Joe Turner’s Come and Gone has come back to Broadway (a review)

The caption for this Jacob Lawrence painting ("The Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 3) reads, "In every town Negroes were leaving by the hundreds to go North and enter into Northern industry." It's at the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.).

August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, set in 1911, deals with the separation of black people in America from their cultural roots. Most of the characters in this play had come to Pittsburgh from homes in the south — part of the “great migration” that was the subject of Jacob Lawrence’s remarkable series of paintings (above and below). August Wilson described it this way in his introduction to the play:

From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city. Isolated, cut off from memory, having forgotten the names of the gods and only guessing at their faces, they arrive dazed and stunned, their hearts kicking in their chests with a song worth singing. They arrive carrying Bibles and guitars, their pockets lined with dust and fresh hope . . . .

The caption for this Jacob Lawrence painting ("The Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 45) reads, "They arrived in Pittsburgh, one of the great industrial centers of the North, in large numbers."

But when we saw this play last weekend at the Belasco Theatre (West 44th Street, Broadway), we realized that at least one of the actresses was even less connected to the cultural milieu of August Wilson than the characters in the play were to their ancestors’ African heritage.

The telling moment came in the play’s final minutes, as Herald Loomis (Chad L. Coleman), meeting his wife Martha after ten years apart, becomes overwhelmed with bitter emotion and pulls a knife. Trying to bring him to his senses, Martha (Danai Gurira) urges him to “look to Jesus. Even if you done fell away from the church you can be saved again.”

Martha begins to quote the familiar words of the twenty-third Psalm. After a minute, the words of Scripture strike a chord with the distraught Herald Loomis:

MARTHA: “Even though I walk through the shadow of death — “

LOOMIS: That’s just where I be walking!

MARTHA: “I shall fear no evil. For thou art with me. Thy staff and thy rod, they comfort me.”

LOOMIS: You can’t tell me nothing about no valleys. I done been all across the valleys . . . .

That’s how Martha’s line was spoken last Friday night: “Thy staff and thy rod, they comfort me.”

When he wrote this passage, August Wilson must have felt that he was making it easy for any actress playing Martha by giving her lines she would already know. Wilson himself surely learned Psalm 23 by heart at an early age; he must often have heard the verses spoken in church. The phrase “Thy rod and thy staff” (like other passages from the King James Bible) would have been part of Wilson’s cultural vocabulary, along with the tradition of gospel preaching also echoed in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.

Danai Gurira

But it’s clear that Danai Gurira wasn’t familiar with Psalm 23 before she took on the part of Martha Pentecost — otherwise, she never would have transposed “staff” and “rod”. For her, this was just another line she had to learn. We couldn’t help wondering if this actress even knew the theological implications of the name “Pentecost” that her character had taken. (With some research, Emsworth has ascertained that Ms. Gurira is about 30 years old, a playwright as well as an actress, and a native of Zimbabwe. We infer that she never attended a Christian mission school in that horribly troubled country.)

It is, of course, unfair to this exceptionally well-acted production for Emsworth to dwell at such length on a minor blunder by one actress. (It’s especially unfair because we saw a preview performance.) In fact, the casting by director Bartlett Sher is one of the many strengths of this show. Each of the nine adult characters in the play is portrayed vividly and in high definition.

Chad L. Coleman

The best part of seeing an August Wilson play is not necessarily the storyline, but the pleasure of getting to know the characters and watching them interact. But of the several Wilson plays we’ve seen on stage, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone has, we think, the most compelling plot and subplots. Former deacon Herald Loomis (Chad C. Coleman) arrives at Seth Holly’s boarding house shorn of his faith and looking for a wife from whom he was cruelly torn ten years earlier. Long-time boarder Bynum Walker (Roger Robinson) wants to find a shiny man that he met in a vision. Mattie Campbell (Marsha Stephanie Blake) wants to recover a husband who left her. 

And what of the various performances? We especially enjoyed Ernie Hudson’s performance as Seth Holly. the grumpy owner of the Pittsburgh boarding house where all the play’s action takes place. We think perhaps Holly was the character August Wilson himself liked the most: the only character born in the North, a devoted husband, a trick worker in a machine tool and die shop, the financially astute proprietor of two businesses on the side, a skilled metalworker, an aspiring entrepeneur, a small-scale vegetable gardener, and a man impatient with the superstitions and unsettled ways of his boarders from the south. We also appreciated Latanya Richardson Jackson as Seth’s tolerant, warm-hearted wife Bertha.

But the finest performance in the show is given by Roger Robinson as the Hollys’ boarder Bynum Walker.  He’s a “hoodoo” man who makes potions with roots and pigeon blood, and he has the ability to “bind” people together (with the qualification that “You can’t bind what don’t cling”!). The scene in the play that Emsworth remembers most vividly is not one that was acted on stage, but instead a scene described by Bynum, the dramatic story of his magical encounter with the “shiny man” who showed him how to find his “song,” the “Binding Song.”

It’s a banner year for theater-going when you get to see not one, but two August Wilson plays. See Emsworth’s review of a remarkably good production of Fences in Rochester in June. Here’s the link.

The Cherry Orchard at the BAM Harvey Theater in Brooklyn

We might have thought August: Osage County was a better play if we hadn’t seen this fine production of The Cherry Orchard in Brooklyn the night before. (Emsworth vents about the popular but incoherent Osage County play in this post.)

Ethan Hawke, Sinéad Cusack, Paul Jesson, and Rebecca Hall. Hall's drab costumes only accentuated her appeal.

Of course, no one needs Emsworth to tell him that The Cherry Orchard is a masterpiece. But it’s easier to make a Chekhov play into a dreary yawner than to bring it to life.  We can report that this production by director Sam Mendes and the Bridge Project is a great success.

We saw it on a whim, ordering our tickets by cellphone as we were driving down to New York City on a Friday afternoon. (We were agreeably shocked to find ourselves talking to a actual box-office employee of the theater, not an anonymous Ticketmaster flunky.) What we Rochesterians didn’t realize until after we’d bought our tickets was that the BAM Harvey Theater is in Brooklyn, not Manhattan (To our shame, we did not know that “BAM” stands for the Brooklyn Academy of Music or that it has been an oasis for classical theater for many years.). We took a different set of expressways, dodged the enormous Brooklyn potholes, and arrived in time for a decidedly undistinguished meal at a kitschy, self-important diner called “Junior’s” that we spotted a couple of blocks from the theater.

The theater itself was something to see.  It must have been a fine old vaudeville playhouse, with its Roman columns, staircases, and a grand balcony, back in the day (1904) when it used to be the Majestic Theater. The place was apparently crumbling and abandoned when (as we learned) one Harvey Lichtenstein bought it twenty years ago and renovated it — after a fashion. It looks as if they stripped away a lot of plaster, down to the pipes and wires, then ran out of money and simply sprayed shellac over everything. We make no value judgments.

Sinéad Cusack and Simon Russell Beale

The Cherry Orchard is set in Imperial Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. It is the story of a proud and formerly wealthy Russian land-owning family that can’t come to grips with changing times.  Here’s the plot: When Ranavskaya (Sinéad Cusack) and her daughter Anya return home from several years in Paris, they face a crisis; their grand estate is about to be sold at a mortgage foreclosure auction.  Ranavskaya’s neighbor Lopakhin (Simon Russell Beale), a prosperous merchant from a peasant family, urges her to save the estate by cutting down its large but unproductive cherry orchard (of which the family is immensely proud) and converting the land into summer villas for the nouveau riche from the cities.

Sinead Cusack's Ranevskaya is prone to melodrama. Standing: Richard Easton as the aged Firs.

But Ranavskaya refuses to face the crisis, or even to talk about it.  Her inability to engage with Lopakhin, who genuinely wants to help her, is just one of many instances in this play in which the characters simply fail to listen to one another.

Ranavskaya throws money around as if the family were still rich. And she still treats her “free” servants like serfs, like the non-people of Gogol’s Dead Souls, even though serfdom was abolished in 1861, several decades before the scenes in The Cherry Orchard. Her elderly footman, Firs (Richard Easton), pines for the days before emancipation, when people knew their places in society.

Ethan Hawke as Profimov resembled Emsworth in his own student days

Ranavskaya’s stepdaughter Varya (Rebecca Hall) and Ranavskaya’s brother Gaev (Paul Jesson) realize that a marriage between Varya and the now-wealthy Lopakhin would solve the family’s financial woes. Varya is willing, but Lopakhin, acutely conscious of their differences in social rank, and perhaps still harboring a crush on Ranavskaya, has never brought himself to speak to her. Instead, a useless romance has sprung up between Anya and the former family tutor Trofimov (Ethan Hawke), a fervent radical socialist and perpetual student.

Rebecca Hall as Vicky in the recent Woody Allen film Vicky Cristina Barcelona

There are more than enough “names” in this show. The ravishing Rebecca Hall had the title role in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona last year (we thought she was excellent, although Penelope Cruz got the Oscar nomination). Ethan Hawke had lots of screen time in last year’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. And we remember vividly Sinéad Cusack’s supporting role as Dr. Delia Surridge in V is for Vendetta.

Hawke in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

But this show is not just something movie stars decided to do between films; this is serious acting by serious, first-rate actors.

We learned from the program that the Bridge Project is a sort of exchange program for actors, a joint undertaking of the Old Vic, in London, where Kevin Spacey is artistic director, and the BAM Harvey Theater, where Sam Mendes is in charge. (Talk about the movies, though! — Mendes was the director for American Beauty, The Road to Perdition, and the recent Revolutionary Road.)

Because of this collaboration, some of the actors (like Simon Russell Beale and Sinéad Cusack) are British members of the Old Vic company; others (like Ethan Hawke and Dakin Matthews) are American. Our only cavil was with the accents. The Brits used upper-class British accents; Ethan Hawke used a working-class American accent; and Selina Cadell, as the French governess Charlotta, spoke in what seemed to be a parody of a French-Russian accent. We thought at one point that the accents might have been intended to match the social status of the characters, but can’t say for sure.

Although we (understandably) couldn’t keep our eyes off Rebecca Hall, we loved Simon Russell Beale as Lopakhin, ambivalent about his upward mobility. He’s one of the best actors we’ve ever seen. And we were especially delighted with Richard Easton as the addled old servant Firs.  These classical actors are worth going out of one’s way for.

The script of this play was a “version” (apparently not a “translation”) of Chekhov’s play by the contemporary playwright Tom Stoppard.  When we got home, we pulled the Constance Garnett translation off our shelves and read it through; we don’t think Stoppard did anything radical.  In the older translations like Garnett’s, the language is so stilted that the essence of Chekhov is lost — or at least so it seems to us. On stage, Stoppard’s “version” was natural-sounding and went a long ways toward closing the cultural gap between our time and Chekhov’s Russia.

This show rates with the 2003 production of The Three Sisters at the Shaw Festival, directed by Jackie Maxwell, as the best Chekhov we’ve ever experienced. We see that this same outstanding ensemble of actors is now also performing Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale in repertory at the Bam Harvey Theater. Unfortunately, we probably won’t be back to New York City before its run is over.

August: Osage County at the Music Box Theater in NYC (a review)

(January 30, 2009)  In New York City last weekend, Emsworth yielded to curiosity and went to see the heavily hyped August: Osage County, which has been on Broadway for over a year and which won the 2008 Tony. 

The Music Box Theater was packed, and, frankly, it’s been a while since we’ve been part of an audience that was so into a play.  But we left with just one thought on our minds: 

This was really the best play on Broadway in 2008?  The Tony?  The Pulitzer too?  Oh, my!

Don’t believe the critics. August: Osage County is what you’d get if you took six months of a daytime soap, boiled it down to three hours, and added laugh lines.

Tracy Letts

The soap formula calls for new dramatic revelations — infidelities, betrayals, crimes of passion – every two or three weeks.  That’s August: Osage County: fresh dark secrets about the Weston family, only they bubble up about every fifteen or twenty minutes. Playwright Tracy Letts exhausted his quota of coincidences and unlikely plot turns by the first intermission.

We learn in the first ten minutes of the play that the folksy Bev Weston is an alcoholic and that his bitchy wife Violet pops pills. But that’s just the beginning.

In short order we learn that their eldest daughter Barbara is separated from her husband, who’s shacking up with one of his students at a university (and that the separation is a secret from her family); that their middle daughter Ivy is secretly sleeping with her first cousin; and that their youngest daughter Karen has just gotten engaged to a shady businessman (narcotics?), who’s trying to get into the pants of Barbara’s 14-year-old daughter Jean.

Sound like six months’ worth of All My Children? That’s what I thought, too.

Estelle Parsons

This play panders shamelessly to trends in pop psychology, the stuff you’d see on Oprah and read about in Cosmopolitan. America loves “truth-telling” — so Letts writes a family-dinner-from-hell scene in which a hopped-up Violet (Estelle Parsons) tells her daughters and their husbands just what she thinks of them! America can’t get enough of The Vagina Monologues — so we get pajama-clad sisters joking about their mother’s privates.  American mothers live in fear that dirty old men will ply their young daughters with pot and try to seduce them — so Letts puts that in the play too!  His audience, viscerally involved, hisses right on cue.

Shock overload? No such thing! Tracy Letts also throws in subplots about suicide and accidental incest. He tries to hit as many of the primal fears of American women that he can. Make no mistake: this is a chick play.

Then he adds a crowning touch: a pure-heared young Cheyenne woman with perfect posture and absolute composure (Samantha Ross). She presides over the play as a sort of spirit presence (and as a conscience for the Westons), reminding us of the moral superiority of America’s indigenous peoples. Letts’s random use of hot-button items from contemporary pop culture make August: Osage County a hopeless mish-mash of a play.

Back in the day: Estelle Parsons with Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde

This may be the same production that won the Tony, but it’s not the same cast. All the actors from the original Steppenwolf production that came to Broadway from Chicago have long since moved on.

Still, there are some very good performances, especially from Estelle Parsons, who plays her “stoned” scenes to perfection.  She also gets to shriek and carry on much as she did when she won a supporting actress Oscar forty years ago in Bonnie and Clyde. We especially liked Molly Regan as Violet’s sister Mattie Fae; this actress is a veteran of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company and has serious acting chops. So does Amy Warren as Violet’s neurotic youngest daughter Karen; Ms. Warren has some marvelous moments with body language, using her arms and legs.

On the other hand, Madeleine Martin seems to feel that the best way to put across a surly 14-year-old girl (Violet’s granddaughter Jean) is to distort her voice and swallow her words.  She was painful to listen to. And the way Bill Fordham delivered his lines (he plays Barbara’s philandering husband Frank) was little better than amateurish.

This is theater for people who like TV. We were entertained — we admit it.  But we were not impressed.

Speed-the-Plow at the Barrymore Theater (NYC) — a review

Mamet

(November 2, 2008) We left the Barrymore Theater last Friday evening with a renewed appreciation for David Mamet, but with growing doubts about straight theater on Broadway.

Speed-the-Plow (written in 1988) is one of two Mamet plays currently on Broadway. The other is American Buffalo (written in 1976); each play deals with betrayal of a business partner and a deal that goes bad. Speed-the-Plow is a compact and extremely fast-paced play, three acts without an intermission. Even though our show started ten minutes late (at 8:10 p.m.), its three actors were taking their bows before 9:30 p.m. In fact, Speed-the-Plow is short enough that the producers should have considered making it the first part of a double bill with Mamet’s one-act play Bobby Gould in Hell, based on one of the three characters in Speed-the-Plow. We would have liked to have seen it.

Jeremy Piven

David Mamet plays generally leave you with a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, so we knew the high spirits in the first act were too good to be true. The first character we meet, Bobby Gould (Jeremy Piven; his picture here is from a movie role he had several years ago), is a Hollywood producer whose job is to identify film projects that will make money, regardless of artistic merit or social value. He’s doing well enough to have authority to green-light film projects with budgets under $10 million, but not well enough, apparently, to have a decent office.

Raul Esparza

Into his office roars Bobby’s old friend Charlie Fox (Raul Esperanza), a lower-ranking producer at the same studio, who has, in a manner of speaking, just won the lottery. One of Hollywood’s biggest action stars has just read a script Charlie gave him (for a cliche of a prison buddy movie), loved it, and told Charlie he wants to do it with Charlie and his studio. Testosterone washes all over the stage as the two plan to present Charlie’s coup to the boss and fantasize about how rich they’re going to be.

Elisabeth Moss

Trouble enters when Bobby calls in his temporary secretary, Karen (Elisabeth Moss) to get them coffee and a lunch reservation. Bobby and Charlie brag to her about how they find projects like the prison film that will put butts in the seats, and how they give the thumbs-down to movie proposals based on artsy books like one that his boss, the head of the studio, has just agreed to give a “courtesy read.”

The book, “The Bridge,” is in fact a pretentious, oqaque, philosophical novel about radiation and the end of the world. (We know it’s unreadable because Charlie and Bobby read passages from time to time; one thinks of Thomas Pynchon.) Bobby and his boss both know that it has no potential as a movie. Looking for a pretext to get Karen into bed, Bobby passes off the job of reading this ghastly abomination to Karen and asks her to bring him a review at his apartment that evening. He fails to anticipate (as the audience does) that she will fall under the book’s spell and use her sexual power to persuade him to recommend “The Bridge” to the studio head instead of the sure-hit prison buddy movie.

I suppose Speed-the-Plow is hard to act. I suppose any David Mamet play is hard to act. Mamet doesn’t expect actors in his plays to take turns speaking their lines; in Mamet-speak, characters are constantly interrupting each other, speaking in sentence fragments, and talking at the same time — much like real-life conversation.

Unfortunately these actors, especially Jeremy Piven and Elisabeth Moss, don’t quite get it down. They can’t seem to get past the notion that they shouldn’t trample on one other’s lines, even though that’s just what Mamet intended them to do. The result is dialogue that’s ever so slightly choppy.

We blame it on television. The program indicates that Jeremy Piven’s resume is mostly in television and the movies, even though his pedigree is in stage acting (here’s a good piece on Piven in the N.Y. Times); currently, it seems, he’s in an HBO show called Entourage (we’d never heard of it), while Elisabeth Moss is apparently in another cable TV show called Mad Men (we hadn’t heard of it, either). Not surprisingly, Piven and Moss act like television actors, going for cheap laughs, yelling their lines instead of projecting them, content to be johnny-one-notes, playing to the camera instead of the theater audience. (See this post on why Emsworth doesn’t watch television.) Sadly, the audience at our show seemed to like them that way.

Not so with Raul Esparza, a fine actor who shows considerable acting range even within the confines of so manic a character as Charlie Fox. This was the second time we’ve seen Esparza, who played Lenny in a revival of Harold Pinter’s nightmarish The Homecoming that we saw last winter; we liked him even better this time. We were grateful for this chance; we don’t get to Broadway often enough to be able to see its best actors in multiple roles.

Fortunately, the play’s strong enough to compensate for the shortcomings of this cast. For as long as Emsworth can remember, people have pretended to despise Hollywood’s commercialism and its unwillingness to make “meaningful” movies. None of this hypocrisy for Mamet! Who else would have the nerve to write a play in which a character is presented with a choice between a commercial hit and a “art” film — and in which the moral choice is the commercial hit? Or in which the character who champions the “art film” turns out to be the real “whore”? There’s more substance in Spiderman than in a dozen critically praised independent “art” films that we’ve long since forgotten.

Piven and Esparza

In Speed-the-Play, Bobby and Charlie spend a good of time calling themselves “whores” for commercial Hollywood, reflecting the ambivalence of American society toward capitalism.  We don’t think David Mamet himself is so ambivalent; the published edition of the play begins with a quotation from Thackeray’s novel Pendennis: “Which is the most reasonable, and does his duty best: he who stands aloof from the struggle of life, calmly contemplating it, or he who descends to the ground, and takes his part in the contest?” Bobby and Charlie weren’t giving themselves enough credit.

Twice during the play Jeremy Piven, as Bobby Gould, turned to the audience to advise us that “there are no mavericks” — a topical reference to the Republican national ticket and Tuesday’s election day. He got his laugh each time (it wasn’t especially funny), but at the expense of the play’s momentum.

What does “Speed-the-Plow” refer to? There’s an explanation from David Mamet himself in the Wikipedia entry for the play.

UPDATE (January 15, 2009): By the unlikeliest of chances (we never, ever watch morning TV), our television came on this morning just as Diane Sawyer of Good Morning America was announcing her next guest, which happened to be Jeremy Piven.  Piven had apparently agreed to let Sawyer cross-examine him about his deserting this production of Speed the Plow several weeks ago, with a couple of months to go in the run. Piven’s people had claimed he was suffering from mercury poisoning from a constant diet of fish and was unable to go on with the show; to our surprise, his departure got publicity not only in the New York tabloids but also in the national press.

Sawyer pointed out to Piven (a) that several medical experts she had consulted found it unlikely that he would suffer any noticeable impairments from the levels of mercury reported, (b) that it was widely rumored that Piven’s real problem was late-night partying, and (c) that none of the show’s producers or investors believed Piven’s story for a minute.

But Piven stuck to his guns and said that his “illness” had frustrated a lifelong dream to perform Mamet on Broadway. Like a well-coached politician charged with scandal, he told Sawyer that he’d been frustrated that he hadn’t been able to get his story across till now. He warned the audience earnestly about the dangers of eating fish. Uh-huh.

William H. Macy, an actor we greatly admire, has now taken Piven’s place in the cast. Wish we’d seen him instead of Piven.

The Tempest at the Classic Stage Company (NYC) — a review

A business trip to New York City this week gave Emsworth a chance to see Mandy Patinkin in a production of The Tempest at the the Classic Stage Company, a small, no-frills theater in the East Village. 

It seems that my twenty-ish children already know Patinkin from his role as Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, a movie that a better father would perhaps have watched with them.  (The picture to the right shows him in that movie with Andre the Giant and Wallace Shawn.) But personally, I hadn’t seen Patinkin at all, not in Evita or Sunday in the Park with George, not as a concert singer, and certainly not on television.  No matter.  For all his work in musical theater, Patinkin is a remarkably good Shakespearean actor, and it was a privilege to see him as Prospero. 

This show (directed by Brian Kulick) gets off to a bit of a slow start with a meandering and not especially terrifying shipwreck scene.  But it picks up as soon as Patinkin and Elisabeth Waterston (as Miranda) take the stage.  Their first scene together, of course, consists mostly of a long-overdue and somewhat long-winded explanation by Prospero of how he and Miranda came to be marooned on their island.  Patinkin kept our attention throughout this well-directed scene and throughout the play.

I couldn’t help, however unfairly, comparing this Tempest to the one we saw at the Stratford Festival in 2005 with the late William Hutt as Prospero (see picture below).  This week we saw a low-tech, low-budget production in a barely adequate performance space, while the Stratford show (in a first-class theater many times larger) went first class on all aspects of costuming and special effects.  And Patinkin’s supporting cast, taken as a whole, simply doesn’t compare to the repertory company at the Stratford.  Nor could any other Prospero measure up to William Hutt.

But Patinkin shares with Hutt a musical, modulated speaking voice, excellent timing (and the use of expressive pauses), and a talent for making Shakespeare’s language immediately intelligible.  Patinkin, who is 55, is of course a far more lively Prospero than Hutt was at the age of 85 — and he sings! 

Nyambi Nyambi is a particularly sympathetic Caliban with some of the play’s best lines; I enjoyed his performance very much. The energetic drunken scenes with Stefano (Steven Rattazzi), Trinculo (Tony Torn), and Caliban are nicely done. Angel Desai is a spunky (if surprisingly pudgy) Ariel with an unrequited longing for her master. I realized during this show that both Miranda and Ariel ask the same question: “Do you love me?” — Miranda of Ferdinand, and Ariel of Prospero.

I avoided the reviews before seeing this new Tempest, but now I’ve seen The New Yorker’s snide comment that “Patinkin doesn’t seem to connect with the other actors or with the text.” 

Not connected with the text! He understood and reveled in each noble line! As to his connection “with the other actors,” The New Yorker seems to be knocking Patinkin for playing the character that Shakespeare created.  Antonio wouldn’t have been able to usurp Prospero’s dukedom in the first place if Prospero hadn’t been an introvert who detached himself from the citizens of Milan to devote himself to his books. 

Moreover, Prospero’s relationship to every character except Miranda, from the “shipwrecked” noblemen of Naples and Milan to the spirit Ariel and the Caliban, who are both his slaves — is one of control and manipulation. In several scenes, Prospero merely stands at the edge of the action, invisible to the other characters though making comments to the audience, watching to see how his schemes unfold. How surprising should it be that any Prospero should seem “unconnected” from other characters? Except MIranda: we felt from the start that Patinkin’s Prospero and his Miranda had a warm and affectionate relationship.