The late legendary Columbia University professor Mark Van Doren’s 1939 book, “Shakespeare,” is very moving, in part because Van Doren is so alive to his subject. Dedicated to each of Shakespeare’s plays and his poems, Van Doren is especially fine when he gets to the maestro’s last play, “The Tempest,” and one of my favorite characters, Caliban. A servant once mentored by Prospero, Caliban is forsaken by his friend, the better for the crafty older man—the man with words—to take over the island that Caliban called home. Caliban says, “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first, / Thou strok’dst me and made much of me.” Caliban, writes Van Doren, “has no capacity for abstraction, and consequently for the rational harmonies of music and love.” But how you can be rational when you’re bereft?
In “Prospero’s Books,” Peter Greenaway’s riveting 1991 film version of the play, the dancer and choreographer Michael Clark played Caliban, and he did it without speaking, miming his disgust with the rational mind: it’s Prospero’s two-faced reasoning that got him in trouble in the first place. Clark’s nuanced performance illustrates the amazing text, narrated in voice-over, which describes the complicated love that can exist between the colonized and the colonizer—and the betrayal that lies at the heart of it.
This summer, the Public Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park kicks off its fifty-third season with Michael Greif’s rendition of “The Tempest” (previews begin May 27), starring Sam Waterston, as Prospero, and Louis Cancelmi, as Caliban. It’s terrific casting to choose Waterston for the role of the keeper of books, the greedy and prophetic elder whose self-creation is his greatest creation. (It is Waterston’s thirteenth production with the Public.) For years, the young Waterston was one of our more awkward leading men, skinny and elegant and troubled, with such pronounced features and expressive eyes that you could not look away. His Prospero will no doubt be infused with his characteristic romanticism, enhanced by the setting—for what could be more appropriate than the Delacorte’s venerable outdoor space to stage this work that feels as though it were written under the stars? ♦
