Tempest Preview

Through time, a link to 'Tempest'

Director's kinsman among the stranded
Thursday, March 15, 2007 BY JENN MCKEE News Arts Writer

Not many people can claim a family connection to a Shakespeare play's creation. David Andrews, director of the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre's production of "The Tempest,'' can and does.

"My grandmother ... had some genealogical research done on our family, and it turns out that I am descended from a guy by the name of Stephen Hopkins, who was a passenger aboard the ship, the Sea Venture, which is the ship that was caught in a tempest on its way to Jamestown in 1609, and stranded on the island of Bermuda for that winter of 1609-1610,'' said Andrews. "That is generally considered to be one of the main source materials for 'The Tempest.'''

Indeed, a man named William Strachey - secretary for the Virginia Company, which had ties to Shakespeare - wrote an account of the shipwreck, so scholars believe the story heavily influenced one of only two original play plots that Shakespeare produced.

"The Tempest'' begins with a storm conjured by Prospero, an exiled duke who's been stranded on a deserted tropical island for 12 years with his daughter Miranda and his books on magic. A nearby ship carries the men who wronged him, so when it is destroyed in the storm and the men come to shore, Prospero has an opportunity for revenge.

Andrews has set his production in the time and place of the Sea Venture's wreck. The scenic design even includes Bermuda's coral reef, because the ship's entrapment in the reef ultimately kept it from sinking.

"I'm taking advantage of the irony of the story itself,'' said Andrews of his vision for the show. "There were eight other ships that went with the Sea Venture to Virginia, and those eight ships made it. Of course, when they got there, they had a brutal winter, and most of them perished - either from starvation, or cold, or lack of supplies, or unfriendly native peoples in the area. Whereas those that were on the Sea Venture, which might have seemed to be in an unfortunate position ... instead spent the winter in Bermuda, which was uninhabited at the time, but did have flora and fauna that the would-be colonists made use of during that winter.''

Yet in the context of Shakespeare's story, Thom Johnson, who plays Prospero, noted why the shipwrecked royal passengers don't take well to the beautiful island. "Prospero has had all these years to develop his magic and has harnessed all the spirits to help him make the place really good for him, and not so good for the king's guys that show up there,'' said Johnson.

Even Prospero seems desperate to leave the "natural world'' of the island for the "civilized world'' of Europe, and the intersection of the two gains expression in Andrews' take on the play's famous masque scene. Andrews created an original, sedate, European-sounding piece for Miranda's wedding, but gave Emmy-winning, Chelsea-based composer Brian Brill a musical challenge for the post-wedding music.

"I commissioned him to write a piece, ... and I told him that it could have no recognizable instruments whatsoever, which he thought was kind of amusing,'' said Andrews. "Basically, anything that he would use in that piece would have to be something that you could find lying around - rocks, sticks, ... something natural. ... It's only two minutes out of the whole two-hour show, but it's pretty astounding.''