By William Shakespeare
Directed By Sean Ryan Kelley
Summer, 1995
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Production Overview
Cast List / Production Team
Dramaturg Notes
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The Tempest By William Shakespeare Directed By Sean Ryan Kelley Summer, 1995 On this page: |
For its third summer of outdoor Shakespeare, FST staged The Tempest, a play from the end of Shakespeare’s career. Colorado director Sean Ryan Kelley returned to what he called the “enchanted” site of Fairbanks’s Birch Hill Park for this production, which ran from July 12 through July 26, 1995. As in Kelley’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (1994), this Tempest emphasized the magical elements in the play. Both time and place were left unspecified. Claudio Lively drew her costume designs in part from garments improvised by individual actors to give the production what Kelley called “a theatrical rehearsal feel.” Kit Mayer’s set of fabric and wood, which suggested both a ship’s hull and Prospero’s island, successfully integrated the audience and the surrounding woods into the performance space.
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Alonso - Martin Moriarty
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PRODUCTION TEAM Director - Sean Ryan Kelley
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From the Dramaturg, Janis Lull:
Some people think The Tempest is Shakespeare's play about himself. Prospero, once an Italian duke, now rules a remote and magical island. He resembles the playwright, who controls all his characters and even the natural elements within the universe of his play. Prospero can conjure up storms and calm them, make people fall asleep or fall in love, create elaborate scenes and suddenly dissolve them. Even those who conspire against him eventually fall into line. But whether or not Shakespeare was sketching a self-portrait in the character of Prospero, he was certainly using The Tempest to explore the strengths and limitations of what we might call science and Prospero calls "the liberal arts."
The island is a kind of intellectual paradise, where the learned magician can bend the world to his will. But when he uses his powers to wreck a ship containing his old enemies, he puts his arts to a climactic test...Return to the top of this page.
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