Twenty years ago, in Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival’s second season, the company took its first crack at The Tempest, the tale of an exiled Milanese duke who seeks revenge on his enemies through sorcery.
Playing young Prince Ferdinand back then was 20-year-old Kevin Crawford, in his first involvement with the play, “back when I could still get away with playing young princes,” he notes.
Now a professor of English and theater at Georgia’s Reinhardt University, Crawford spends his summers in Palm Beach County as artistic director of the Shakespeare Festival and, this year, playing aged Duke Prospero.
As he says of the play, “I think it’s pretty top-drawer, and a crowd-pleaser. The reason it’s been so long since we’ve done it is I did it so many times when I was younger, I got tired of it.”
Still, when it came to choosing a work for the group’s annual Shakespeare-by-the-Sea at Jupiter’s Carlin Park Amphitheatre, Crawford and technical director/scenic designer Daniel Gordon agreed that it was time again for The Tempest. “It’s the 400th anniversary year of the play’s first performance,” reports Crawford, excuse enough for a new production.
While many refer to The Tempest as Shakespeare’s last completed play, Crawford calls it more accurately the Bard’s “final non-collaborative effort for the stage.” The distinction? “He wrote other plays after ‘The Tempest’ with junior company playwrights,” says Crawford. “Like what we now call ‘Henry VIII,’ ‘Two Noble Kinsmen’ and a play based on the life of Sir Thomas More.”
Last script or not, The Tempest feels like a swan song to the theater, for Shakespeare includes numerous concluding statements about stagecraft. Still, Crawford cautions against making too much of it. “Yeah, it’s very easily read that way, but it’s a very romantic notion. That story didn’t get floated around until the late 18th or early 19th century,” he says. “And this play was just perfect for the idea of him saying goodbye to the stage, with such ideas as Prospero breaking his staff is Shakespeare breaking his pen. But he continued to work actively for a number of years after.”
It is also usually taught that Prospero is a stand-in for Shakespeare himself. “I never bought it, but it’s very, very easy to see that,” notes Crawford, whose production will emphasize the dark side of the character. “Prospero really is a despicable man on some levels. He was stupid enough to lose the dukedom in the first place. He does enslave other characters in the play. He makes people think that their children are dead.”
Unlike many Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival shows, which transport the play to offbeat places and times, this Tempest will not be set in a definite locale. “The stage will be mostly bare with a simple series of ramps and platforms,” says Crawford. “It’s not set in the caves of Bora Bora, there is no beach, no water line. I think most 20th-century productions, post-1950, 1960, have been interested in a post-colonial reading of it: that this is all about white people going to uncharted territory and taking it over, putting their white European stamp on it.
“That’s fine, but that’s definitely not where we’re going with this,” he said.
Prospero is a sorcerer and many modern productions have emphasized magical effects, but Crawford is resisting that impulse, too. “I think the magical effects will mostly be suggested through mime and sound,” he says. “I think there’s something powerful about someone raising their hand and a sound effect. The audience just accepts that he made a lightning strike.”
The simplicity of the production might be read as a reflection of the downbeat economy, but Crawford says it is really a test for next summer, when the Festival hopes to tour its production — probably Twelfth Night — to Hawaii.
To build up its treasury for 2012, the company contemplated instituting an admission charge instead of its tradition of free performances. “Ultimately, we all came around to the idea of keeping it as free as possible for our audiences,” says Crawford.
“There are some people who come out almost every night with their family, because it’s free. But as they’ve told us, they simply can’t afford to come out all that often if there’s an admission fee. So we’ve kept it at free admission with a suggested donation of $5 or whatever you want to put into the wishing well.”
THE TEMPEST. Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival, Seabreeze Amphitheatre, A1A and Indiantown Road, Carlin Park, Jupiter. Thursday-Sunday, July 14-17 and 21-24. Admission free, with suggested donation of $5. Call: (561) 963-6755.