The Feast: An Intimate Tempest (review)

Jessica Thebus, who co-created and directed The Feast: An Intimate Tempest with Frank Magueri of Redmoon Theater, radically reinterpreted the plot and characters of The Tempest in adapting the script, paring and rearranging the text of Shakespeare’s play to highlight the theme of transformation. Those already familiar with The Tempest had the richest experience of this production. Thebus’s script presumed Miranda dead, and Prospero the mad scientist manufacturer of the puppets that represented her and all of the Milanese characters, as well as the central feature of the performance space: a large, mechanized, equilateral cross-shaped dining table. A skilled puppeteer hidden beneath it, the massive table constituted both the stage for Ariel and Caliban’s forced enactment of central scenes in The Tempest’s narrative, and the actual dining table at which Prospero held court.

The central moments from The Tempest dramatized in The Feast were the titular tempest; the meeting of Ferdinand and Miranda; the arrival on shore of Alonso, Antonio, Sebastian and Gonzalo; the encounter of Stephano and Trinculo with Caliban; the “feast” referred to in the main title of the production (act three’s vanishing banquet); the betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda; and Prospero’s foiling of the assassination plot against him spearheaded by Caliban. The audience sat on sharply raked risers facing a rectangular stage at ground level in the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Theater, a black box studio upstairs from the main house. The action was compressed into one act, with three performers: Prospero (John Judd), Ariel (Samuel Taylor), and Caliban (Adrian Danzig). Ariel and Caliban portrayed all of the other characters as puppets. The Feast was presented as a play that Prospero scripted, directed and stage managed, providing lines, props, sound and light cues, and barking out directions to his principal performers, Ariel and Caliban, throughout.

Redmoon Theater is famous for their puppetry, stage machinery, and physicality. The decision of Magueri and Thebus to depict only Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban with live actors in The Feast demanded tremendous vocal and physical skill of these performers, and rendered all of the other characters “not human,” insofar as they were puppets manipulated by Ariel and Caliban under the compulsion of Prospero. Thus, The Feast tackled through its casting and the interpersonal dynamics among Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban an issue central to The Tempest: what it means to be human.

The heavy, slatted wood table occupying most of the performance space functioned like the cabinet of Dr. Caligari. During the opening tempest, two-dimensional waves rose up through the slats, operated by levers at Ariel and Caliban’s respective sides of the table. Prospero set a tiny model of a double-masted sailing vessel into a separate track that allowed him to winch the boat across the table using a hand-operated crank. Eventually, Ariel took the boat up in his hand, whirling it through the air while simulating the sounds of wind and waves, looking for all the world like a child playing with a toy. For the “vanishing banquet,” two-dimensional representations of the feast’s elements, such as a roasted pig on a platter festooned with grapes, emerged through a table slat, to be replaced by rotting representations as Ariel leapt to the center of the table. Ariel’s harpy wings emerged from the table, too—silvery bat wings that unfurled up through a table slat and then flapped, menacingly, throughout his curse on Antonio, Sebastian and Alonso as “three men of sin.”

Fig. 8...