By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,/ Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not….” The Tempest, Act III, scene 2

The Freewill Shakespeare Festival has taken its game resident playwright on the road before now, and even to the Fringe three years ago. Last summer Shakespeare’s Edmonton Airbnb was a beautiful hand-crafted spiegeltent at the EXPO Centre, with alternating  Freewill productions of Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night.

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This summer, light on his feet as always, Shakespeare is on the move, outdoors, to four different Edmonton locations, with a single play. In this their 35th annual edition, the Freewill Shakespeare Festival — booted from their home on the Heritage Amphitheatre in Hawrelak Park by three-YEAR renos — is taking their ever-resilient resident playwright to four Edmonton community leagues, a week in each, starting June 20. At Crestwood, Kenilworth, Lessard, Sherbrooke, we’ll be seeing Dave Horak’s production of The Tempest, Shakespeare’s strange and wonderful late-period “romance,” close at hand in that most quintessentially Edmonton of venues, an outdoor hockey rink.

So, in the summer of 2024, a theatre company is in exile, doing a play set on a mysterious island, over which a magus in exile presides. We’ll be sharing Prospero’s island up close — actually Prospera’s, since Nadien Chu (Lady Toby in last summer’s Twelfth Night) is taking on the role in Horak’s gender-crossing nine-actor production. And we’ll be in a place that echoes with “the sounds and sweet airs” of generations of face-offs and slapshots. “Hyper-local!” says Freewill’s artistic director. “Essentially in our audience’s back yard.” And the performances will come with Freewill’s traditional festive trimmings, he says, “tents, food trucks, a beer garden, popcorn, merch….” Tickets are already on sale (see below).

As Horak explains, the actors, mic’d, will be centre ice. “We’ll be setting up a platform stage,” a thrust configuration that will have the audience on three sides. The seating capacity will be around 350 or 400, about twice the spiegeltent audience size. “We’ll build some bleachers, and you can bring your own chairs, blankets, picnics. “I find I like directing in an intimate setting,” he says. “And our audience wants to be outside.”

Fresh from directing U of A theatre students in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Horak picked The Tempest as the sole offering for this year’s festival, he says, first because it hasn’t been staged by Freewill for 14 years. (the 2012 production, which alternated with Julius Caesar, starred John Wright as Prospero and Amber Borotsik as Ariel). The play’s magical mysteries, including the Act III masque, a banquet that appears out of thin air, are “visually fun. Lots of music, huge puppets … we can really take advantage of being outdoors.”

As for the meteorological subtext of the title (fingers crossed, everyone) at a festival that always credits Mother Nature as “ambience director” in the program, “none of the four community leagues has an indoor space.” So just in case, Freewill is making plans for “an emergency venue” in the school gyms that are next door to the community league hockey rinks. “We can make this work,” he says.

The Tempest, elusive, weird, and fascinating (not least because it might be the last play Shakespeare wrote solo), has invited interpretations of every stripe over the centuries. Many contemporary Tempests embrace colonial themes: an island colonized, and its indigenous inhabitants enslaved, by Europeans. Horak’s production, he says, will lean instead into “the environmental…. The global North has encroached on this magical island … now ruined by waste and garbage.”     

“It invites big costumes, big character choices,” says Horak, a big fan of the late Shakespeare romances in all their strangeness. “Like The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest is not in a real place… These aren’t realistic plays; Shakespeare is a poet; he uses metaphor.” Locating Shakespeare plays in a very particular, identifiable place or time, seductive as that can be for a director with a concept, is often reductive rather than expansive, Horak has found.

Shakespeare doesn’t identify the island in any way in The Tempest, which is one of its manifold attractions. “And because we’re outdoors and in a rink, we’re on this island all together, surrounded,” says Horak. “I hope it will feel like that…. The Tempest doesn’t change location, and the time is quite linear.”

He hopes Freewill will be back with two alternating productions next year. But in the current climate, battered by both the lengthy closure of Hawrelak Park and the post-pandemic malaise, “we’re being super-cautious.” Calgary’s outdoor Shakespeare festival, a year older than Freewill is cancelled altogether this summer. Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach has reduced its programming.

“We’re doing the best we can,” says Horak. “One thing I’ve noticed is that Shakespeare is super-resilient. And so is this company…. I take some optimism from that.”

The Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s production of The Tempest, directed by Dave Horak, runs June 20 to July 14 in four locations: 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. The cast, a mixture of veterans and newcomers, includes Nadien Chu, Chariz Faulmino, Meegan Sweet, Brett Dahl, Hal Wesley Rogers, Troy O’Donnell, Jessy Ardern, Melissa McPherson, Cody Porter.

Full schedule at freewillshakespeare.com. Tickets are now on sale: tickets.freewillshakespeare.com.