An Island of Eerie Lighting and Delightful Sounds
A La MaMa ‘Tempest,’ With Music by Elizabeth Swados
Laura Collins-Hughes
October 14, 2014: The enchantment begins immediately, with a storm-tossed shipwreck made of shouted voices, a haze of fog and a speckled, celestial light cast by a giant metal orb. Pocked with holes, it’s lit from within, swaying like the wild sea. Then we are on the island in Karin Coonrod’s Tempest, starring Reg E. Cathey as a commanding, warmly paternal but weather-beaten Prospero. With music by Elizabeth Swados, this sonically lush production of Shakespeare’s late play — presented by La MaMa at the Ellen Stewart Theater — takes its cue from Prospero’s slave, Caliban. “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not,” he tells the drunken, deluded butler, Stephano. “Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices.” So it is for the audience, arrayed around three sides of the stage. Soft noises come at us from behind and above and we don’t know quite where in a layered soundscape of whistles, echoes, coos, breaths. From time to time, the musicians, too, roam Riccardo Hernandez’s spare set, a space both gymnastic (a quartet of ladders, which the actors climb) and magical (geometric white lines traced on the black floor).
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