A reimagined version of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest had an acclaimed world premiere at The Smith Center for the Performing Arts in Las Vegas this past winter. Produced by the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) and The Smith Center, the show is currently in the midst of a second run through June in Cambridge, MA at A.R.T. The highly creative piece was adapted and directed by Aaron Posner and Teller (of Penn and Teller fame), who also provided the magic. The production features music by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, and movement by Pilobolus. The design team includes scenic designer Dan Conway, lighting designer Christopher Akerlind, sound designer Darron L. West, and costume designer Paloma Young.
While the current production in Cambridge at A.R.T. has moved indoors, The Smith Center production was performed in a 500-seat climate-controlled tent. Strongly featuring magic and illusions created by Teller, this version of The Tempest allows the audience to experience Prospero’s wizardry in a whole new way. The artistic team integrates the magic into the story so it does not feel like a magic show, but rather the magic organically flows as part of the play itself. When the shipwrecked aristocrats wash up on the shores of Prospero’s island, they find themselves immersed in a world of trickery and amazement. However, the revels come to an end when the magician realizes he has neglected his life in service of his art and must now relinquish his conjuring in order to reclaim his life and provide for the future of his only child. Traveling Show.
Conway was looking for a way into the visual world of The Tempest, he says, when “Teller gave me a book about a dust bowl magician named Willard, an actual magician who toured the Southwestern United States. He was a fascinating character and quite well known in that region. He did huge tent shows that were packed. To the end, with the advent of films in every little town, attendance waned, and he became a kind of tragic figure.”
For the production, life on the road in a tent became a metaphor for being marooned on the island. “Teller described it as, ‘a shipwrecked magic show.’ That’s where I took off from and did a tremendous amount of research into magicians of the early 20th-century,” says Conway. “It was quite an interesting visual world there, because it’s flat in terms of the rendering of drops and the like. I was interested in the HBO series Carnivàle that was set during the Depression-era dust bowl. I loved the look of that show. It had this depressed color tone, washed out as if the drops had been hung a hundred times. In our show, when the stage lighting comes on with the strings of incandescent light bulbs, the whole thing just glows and turns into a real world of magic, which is what The Tempest is. It turned out to be perfect in terms of the right visual world.”
The design team learned a lot about working in an actual tent during the Smith Center run. “The challenges are endless, like wind, heat, and cold in the desert,” says Conway. “Chris was focusing the lighting during a windstorm, and the pipes were swaying back and forth; it was a little scary at times. A lot of people who saw it in Las Vegas said, ‘Oh, I loved that, when you walked in, there was the smell of grass and dirt.’”
Due to budget and availability, the team ended up with a contemporary, rectangular tent rather than an older, circular tent more commonly associated with a circus. Conway continues, “I wanted an old circus tent, but they just don’t lend themselves to heating and air conditioning. It was something that we had to face.” Using a tent did present some challenges that needed to be addressed, one of which was the weight limit. “From the very beginning, working with Stephen Setterlun [technical director] at A.R.T., we really tried to make the set as freestanding as we could, so the tent framing could be used to hold the lighting,” says Conway.
A Traveling Show
In his design, Conway came up with a number of scenic drops, much like the ones that Prospero would have used for his traveling magic show tent. What really interests Conway is “the faded elegance of the period and the magic show itself. I did every kind of drop you could do. I did a roll drop, a traveler, wipes, and a guillotine kind of idea. Those drops, in my imagination, during the tour of Prospero’s world, have been taken down and folded many times. They’re all aged, and the paint is flaking off, but when the clamshell incandescent footlights turn on, they become this absolutely beautiful world, so rich. All of the faded colors come alive again. Aaron, the director, said what moves him so much visually is these strings of incandescent lights. We bought the kind of Edison lamps where you can see the filament, so they glow with that kind of wonderful amber color, which is just beautiful—the warmth of that glow. Those particular ones are really expensive, like $6 a lamp, and there are probably 150 in the show. There’s nothing like them; they’re so beautiful and worth every penny. It created this wonderful interplay between dust bowl depression and the beauty and magic of the magic show.”
Accommodating the magic into his scenic design and initially working with the magic team was Conway’s challenge. “That was actually, as hard as it was, also a lot of fun,” Conway says. “Teller has this consultant, Johnny Thompson, one of the premiere magic consultants of the last 30 or 40 years; he’s worked with Penn and Teller for 20 years. What was really interesting was that the magic people were a little distrustful of the theatre people, because we didn’t really understand all of the magic, and the theatre people had to get used to the magic people in terms of getting them to understand how much we could do with texture, surface, and decoration. Magicians tend to be very utilitarian. ‘I need this, this, and this to do the magic.’ It was great, the clash of the two worlds. We ended up loving each other, really informing each other’s world, which was kind of amazing. I developed a great respect for what it is that they do; it’s very precise.”
In designing the set, Conway also had to address the challenge of dealing with the sightlines for the magic. Seated too high, and the audience can see over something that they’re not meant to see, and too wide, and they can see around something that they’re not meant to see around. His design had to allow room for the magic and illusion rigs that would be needed for the production. “There’s a lot of black art magic in the show, so the ‘black arts cave’ was an important part of the scenery,” says Conway. “In fact, I started the design by sketching in the black arts cave first and making the rest of the set work around all of the needs that the black arts cave had. There is a lot of disappearing—and appearing—of both objects and people that are a part of the black arts cave.”
Conway notes that many of the tricks involve disappearances, none of which he can detail without giving away some secrets. “One of the things we needed was more space, because we were having a really hard time fitting all of the different illusions behind the traveler,” he says. “We developed this really terrific curved track that comes in, and the traveler moves downstage as it’s going across. This bought us more onstage room; it was really simple. A curved track is a really difficult thing to pull off and have it work well all the time. Those guys at the shop at A.R.T. are simply some of the best, and they made it work effortlessly and smoothly every time. It turns out that very simple stagecraft is the thing that we’re most dependent on.”
The artistic team worked hard to integrate the magic seamlessly into the story and never forgot that the story is number one. “Chris, Darron, and I, along with Matt Kent from Pilobolus, kept trying to figure out how to use tried-and-true theatrical ideas about focus, attention, and pace to inform the magic in the play so that it did seem totally integrated to the story of the piece. That was our work in Vegas and continues to be in Cambridge,” Conway says. “As exhausted as we were after that three-week tech—I have never done a three-week tech in my life—we looked at it on opening, and we then started to rethink and reshape for Cambridge.” Andrew Cohen was the assistant scenic designer.
Scenery was built by the A.R.T. shop in Cambridge and trucked out to the Smith Center. Thom Rubino in Las Vegas handled the magic engineering and construction. This allowed Teller to easily visit Rubino’s shop throughout fabrication. Conway had to design his set with receptacle areas for the magic tricks that were built in Las Vegas. It was tricky, but it worked. The A.R.T. shop also handled the scenic painting. “Their scenic artists and I had this great conversation, because paint shops these days don’t get to do this kind of beautiful trompe l’oeil work,” comments Conway. “They don’t get to do decorative painting much anymore. This was not only decorative painting but also went through 20 to 30 years of aging. Scenic artists just love that kind of work, doing something beautiful and then aging it.”
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