What does it take to let go of a tightly held aspect of your identity?
That’s in many ways the question at the heart of Shakespeare’s (possibly final play) The Tempest, in a production that wraps director Karla Boos’s thirty-six year tenure as the founder and artistic director of Quantum Theatre. And while I don’t have any reason to believe that Boos has the kind of defining grievance that motivates Prospero (Jeffrey Carpenter) in the play’s beginning, I imagine his journey must resonate deeply with her as she, like Prospero, finds herself at her own moment of “letting go.”
Boos has staged this production outdoors on the site of the former Carrie Blast Furnaces, a location that itself symbolizes Pittsburgh’s own need – within the lifetime of many in Quantum’s audience – to reluctantly and painfully let go of its proudly held identity as a steel manufacturing city. Scenic designer Stephanie Mayer-Staley has integrated a circular platform stage into a serpent-like earthworks under the furnace’s enormous gantry crane. A series of steel artworks representing the solar system, or an atomic structure (or, perhaps, both) leads off to one side; a cannon-like iron hopper – presumably a relic of the working furnace – occupies the center of the stage, crammed with books, above which sits the small platform that is Prospero’s cell; in the deep background, and behind the audience bank, hover the massive, complicated mechanisms of the blast works. Like the island that Prospero has brought under his rule, the setting and scenography radiate both power and mystery.
Boos matches the grandness of the site with some bold directorial choices. One of those – to stage the play’s initial scene (the sea tempest of the title) as slow motion choreography – is a swing and a miss: the dialogue is so slow and disjointed, and the movement so abstract, that a viewer unfamiliar with the play could be forgiven for not realizing that the scene is meant to depict a shipwreck. Others are homeruns. Her choice to change Gonzalo to a female character (played by Julia Silverman) layers manosphere misogyny onto all of the other reasons we are given to despise the scheming, traitorous younger brothers Sebastian (Joseph McGranaghan) and Antonio (Corey Rieger), and the two actors effectively use that whetstone of toxic masculinity to sharpen their characters’ cruel mockery of their elder companion. The casting of Tomé Cousin as Ariel is likewise inspired: not only do they bring the world-weary wisdom and gravitas of their years to the character of the trickster spirit, but they also palpably burn with resentment against Prospero’s constant bidding, having waited too long for emancipation from humiliating servitude. Susan Tsu’s inventive, eclectic costuming elevates the characters into a poetic realm resonant with the fantastical atmosphere of the scenography. And the combination of Daniel Nesta Curtis’s music and Joe Pino’s sound design create a soundscape for the “Isle of Noises” that matches the Carrie Furnace’s eerie, brooding architecture.
Carpenter’s Prospero is complicated and labile, a man whose motivations shift and evolve over the course of the action. It’s his journey to reconciliation that the play tracks, and Carpenter traces that arc with nuance and depth. There’s rage and resentment against the brother and King (Mark Staley) who stripped him of his wealth and title and sent him to what they thought was his death at sea; but there’s also the doting of a father on his daughter, the amusement of an elder witnessing two young people fall in love at first sight, the blind cruelty of a despot who uses his power to torture his servant Caliban (Jerreme Rodriguez), and, in the end, the reluctant and anticlimactic recognition that the time has come to let it all go.
By play’s end, he’s given it all up: daughter, magic, Ariel, ownership of the island, along with all of his rage and desire for vengeance. He’s also skirted responsibility for his own crimes and failings, chief among them his enslavement and maltreatment of Caliban and Ariel. So what does he have left; who is he now? Shakespeare doesn’t provide us with a firm answer, nor does director Boos; but whatever the future holds – for both, I dare say – it is characterized by release: “Let your indulgence set me free.”
