Universal truths

By Mitch Pugh, Broomfield Enterprise
July 9, 2003

'The Tempest' a timeless story of life's contradictions

LAFAYETTE — When director Madge Montgomery decided to take on the task of William Shakespeare's classic play, "The Tempest," she knew she was dealing with a story any audience could relate to.

Yet, making the words and ideas of Shakespeare accessible to modern audiences has always been a challenge.

The play was trimmed down -- without losing its focus -- to a manageable 90 minutes. But that still wasn't enough.

So Montgomery turned to one of the nation's most popular time periods, from an entertainment perspective, and set the play in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

"Our idea was to try and make the production really accessible and family friendly," Montgomery said.

But those choices weren't just made with an eye on ticket sales (notoriously sluggish in the current economic climate). Rather, the time period was a perfect fit for the story -- one Montgomery feels is as important today as ever.

"The main parts of the play are really universal and could apply to any time and we didn't want to hinder that," Montgomery said.

"The Tempest," thought to be Shakespeare's last play, has at its center a character by the name of Prospero. An Albert Einstein-like figure, he is a man who has learned the secret power of nature through laborious study and has become a powerful -- but lonely -- magician.

Without giving away plot, the play is a strange one, almost dream-like, that explores the contradictions of nostalgia and anxiety and deftly contrasts themes of illusion versus reality, freedom versus servitude and redemption versus revenge.

All concepts that the people living through the late 1950s and early 1960s -- or the Atomic Age -- struggled with. And, coincidentally, concepts America finds itself struggling with once again.

"The play actually deals with a lot of concepts that are contradictions," Montgomery said. "We wanted to look at setting it in a time that itself was very contradictory. It was a time of growth of ideas but also a very dangerous and paranoid time. We had the Cold War and the advent of weapons of mass destruction. And we look back on that time with a mixture of nostalgia and anxiety."

Adapting the Elizabethean play to the Atomic Age was not as difficult as it may seem, Montgomery said. There were few changes made to the language of the production, instead many of the alterations came in the form of costumes and set design.

Along with fun and nostalgic references to the popularity of TV dinners and Star Trek, there were specific challenges dealing with how to represent a spectacular and chaotic storm scene, magical manipulations, invisible spirits, singing and dancing goddesses and, of course, the half-domesticated monster.

Montgomery said this production may be one of the most technically ambitious the group has ever tackled.

"There are lot of special effects and things we do with lighting," said Montgomery, who unveiled the show without some of those effects Sunday for an outdoor performance in Louisville. "But I think it came together really naturally."

INFO • www.LCPtheatre.org