The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
BARD RESET
Great Lakes returning to the stage with Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’
With the classic theater company being dark for the last 18 months, Great Lakes Theater officials knew they had to kick off its 60th-anniversary season with an exciting show.
Considering the fall production would mark a return to in-person performances, a certain excitement would be baked in for both performers and audiences.
Still, the appeal of producing a show about four disparate and dissimilar characters stranded and lost out of time was too good to pass up. That’s why the Great Lakes Theatre will be producing William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” Oct. 15 through Nov. 7 at Playhouse Square’s Hanna Theatre.
“It’s not hard to imagine creating a play about people in isolation after everything we’re actually still dealing with in many ways,” said “The Tempest” director Sara Bruner, who is also Great Lakes Theater’s associate artistic director. “The way I thought about it and continue to think about it is this notion of Prospero, Miranda, Caliban and Ariel on an island isolated.
“They have their own culture but they don’t have exposure to community and
the rest of the world. That’s actually creating quite a bit of unrest for the inhabitants of that island. They’re not going anywhere.”
Set on a remote island, “The Tempest” centers around sorcerer Prospero, who, Bruner said, has a management problem. The people he’s overseeing — daughter Miranda and servants Caliban and Ariel — aren’t happy.
This requires Prospero to reintroduce himself to his very tumultuous and painful past while seeking forgiveness for the better of all involved.
“‘The Tempest’ just makes more of an emotional sense, but the isolation thing was so right at the surface when we started talking about it,” Bruner said. “We really got excited. We thought it (would) be a magical way to come back into the theater because the script has so many tall orders story-wise.
“It starts with this big shipwreck, but it’s got a heartbeat, it’s got magic all over the place, and we were just excited about that aspect. If we’re going to come back and do live theater, then let’s do live, imaginative theater.”
That said, Bruner said she made an active choice not to hammer the audience with the isolation theme considering audience members returning to live theater didn’t necessarily need to be reminded of life during the last year and a half.
“The audience does a lot of that work for us,” Bruner said. “We don’t have to remind them of where we’ve all been and where we are.
“I like to create space for the audience to sort of meet us halfway, to bring themselves to the piece instead
of us just landing everything right on their laps.”
In addition to the pandemic, something else that surely will land with “The Tempest” is the current political climate. No matter on which side of the aisle an audience member sits, the production’s famous line, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here,” probably will hit home.
“The telltale sign of Shakespeare comedies is they end in marriage and community healing,” Bruner said. “That’s often done through young lovers finding one another, falling in love, and it heals the woes of the past. Hopefully that message of compassion and forgiveness can be something people walk away with because it is the truth.
“In many ways, you can’t move forward without acknowledging the past. Another great line from the play is, ‘The past is prologue.’ It’s such a rich piece, so beautiful and so many great lines, so many great ideas.”
While Bruner has a long history with “The Tempest,” including playing the role of Miranda in her first professional gig as an 18-year-old actress with Great Lakes sister outfit the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, as well as appearing as Ariel in a 2007 Great Lakes Theater production, she’s never directed the Bard’s classic.
Bruner admitted to being nervous about helming the upcoming Great Lakes Theater show, which debuted this summer at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, but
then she remembered something the pandemic taught not only her but society in general.
“At this point, it’s just excitement and gratitude because we’re doing it,’ Bruner said. “Something the pandemic taught me having been away from theater for so long is that the fears are normal but don’t let them win the day when the fact you get to do the thing you don’t always get to do.”
NOTE: As a resident company of Playhouse Square, Great Lakes Theater will follow the health and safety policies established by Playhouse Square’s Healthy Together guidelines, which include, but are not limited to, vaccination against COVID-19 and mask requirements for all audience members.