TRTC Turns William Shakespeare on His Head
The Sopris Sun Review:
by Terray Sylvester

The 19th century poet John Keats called it “negative capability.” It’s the ability, as he described it, to exist in uncertainty, mysteries and doubts without irritably grasping after fact and reason – the ability to let a sense of beauty overcome every other consideration. He thought such a capability was a major source of poetic inspiration.

So maybe Keats would have appreciated the latest production from the Thunder River Theatre Company, “A Tempest of the Mind.” In it, TRTC nudges its audience in just that direction: toward an appreciation of the beauty of the plays usually attributed to William Shakespeare, even amidst the centuries-old mystery of who wrote them.

“Tempest” is an original creation. Developed by TRTC Artistic Directors Valerie Haugen and Lon Winston, and written by Haugen, it’s partly a blend of the most famous comedies, tragedies and sonnets generally credited to Shakespeare. But it’s also a wild, literary whodunit filled with arcane rites and the ghosts of long-dead authors.

Winston plays an aging, crippled professor who has devoted his life to teaching Shakespeare, but who suffers a crisis of faith – a “tempest of the mind” -- when he begins to question whether William Shakespeare wrote all those famous verses after all. Haugen, who plays the professor’s pleasantly foul-mouthed daughter, bustles into the play in the opening scene and finds the professor in the midst of a séance, intent on conjuring up Shakespeare’s ghost so he can set a few things straight.

However, it’s not Shakespeare who crawls out of the crypt -- or out from behind the bookcase -- but the energetic specter of Mark Twain, played by Jeff Carlson. And from there, with Twain as a guide, the performers set off on a journey through the mystery of the famous playwright’s identity, sliding in and out of their original personas along the way in order to inhabit the characters of “Twelfth Night,” “King Lear,” “The Merchant of Venice” and other Shakespearean works. Richard Lyon and Jennica Lundin also appear in the play.

With its occasionally wacky plot interspersed with scenes from the most famous plays of the English language, “Tempest” will appeal not only to those who’ve lingered through Shakespeare in the past, but also to those who’ve never delved into his works – though anyone in the second category may want to head to the library afterwards for a little background reading.

The play is a sensory feast as well, with a set almost as alive as the actors. A palpable creepiness pervades the stage during the initial séance as a storm howls around the professor’s cluttered office and he struggles to contain the maniacal Shakespearean voices in his head, which cackle unnervingly out of the theatre’s sound system.

And little touches make the set appealing, too. A plastic bobble-head doll of Shakespeare as we usually imagine him – as a somewhat weak-lipped 16th century gentleman – sits on a table. The characters occasionally pick it up as they explain just how absurd it is that he gets the credit for the plays.

But in “Tempest” TRTC draws no conclusions. Instead, the theatre company presents the evidence and then urges the audience to challenge all of its assumptions about Shakespeare. And when the professor finally hits the limit of his beliefs the audience receives a brief chance to revel with him in the basic mystery, and beauty, of the plays regardless of who wrote them.

Incidentally, John Keats does make an appearance in the play, albeit as just one name in a surprising list of individuals who think Shakespeare really wasn’t. The others include Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia, silent film actor Charlie Chaplin and activist Malcolm X.