STAGE REVIEWS : Shakespeare as You Like It--or Not : Old Globe’s ‘Tempest’: Fewer Magical Moments

SAN DIEGO —  To the degree that all revivals are fresh interpretations, each new production of a Shakespearean play is destined to be a director’s creation. What makes one more memorable than another is the degree to which a director honors the text. That never means treating it reverentially, but honoring what the playwright set out to do. There are as many ways of doing that as there are artists to try it.

Adrian Hall would probably argue that it’s exactly what he did when he staged “The Tempest” that opened Friday at the Old Globe. But given the staunchly earthbound “Tempest” he has mounted, and his stated diffidence (in program notes) about such words as “enchanted” and “magic,” why do this play at all?

“The Tempest” is Shakespeare’s most self-reflective and thaumaturgical piece, written as he was nearing 50. It is also widely accepted as his last and in many ways his most spiritual--a farewell to arms and a plea for forgiveness:

“ . . . My ending is despair,

Unless I be reliev’d by prayer,

Which pierces so that it assaults

Mercy itself and frees all faults.

As you from crimes would pardon’d be,

Let your indulgence set me free.”

Hall’s version, which compresses the text all along, omits this epilogue altogether, perhaps because within it Prospero also states “Now I want / Spirits to enforce, art to enchant . . . .” He has substituted a well-known speech from Act IV Scene 1, which now feels merely inconclusive and out of place. To stage “The Tempest” and deny it its bewitching elements is to build a sandcastle without sand.

Once off the track, Hall, who gave us a not unmagical “Hope of the Heart” a year ago at the Mark Taper Forum and a remarkably dark and judicious “Measure for Measure” two years ago at the Globe with many of the same key players, never regains equilibrium.

He’s lucky to have the sturdy, clear-spoken and smart Richard Easton as Prospero, an actor who knows how to make the language serve this smaller-than-life interpretation as a single-minded man of action with some taste for revenge. But it’s as far as the good sense goes.

In making the play more terrestrial, Hall also panders to modernity of sorts, mixing his periods like his metaphors. His Prospero wears the vestiges of a Giorgio Armani suit over a striped nautical T-shirt most days, donning a robe for official occasions and Edwardian finery when he wants to be recognized by the shipwrecked party.

One can’t pin this on designer Lewis Brown, any more than one can hold Brown more than peripherally responsible for the foolishness of Caliban’s costume. The latter has actor Stephen Markle teetering awkwardly on a pair of footstools that he wears like cothurni from hell. Stephano (Richard Kneeland) and Trinculo (Allen McCalla, the production’s singular delight) are perpetually having to prop him up and help him.

The other actors, as actors do, gamely go along with Hall’s concept, finding neither much shame nor much distinction in it. This includes a lot of talking to the audience instead of to each other, a conceit favored by Hall that soon grows tiresome. Jonathan McMurtry turns in a dithering old Gonzalo, while Julian Gamble and Vaughn Armstrong are standard-issue villains as the plotting Sebastian and Antonio. Ferdinand (Eric Liddell) and Miranda (Mary Elizabeth McGlynn) make a decorative couple, with her Miranda pretty rather than plucky. But do we need “real” rain falling on her head alone, as if from Woodstock’s personal cloud in “Peanuts”?

And do we need “real” rocking of the boat in “The Tempest’s” opening scene, when nothing else is blowing up much of a storm? It’s the kind of misplaced technical prowess wedded to underdone logic that scuttles this effort.

That “airy spirit” Ariel is played unairily but with humor and energy by the spindly Sean Murray in shorts, shirt, skullcap and gold-rimmed specs. It’s not clear why. Neither is it clear why he pops up from the stage floor decked out in a Cyrano nose and conical Madonna breasts at the top of Act IV.

One did not expect to find the mythological goddesses doing their usual masque-of-plenty in this spot, but neither did one expect this comic vision, accompanied by a gigantic (and unexplained) straw puppet, more West Indian in appearance than Mediterranean.

Such slammed-together oddities are symptomatic of a production that gives few clues as to its whys and wherefores and even fewer rewards. The island as designed by Ralph Funicello is a barren, naked place with straw on the ground, a rolling cart with a broken umbrella, an armoire and a pair of ubiquitous stairways on wheels. And for all the talk of staying away from enchantment, it takes many island sprites in loin cloths to move this equipment around.

If there’s a grand design in all this, it defies apprehension. Perhaps it’s a matter of spelling. Once, I took a bright lad of 14 to an enchanted production of a play he’d never seen: Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.” He found it to be “magic with a k.” Just what this “Tempest” needs: Some magick.

* “The Tempest,” Old Globe Theatre, Lowell Davies Festival Theatre, Simon Edison Centre for the Performing Arts, Balboa Park, San Diego. Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Oct. 6. $17.50-$28.50; (619) 239-2255. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

‘The Tempest’

Actor: Character

Dierk Torsek: Alonso, King of Naples

Julian Gamble: Sebastian, his brother

Richard Easton: Prospero, the once Duke of Milan

Vaughn Armstrong: Antonio, his brother

Jonathan McMurtry: A councilor

Marc Wong: Adrian

Donald Sager: Francisco

Sean Murray: Ariel

Stephen Markle: Caliban

Richard Kneeland: Stephano

Allen McCalla: Trinculo

Eric Liddell: Ferdinand, son of the King of Naples

Mary Elizabeth McGlynn: Miranda

Aldo Billingslea: Master of a ship

Triney Sandoval: Boatswain

Shakespeare’s play. Director Adrian Hall. Sets Ralph Funicello. Lights Peter Maradudin. Costumes Lewis Brown. Composer Larry Delinger. Sound Jeff Ladman. Dramaturg Dakin Matthews. Stage manager Douglas Pagliotti. Assistant stage manager Peter Van Dyke.