The Engineered Tempest

The Meridian Theatre's new production of The Tempest arrives with a program that vaunts its technological daring, ecological conscience, and radical compassion. Unfortunately, opening night reveals a meretricious spectacle, glittering insistently while Shakespeare's human conflicts disappear beneath it. A revolving island groans through every scene, video waves crawl over actors' faces, and airborne lanterns distract from crucial exchanges. These devices were surely difficult to engineer, but difficulty alone does not make them dramatically necessary.

Director Inez Vale compounds the problem by framing each scene with sententious pronouncements from a chorus dressed as stranded tourists. Their claims about guilt and forgiveness sound like slogans, while their cryptic gestures confound even attentive viewers. When three members slowly exchange identical suitcases, the action promises significance, yet no later event clarifies the ritual. Meanwhile, Prospero's speeches are cut in half, an odd choice when the program is so prolix that its notes exhaust two intermissions.

The performers occasionally escape the machinery: Lena Ortiz is a deft Ariel, darting between platforms and changing vocal registers with startling precision. Yet her finest scene ends in a technical debacle when a harness jams, leaving her suspended above spectators unsure whether to applaud. Below her, the dejected cast waits through an eight-minute blackout, and the spell the production labored to create vanishes. Breakdowns can occur in any ambitious staging, and a captious reviewer might exploit them unfairly; here, however, the accident exposes deeper confusion.

The gravest failure is Vale's treatment of Caliban, converted from a complicated figure into a convenient lecturer on colonial wrongdoing. His speeches grow vituperative whenever another character questions him; he spits insults and answers doubt with furious denunciations, obscuring the actor's wounded intelligence. At the curtain call, Vale appears onstage to vaunt the company's courage, while actors look too dejected to meet the audience's eyes. That gesture summarizes the evening: enormous labor marshaled in service of shallow effects, moral certainty, and an interpretation unable to trust its audience.