In ‘The Tempest,' Shakespeare is as magical as a Disneyland ride

San Francisco Chronicle​

a day ago

'The Tempest' might have a book of spells, otherworldly spirits and a magic robe and staff. But Marin Shakespeare Company has set, lighting, sound, costume and puppetry design.
Imagination, meet craft.
In the sorcery-filled play set on a Mediterranean isle, a storm wrecks a ship, a banquet vanishes presto-chango and deities, sprites and demons interfere with mortals like kittens pouncing on a laser pointer. One of Shakespeare's last works, it feels old and young at the same time. It's about forgiving the unforgivable, even when you're still seething, because age and wisdom teach you that there's more to life than rage. Yet it's also suffused with innocence and wonder, a child's play-pretend sense of 'what if?'
In short, the story of the betrayed duke-qua-wizard Prospero (Stacy Ross) is as fertile for a visionary director as the island is for flora, fauna and fairies, and M. Graham Smith's production, which opened Saturday, Aug. 16, at the Forest Meadows Amphitheatre, makes a feast of spectacle.
It all starts with Nina Ball's set design. A tangle of ropes and sails for the play's wave-crashing opening scene folds open, like the pages of a giant tome or a ride at Disneyland, to reveal the moss-capped striated cliffs of an uncharted isle. Before long, Jon Tracy's lighting design turns the rock pink and purple, coincidentally echoing the peach-limned clouds of the sunset above.
As Prospero seeks to retrieve his dukedom from his usurping brother Antonio (DeAnna Driscoll), who left Prospero and his daughter Miranda (Anna Takayo) for dead in 'a rotten carcass of a boat,' puppets by Peter Q. Parish make fantasy come to life. Curs with glowing red eyes are as hellish as Cerberus. Ariel (Anna Ishida), Prospero's fairy lieutenant, sprouts bat wings as wide as a circus tent, and Tracy's footlights expose her prey as pitiful fools.
When Miranda prepares to marry Ferdinand (Jordan Covington), son of King Alonso (John Eleby), giant fire and water deities with jack-o'-lantern eyes materialize to bless the occasion.
But for all the visual sumptuousness, cast members alternately get mired in, then left behind by, the text. An unmotivated primal scream reads as a desperate attention-grabber. That guiding spirit that's the hallmark of great direction — where actors have molecule-deep knowledge of who they are, what they want and how to use their minds and bodies to get it — surfaces only intermittently.
Still, the occasional choice illuminates. Listen to how Driscoll uses the last word of a line as a springboard to the next. Or how Ishida, finding mischievous little inflections, opens the tantalizing possibility that Ariel, upon being granted freedom from servitude by Prospero, might choose to stay out of love.
The production's real revelation, however, is Chris Steele as Caliban, the deformed child of a witch who points out that Prospero stole the island from him. Rarely has the character had so much pathos. When Caliban complains that Prospero betrayed him, his grief mirrors Prospero's own. When Caliban gives over to fury, it's as if he would howl his master out of the sky, stomp him out of the ground.
'The Tempest' is in essence a very long goodbye. Prospero is staging an elaborate departure from the island, his magic, his bitterness, his daughter's childhood. But Smith insightfully ends his production on a new beginning, with Caliban picking up Prospero's discarded cape and staff.
In a play that's all about coups and quests for freedom, history isn't over just because one reign ends. The lust for power, and the burdens it confers, are eternal flames.