The Tempest and Cycles of History
What is Karla Boos’ The Tempest? We know it was Shakespeare’s last work; why is it often chosen by theater artists as their own?
For Boos, it’s about history, history endlessly repeating itself. If it's not too grandiose to say so, theater artists make theater to decode human behavior, and behind that impulse is a wish to see evolution – human beings becoming better-behaved.
In The Tempest, Boos sees an amazingly concise representation of the cycles that define history. Revenge plots. Strikingly similar behavior by the oppressed turned oppressor. At the end of one’s work, or perhaps life, one wants to say “is that all there is?” Shakespeare gave his last protagonist a shocking, surprising action at the end of Act V to say… maybe.
Kott figures in Quantum Theatre’s history by suggesting Tadeusz Rozewicz’s play The Trap, about Franz Kafka, and was amazingly available as Quantum created our version of the play in 1992.
What does Jan Kott say about The Tempest that resonates so intensely with Boos? That it offers ‘fragile – though stubborn – hope’.
That is what Boos wants to offer. She has strived always for lyricism as a needed balm and finds great beauty in our landscape and in the bodies, minds, and souls of her collaborators - actors, designers, technicians.
So: hope cloaked in beauty. That’s what she wants The Tempest to offer here at last, trapped though we may be by the cycles of history.
