‘Tempest’ reimagined as ‘Feast’

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Ariel (Samuel Taylor) acts out a scene wherein Sebastian (with crown) is shocked to learn that Antonio, performed by Caliban (Adrian Danzig), is plotting a murder, while Prospero (John Judd) looks on, in Chicago Shakespeare Theaterís world premiere The Feast: an intimate Tempest, an artistic collaboration with Redmoon playing Upstairs at Chicago Shakespeare now through March 11, 2012. Photo by Michael Brosilow.

Updated: January 26, 2012 11:26AM

The nutshell version of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” goes like this: Prospero, a nobleman with magical powers, has spent 12 years in exile, living on an island with his teenage daughter, Miranda, and his two captive servants — that fleet spirit, Ariel, and the more abused and angry slave, Caliban. But after conjuring a shipwreck, things on the island begin to change dramatically.

Ordinarily, this play receives a grand-scale production that runs several hours. But in “The Feast: An Intimate Tempest” — a collaboration between the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre and Redmoon Theatre — co-creators Jessica Thebus and Frank Maugeri have reworked the story into a 70-minute spectacle involving three live actors (John Judd, Samuel Taylor and Adrian Danzig), plus “651 pounds of driftwood, 38 feet of chain, a gramophone, and an axe.”

“Our idea was to take the play’s massive stage illusion and shrink it down to toy theater size,” said Maugeri, himself a magician of puppetry and object-driven theater. “Prospero is the director/magician of his own world, and in our show he controls things within a mechanical setting reduced in scale so that it is intimate, confined and strange.”

The play’s three live actors are strategically placed at a dinner table where, as Maugeri explains it: “They are waiting to eat, and must tell their story over and over again until they get it right. The table is full of magical properties, and all the additional characters become talking heads. As for our choice of the new title, ‘The Feast,’ it is rooted in the idea that the whole play is about the starvation of the spirit, and it chronicles one man’s very difficult path towards self-discovery and forgiveness. ”

“I call Prospero a ‘master of illusion,’ rather than ‘a magician’,” said Maugeri. “And we see the reality he has constructed for himself fall apart.”

Thebus had wanted to work again with Maugeri ever since 2002, when they first collaborated on a version of Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ at Chicago Shakespeare.

“Our idea for this ‘Tempest’ was to create a contemporary interpretation of the play that focused on the visual world and played with scale,” said Thebus, who worked with Chicago Shakespeare’s artistic director, Barbara Gaines, on telescoping the text. “We wanted to highlight Prospero as the master puppeteer whose puppets are Ariel and Caliban. For an actor, working with puppets can be a real challenge, because you have to erase yourself and put the audience’s focus on the object you’re holding. The human must emerge secretly, underneath the puppet.”

“Frank [Maugeri] is such a great storyteller,” Thebus said. “He sees the multiple dimensions of stories, and is able to devise a visual element, have a world blossom out of that element, introduce a character, and then have another story wound around it.”

† “The Feast” runs through March 11 at Chicago Shakespeare Upstairs, 800 E. Grand. Tickets, $35-45. Call (312) 595-5600 or visit chicagoshakes.com.

—Hedy Weiss