The Tempest

Tina Packer Playhouse, Lenox, Mass.

(413) 637-3353

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The role of Prospero “calls for anger, a thirst for revenge, fearlessness, and majesty,” said Frank Rizzo in The Hartford Courant. Is it wise, then, for anyone to transform this powerful father figure into a woman? When the performer entrusted with the task is the 81-year-old “force of nature” known as Olympia Dukakis, the answer is an emphatic yes. Dukakis plays Prospera, a mystic and the exiled Duchess of Milan, as “a strong, maternal monarch.” More importantly, in a transition that’s often botched by lesser actors, she makes sense of Prospera’s switch from being vengeful about her forced exile to being forgiving.

This Shakespeare and Company production is more than just a star vehicle, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. While the supporting performances “are of varying polish and complexity,” no one falls into the common trap of being a dutiful bore. Merritt Janson and Ryan Winkles, as Prospera’s marriageable daughter Miranda and Prince Ferdinand, seem not so much fairy-tale royalty as “enthusiastic, impressionable goofballs matched by their appreciation of each other’s novelty.” Still, the stage belongs to Dukakis. Prospero has been subjected to a few gender-bending experiments before, “but surely no one else has provided the ineffably maternal mixture of fire, ice, earth, and just a dash of sea salt” that Dukakis brings to the part.

Intriguingly, there’s a “mournful undertone” to this staging, said Don Aucoin in The Boston Globe. The Tempest was the last work Shakespeare wrote alone, and director Tony Simotes seems to want us to experience it as the playwright’s “farewell to the stage.” Here and there, the downbeat atmosphere is pierced by broad comedy, mostly involving Rocco Sisto’s “rambunctious energy” as “the rebellious, loincloth-clad servant Caliban.” Yet even when Dukakis’s Prospera makes early fearsome use of her magical powers, “she seems ready to surrender them, or at least resigned to their loss.”