theater
Shakespeare Shakeout
The Tempest inspires Insight Out to For:Give
by Timothy Krause
iven the choice, Tony Fuemmeler
would just as soon shelve Shakespeare
for 20 years, letting rest academic pre­
occupation in favor of rediscovery. “Just
let it sleep a bit and then come back to
it with fresh eyes, instead of everyone having to
Access to Artistic Excellence grant from National
Endowment for the Arts, Fuemmeler, playwright
Cindy Williams Gutiérrez and a cast of seven
women use The Tempest as catalyst and criterion,
revisiting the source text as often as unraveling
new threads.
Fuemmeler’s research included educational
outreach to DaVinci Middle School and Frank­
lin High School, asking point-of-view questions:
do some Shakespeare all the time,” he suggests. |
In Shakespeare’s saga, Prospero, a sorcerer
Ironically, this gay 32-year-old theater artist (who
and Duke of Milan, is exiled along with daugh­
recently designed puppets for Lily’s Purple Plastic
ter Miranda on an enchanted island where they
Purse at Oregon Children’s Theatre) now finds are served by Ariel, a spirit, and Caliban, a slave.
himself returning to the Bard as director of For:
Prospero creates a storm to maroon his usurpers,
Give, a new project from Insight Out Theatre Col­ who split into factions with rebellious and roman-
lective inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
tic intents. It’s outwit, outplay and outlast—an
“In The Tempest, there are many times when
the characters seem to be caught by a spirit, or
“Shakespeare in general has such a particular
place in the theater community and society at
large'. He’s really talented, taken for granted and
so many people talk about how great his work is,
but there are very few productions that manifest
those things that are so great about him,” Fuem­
meler asserts. “Because 1 had this feeling, I won­
dered what I would learn.”
Like all of Insight Out’s undertakings, For:
Give began as a collaborative process to encourage
public dialogue around challenging themes, here
hinging on enslavement and liberation, rites of
passage and evolution of the spirit. With a $5,000
z
Elizabethan game of Survivor replete with tricks
and trysts befitting an exploration of compassion
and pardon.
Who is forgiveness for? What is the biggest bar­
rier to forgiveness? What is the hardest thing to
forgive?
a certain emotion,' overtaken by grief, caught up
in rage and working with that dynamic in which
something in everyday life all of a sudden over­
takes you. It’s you and isn’t you at the same time,
especially in terms of how you deal with other
people,” Fuemmeler says. “The advantage’of this
show is that we have a lot of requirement and
pero, or a person’s dark side and light side,” says
Fuemmeler, “and there are different opportunities
toward understanding how you might look at this
material through dance and movement, height­
permission to explore the show in a variety of
avenues.”
That includes bringing together a cast of all
women, although Fuemmeler attributes this
choice to a preponderance of female talent rather
than a political statement. That the charac­
ters of Miranda and her suitor, Ferdinand, both
are played by women is not an issue for him; in
fact, he prefers audiences not think of the show
as specifically feminist or lesbian. “It’s about the
ened language, song and multimedia projection.”
relationships that do exist. If people are falling in
In Insight Out’s evolution, several women are
drawn to a different kind of island in a storm—a
seemingly abandoned warehouse—where they
come face to face with personal demons. “There
are ways the characters manifest aspects of Pros­
Several women find themselves face to face
with their personal demons in the midst of a
powerful storm in For:Give.
love, they fall in love.... We are concentrating
on what the characters are doing rather than the
fact that they are a woman or not a woman....
Hopefully audiences will see the complexity in
everyone.”
I nsight O ut T heatre C ollective presents
For:Give through May 17 at Mississippi Ballroom,
833 N. Shaver St. Tickets are $15 from
503'493'8070 or www.insightouttheatre.org.
T imothy K rause is the marketing director for
Miracle Theatre Group.