NEW YORK — Most visits to the theater demand that audience members become invisible. We’re asked to silence our cellphones, quietly unwrap our lozenges and refrain from speaking. But not so at the Public Theater Mobile Unit’s enchanting production of “The Tempest,” where before the play begins we’re taught a song: “Cultivate love, cultivate courage, cultivate strength, cultivate hope.”
The song will be useful later.
This upbeat mantra may come as a surprise to those familiar with Shakespeare’s “problem play,” in which Prospero, the spiteful sorcerer and former Duke of Milan, causes a shipwreck to seek revenge on the men who wronged him 12 years earlier.
And it’s not that the Prospero in this free production isn’t angry. Who wouldn’t be, if your brother plotted to usurp your dukedom and had you and your daughter sent adrift on a ship until you landed in a remote island?
But as portrayed by the regal Myra Lucretia Taylor — who joins Helen Mirren and Harriet Walter among women who have played the leading role — this Prospero has a warm heart and endless devotion to her daughter Miranda (Sam Morales). She seeks revenge as a means of self-protection, not blood thirst.
Prospero’s gender isn’t the only thing that’s changed in this “Tempest.” Director Laurie Woolery has streamlined the play to 90 minutes with no intermission (a staple of Mobile Unit shows; last year’s “Henry V” felt like “Die Hard”) and turned it into a bona fide lovefest, with songs and an emphasis on comedy and romance. You leave this storm rejuvenated rather than wet, confused and cold.
Woolery heads the theater’s Public Works program, which brings together professional actors and community performers in pageantlike productions. As in those shows, she treats the text not as a sacred manuscript but as a guidebook to humanity, full of characters with needs and desires as familiar to us as they were 400 years ago.
It’s easy to identify with Miranda’s dreams of love, the young Prince Ferdinand’s (Jasai Chase-Owens) industriousness as a way to overcome grief and the spirit Ariel’s (Danaya Esperanza) desire for freedom.
The director even provides insight into the monster Caliban (Christopher Ryan Grant), a creature Prospero enslaved upon her arrival at the island, who is too often treated as a comedic sidekick or a dramatic nuisance.
Here Caliban becomes the embodiment of male resentment toward matriarchal structures. The creature doesn’t understand how a woman tamed him, and is trying to revert the island to the former status quo by forming alliances with the shipwrecked sailors. His very human motivations make him less scary; it helps that Grant plays him as a buffoon who still has a chance at redemption.
Sitting in the round at the Shiva Theater to watch this “Tempest” is a bit like being at a campfire, listening to ancient storytellers. The house lights stay on the entire time, creating an unspoken feeling of complicity. We are all inhabitants of the island.
Which means by the time we’re asked to recall the song we learned at the beginning, it’s as if the words — love, courage, strength, hope — had been living inside us all along, just waiting to be released by fanciful spirits.
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Production Notes:
‘The Tempest’
Through May 19 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; 212-967-7555, publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.