A CurtainUp Review The Tempest

A triptych of Tempests is breezing through New York this season. The first, directed confidently by Karin Coonrod amd with music and lyrics by Elizabeth Swados, is now on the boards at La MaMa (at the Ellen Stewart Theatre). As part of the company’s La MaMa Earth program, it weighs in with a social conscience and a nod to the world ecology. And, with the dynamic Reg E. Cathey as Prospero, it will speak cogently to New Yorkers who all too well remember the real-life devastations of Hurricane Sandy. Whereas most of the Tempests that I’ve seen on stage and film in recent years have whipped up faux storms of fierce proportions, Coonrod radically departs from this traditional staging and begins it in a hushed atmosphere. The entire cast, elegantly outfitted, silently file into the large rectangular performance space, which is swept bare except for a large black orb at center stage that is suspended by a wire from the flies.  As soon as the actors assume their stage positions, than a loud thunderclap sounds, and the performance space totally blacks out. Only the orb remains in view, now twinkling with lights, and swinging back and forth in pendulum fashion. A beat later, Prospero and his young daughter Miranda come to the fore. Prospero first quells her fears about the offshore shipwreck that she has just witnessed, then starts to tell her the strange personal history (and one of the longest expositions in the Bard’s canon) that brought them to the remote island 14 years ago. Miranda strikingly sums up the political treachery which caused her father to lose his rightful dukedom to her power-grabbing Uncle Antonio: “Your tale, Sir would cure deafness.” This production just might cure those theatergoers who have been deaf to this play’s poetry and charms. Although Coonrod does toss in a generous dollop of symbolism with the pageant-like opening and the aforementioned pendulum that neatly suggests the movement of a ship pitching through colossal waves, it never gets heavy-handed.