Nadien Chu stars in The Tempest, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Ryan Parker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The play that launches the 35th annual Freewill Shakespeare Festival this week — destined for four outdoor community league hockey rinks — is full of strange transformations.

The Tempest, one of Shakespeare’s late-period “romances,” begins with the magical conjuring of a violent storm at sea and an orchestrated shipwreck. A mysteriously powerful magus banished from his rightful European kingdom has drawn his enemies — and us — to the spell-bound island he rules. “My high charms work…. They now are in my power.”

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And speaking of exile, that’s the situation of the festival itself, evicted from its home on the Heritage Amphitheatre stage in Hawrelak Park for three-YEAR renos (a stunning failure of creativity on the part of the City).

In the gender-crossing production, Freewill’s single offering this summer, directed by Dave Horak and opening Thursday at the Crestwood community league, the island is a hockey rink with its built-in perimeter, and the audience on three sides. And Prospero, the island boss, is a woman. Nadien Chu, who leads the nine-actor cast as Prospera, says “I wouldn’t call (this version) contemporary, or historical…. It’s a magical liminal space where something has to happen around forgiveness and family.”

Among the many interpretations The Tempest has attracted in four centuries, the most popular in contemporary times has been tuning it to colonialist themes, the enslavement by white Euros of the local Indigenous population. As Chu explains, this production isn’t one of them. “We are leaning into concern about the environment.” The oceans are filling with trash, and Prospera’s island is “one of the huge patches of floating garbage … plastic bags, nets lost by fishers, water bottle, cans…. That’s what we’re floating on.” And it has, she says, “mystical properties.”

Chu thinks of thinks of Station Eleven (the TV adaptation of the Emily Saint John Mandel novel), and its depiction of the rusted-out post-apocalyptic world through which a nomadic company of Shakespearean players travels.

Stephanie Bahniuk’s costumes are cued by that thought, says Chu. “A major part of my costume is a great big plastic bag.” At a fitting last week, she noticed a Save-On label,” product placement at its most equivocal. Prospero “has made herself the queen of the great garbage patch.”

If the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream take a forest as their playground (“I picture ancient trees, a subtropical rain forest, an island near Tofino!” says Chu), “the kind of magic in The Tempest feels more air-borne — the wind, the sky, the water.”

Brett Dahl and Nadien Chu in Twelfth Night, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

Of late Chu, as it’s turned out, has made something of a specialty of playing women in gender-switched male roles. At Freewill last summer, for example, she was that irrepressible carouser and all-night party animal Toby Belch in Twelfth Night. She was both the good duke and the bad usurper duke in Daryl Cloran’s Beatles-inflused As You Like It, in its Theatre Calgary incarnation this past season (with the Grand Theatre in London, Ont. to come next season). Most recently, she was in charge of the unruly sword-happy musketeer squad as the bossy, exasperated Mme de Treville instead of the usual Monsieur, in Cloran’s Citadel production of The Three Musketeers.

Heck, even Lady Bracknell, the formidable dragon lady and social arbiter of The Importance of Being Earnest, which opened the Citadel’s season, is just as often played by men as women. Pursed lips and a ferocious glare know no gender prescriptions.

Prospero has been played by women, to be sure — Vanessa Redgrave and Martha Henry among the stars actors — but usually as a man. When Prospero is a woman, Chu thinks, the central relationship of The Tempest changes from father-daughter to mother-daughter. “And they’re different.”

And perhaps, when both are women, the important sisterly relationship between Prospera and her usurping sister duchess (Jessy Ardern) changes too. Is Prospera driven by the spirit of revenge? “There’s a huge sense of betrayal, a fracture inside the family…. What has saved Prospera is her child, and her hopes for the child…. I guess at the heart of it is love, love for her family, whatever axes there are to grind. Despite the stormy weather, the garbage, the global warming….”

“A lot of baggage comes with these roles,” Chu says of Shakespeare. “People come to the show with an idea of what they want to see, what Romeo and Juliet is like, who Hamlet should be. And it’s fun, delicious!, to play against expectation and stereotype…. Let’s just see what would happen: it’s such an interesting investigation. And I’m always really curious!”

“Is (the play) different if Toby Belch is a woman? What kind of judgment do we bring to it if she’s a woman?” In the case of that unruly drunkard, Chu laughs that someone compared her to the Ab Fab women, “the way you’re working inside clown energy. “

Though The Tempest was ”never one of my favourites,” Chu says she’s found it fascinating, “so much fun to be immersed in and investigate…. I’m one of those actors who research and research — the more I’ve learned about it. The whole piece has such a strong heartbeat to it. It has a pulse that some of the others don’t. It resonates in the body differently — on a cellular level.”

She’s excited to be taking the play to neighbourhoods, “to meet the audience in a different way…. You can come out of your house, cross the street, and hang out.”

“It’s like the old days,” she laughs. “You get out of the buggy and ‘let’s sing! let’s connect!’ There’s music and art and stories…. We’re all in post-COVID recovery. And we’re going out to travel, meet folks!”

Freewill Shakespeare Festival artistic director Dave Horak talks about this year’s edition of the festival, and The Tempest, in On The Road Again, a 12thnight PREVIEW.

PREVIEW

The Tempest

Theatre: Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Directed by: Dave Horak

Starring: Nadien Chu, Chariz Faulmino, Meegan Sweet, Brett Dahl, Hal Wesley Rogers, Troy O’Donnell, Jessy Ardern, Melissa MacPherson, Cody Porter

Running: June 20 to July 14

Where: Crestwood Community League June 20 to 23; Kenilworth Community League June 25 to 30; Lessard Community League July 2 to 7; Sherbrooke Community League July 9 to 14.

Tickets: tickets.freewillshakespeare.com.