The Tempest
2004-2005 Season
Illuminating the Present Through the Past
Director Kate Whoriskey Champions the Relevance of the Classics
LIZA HOLTMEIER
“The curious thing about directing a classical play,” says director Kate Whoriskey, “is that there's a dialogue between the past and the present. A director's job, then, is not just to do a play as it was done when it was written, but to have a discourse between the past and the present.”
Whoriskey is sitting in The Shakespeare Theatre's rehearsal hall following one of the first rehearsals for The Tempest . It's been an exhilarating but exhausting day focused on staging the opening scene: the violent, shipwrecking tempest. Now, leaning forward in her chair, Whoriskey is quiet and contemplative, discussing The Tempest 's own relevance to contemporary life.
“I am interested in a play about forgiveness, given the time that we are living in,” she says. “We are living in a very justice-oriented society, where there is a direct and justifiable action that you should take against someone who has wronged you. I think Prospero would have been completely justified in not forgiving his enemies … but in the end, he does. It reminds me of an essay by Jacques Derrida, who said that the act of forgiveness is an act of insanity, because when you ask for forgiveness, you are admitting that what you have done is irreparable.”
For the production, Whoriskey and her designers have made Prospero's island a fusion of African and Arab influences. They hope to explore the significant impact the Western world has on Africa and the Middle East, and to underscore the tensions, both political and personal, that exist between these cultures.
At the center of this exploration is Whoriskey's choice to cast Daoud Heidami, an Arab-American, as Caliban. Heidami first impressed Whoriskey at his audition—“He was the best person I saw read for the role,” Whoriskey says. “He avoided all the animalistic baggage that we tend to place on Caliban.”
Once he was cast, Whoriskey saw new avenues in which to explore the subject of colonialism and its ramifications in contemporary times.
“A central question when you're doing The Tempest is whether it's about colonialism or not,” Whoriskey says. “If you make the decision that it is about colonialism, then the next question is, ‘Who is Caliban?' In The Tempest , Caliban is called monstrous, vile, villainous. But is that Caliban or a colonizer's view of him?
“Over time, Caliban's portrayal has changed, grown sympathetic, because more complex interpretations are available in Shakespeare's text. There is a long history of African, African-American and ‘Third World' Calibans on stage, which started an important dialogue with this play… certain directors cast people of color in the role because they were interested in how colonial subjects are perceived. Black Calibans were attempts, and successful ones, at trying to reconsider this character and look at colonized, enslaved Africans differently. Still rooted in Shakespeare's words, Caliban was no longer simply evil, but a man with a just claim on this island. And now we are going with an Arab Caliban for very similar reasons. Right now, sadly, Arab communities are often perceived, perhaps marketed, as evil. We want to have this important dialogue with The Tempest and with our current, incredibly charged circumstances.”
Highly visual yet intensely personal, Whoriskey's style has developed through a variety of experiences. She first became interested in theatre while growing up in Massachusetts. In high school, she directed a play called Views of Vietnam , a production that exposed her to theatre's power to create a dialogue between past and present. The play, which used letters from Vietnam soldiers, was attended by residents of the local VA Hospital as well as the parents of the students performing, many of whom were former hippies.
“I'm sure the theatre piece was not very strong,” Whoriskey says, with a laugh, “but what happened between these two groups was really interesting.”
Whoriskey went on to get her undergraduate degree in directing from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. There she studied with Kevin Kuhlke, who emphasized principles of dance-theatre: space, shape and time. Kuhlke also taught her the importance of having a personal relationship to the text.
Following graduation, Whoriskey spent several years directing at smaller spaces in downtown New York, such as HERE, Tribeca Lab and for her alma mater, NYU. She then went on to American Repertory Theatre (ART) to study for a graduate degree through the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training in Cambridge.
While there, she met Robert Brustein, artistic director of ART. Impressed with both her visual imagination and her grasp of text, Brustein invited her to direct Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder at ART. In many ways, the production was a breakthrough for Whoriskey. It got her on “this whole classical journey,” she says, while verifying for her how relevant the classics could be.
It also led to future directing opportunities. After seeing The Master Builder , the artistic director from Seattle's Intiman Theatre invited Whoriskey to direct a production of Eugene Ionesco's The Chairs . The Seattle Times subsequently praised that production for its “unusually sensuous and whimsical texture” as well as its “pockets of tenderness and wonder.”
Since then, Whoriskey has continued to direct a string of classics—Eugene O'Neill's Desire under the Elms for Perseverance Theatre in Alaska, Ibsen's Lady from the Sea at Intiman Theatre, Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo at the Goodman Theatre, Antigone at South Coast Repertory and Regina Taylor's Drowning Crow , an adaptation of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull , also for the Goodman.
She also has developed a reputation for her ability to direct new works by living playwrights. Her production of Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel for South Coast Repertory was praised for its “emotional subtlety and visual acumen” ( San Diego Union-Tribune ), and led to her being chosen to direct Fabulation, or The Re-education of Undine for Playwrights Horizons.
Following The Tempest , Whoriskey returns to directing work by a living playwright for a production at New York's LAByrinth Theater Company. There, she will direct the world premiere of Massacre (Sing to Your Children) , a play by Jose Rivera, author of the screenplay for The Motorcycle Diaries .
The production will require that Whoriskey switch into a different directorial mindset.
“When directing a play by a living writer, I consider him or her the lead artist in the room,” Whoriskey explains. “My job is to interpret them. It's really important that they see a production that they wrote, or that the relationships are what they designed them to be. With classical material, as a director, you are really shaping the meaning more aggressively. You are pulling some themes forward while allowing other ones to be background.”
For The Tempest , that means using Shakespeare's story to illuminate humankind's ongoing search for mercy and forgiveness.
8/20/2005
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