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Just Out
May 2, 2008
by Timothy Krause
Shakespeare Shakeout
The Tempest inspires Insight Out to For:Give
Given the choice, Tony Fuemmeler would just as
soon shelve Shakespeare for 20 years, letting
rest academic preoccupation in favor of
rediscovery. “Just let it sleep a bit and then
come back to it with fresh eyes, instead of
everyone having to do some Shakespeare all the
time,” he suggests. Ironically, this gay
32-year-old theater artist (who recently
designed puppets for Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse
at Oregon Children’s Theatre) now finds himself
returning to the Bard as director of For:Give, a
new project from Insight Out Theatre Collective
inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
“Shakespeare in general has such a particular
place in the theater community and society at
large. He’s really talented, taken for granted
and so many people talk about how great his work
is, but there are very few productions that
manifest those things that are so great about
him,” Fuemmeler asserts. “Because I had this
feeling, I wondered what I would learn.”
Like all of Insight Out’s undertakings, For:Give
began as a collaborative process to encourage
public dialogue around challenging themes, here
hinging on enslavement and liberation, rites of
passage and evolution of the spirit. With a
$5,000 Access to Artistic Excellence grant from
National Endowment for the Arts, Fuemmeler,
playwright Cindy Williams Gutiérrez and a cast
of seven women use The Tempest as catalyst and
criterion, revisiting the source text as often
as unraveling new threads.
In Shakespeare’s saga, Prospero, a sorcerer and
Duke of Milan, is exiled along with daughter
Miranda on an enchanted island where they are
served by Ariel, a spirit, and Caliban, a slave.
Prospero creates a storm to maroon his usurpers,
who split into factions with rebellious and
romantic intents. It’s outwit, outplay and
outlast—an Elizabethan game of Survivor replete
with tricks and trysts befitting an exploration
of compassion and pardon.
In Insight Out’s evolution, several women are
drawn to a different kind of island in a storm—a
seemingly abandoned warehouse—where they come
face to face with personal demons. “There are
ways the characters manifest aspects of
Prospero, or a person’s dark side and light
side,” says Fuemmeler, “and there are different
opportunities toward understanding how you might
look at this material through dance and
movement, heightened language, song and
multimedia projection.”
Fuemmeler’s research included educational
outreach to DaVinci Middle School and Franklin
High School, asking point-of-view questions: Who
is forgiveness for? What is the biggest barrier
to forgiveness? What is the hardest thing to
forgive?
“In The Tempest, there are many times when the
characters seem to be caught by a spirit, or a
certain emotion, overtaken by grief, caught up
in rage and working with that dynamic in which
something in everyday life all of a sudden
overtakes you. It’s you and isn’t you at the
same time, especially in terms of how you deal
with other people,” Fuemmeler says. “The
advantage of this show is that we have a lot of
requirement and permission to explore the show
in a variety of avenues.”
That includes bringing together a cast of all
women, although Fuemmeler attributes this choice
to a preponderance of female talent rather than
a political statement. That the characters of
Miranda and her suitor, Ferdinand, both are
played by women is not an issue for him; in
fact, he prefers audiences not think of the show
as specifically feminist or lesbian. “It’s about
the relationships that do exist. If people are
falling in love, they fall in love…. We are
concentrating on what the characters are doing
rather than the fact that they are a woman or
not a woman…. Hopefully audiences will see the
complexity in everyone.”
Insight Out Theatre Collective presents For:Give
through May 17 at Mississippi Ballroom, 833 N.
Shaver St. Tickets are $15 from 503-493-8070 or
www.insightouttheatre.org.
Timothy Krause is the marketing director for
Miracle Theatre Group.
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