malina, a founder of the iconoclastic Living Theater.