Dismantling Prospero
Written by Tom Rowan
Directed Kevin Ray
Choreographed by Ai Toyoshima
Produced by Marty Goldin@ TBD Capital, LLC
155 First Avenue, Manhattan, NYC
August 24-September 7, 2025
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| Andy Start and Joshua Elijah Lewis. Photo by Kevin Ray. |
A storm is brewing in the Midwestern University Dance Department in Tom Rowan's timely and trenchant new production,
Dismantling Prospero. Set in the years immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic, the play follows veteran dance professor Griffin Bates (Andy Start) as he mounts a new ballet version of
The Tempest, putting wild waters into a proper roar. In a bold flourish of ego (and perhaps vaulting ambition) he casts himself as Prospero, transforming the rehearsal process into a battleground over artistry, authority, and the pressures of contemporary campus politics. In an era of bad faith questions, quick answers, and even quicker judgments,
Dismantling Prospero offers a measured and empathetic interrogation of what is often dismissed as mere cancel culture, unflinchingly wielding choreography, wit, and real dramatic heat.
The production embraces spare design befitting action centered on a campus ballet rehearsal. An empty floor encircled by chairs, dotted only with a few backpacks and totes, serves as studio, classroom, and performance space. The intimate round configuration leaves actors exposed and the audience complicit in every decision and misstep. A single music stand transforms into desk or piano as needed—this elegant simplicity keeps attention where it belongs: on bodies in motion and the language that animates them. Costume choices reinforce this focus. Dancers appear in practical, unadorned rehearsal gear, while Christina (Dana Segal), the campus diversity facilitator, wears a painfully familiar college-administration friendly jacket that marks her as institutional authority in form. Student dancer Jake (Jake Wallack) arrives in a “No Sniveling” T-shirt, a comic contradiction given how often his character breaks into tears (never in self-pity, but always as an outpouring of deeply felt emotional truth). These details ground the play in a recognizably collegiate environment while again maintaining audience focus on speech and movement.
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| Calista Jones, Edgar Eguia, Jake Wallack, and Monique Ward Lonergan. Photo by Kevin Ray |
Rowan's script is razor-sharp, layering inside-baseball ballet jokes with probing questions about appropriation and power. The comedy is precise, at once satiric and true to character, animated by truly stellar performances. Jake Wallack delivers a line about having enough “intersectionality to confuse a traffic cop” into one of the evening's best landed quips, delivering it with breezy bravado—both confident and ironically self-aware. The syllabus gag, when Sara (Calista Jones) mocks the casting by citing “Beginning Basic Masturbatory Improvisation for Non-movers” and Jake replies, “Interpretive Movement 101,” satirizes contemporary academic jargon while exposing anxieties about who counts as trained versus merely granted access (all while delivering the goods with joy and wit).
Monique Ward Lonergan provides excellent grounding as Emily, steadying the banter so jokes land as critique rather than mere ridicule. Joshua Elijah Lewis brings welcome humanity to Marcus, the role of the outsider; his presence transforms what might be a simple punchline about muscles into a portrait of a young man trying to belong and a probing inquiry into the realities and ubiquity of implicit bias.
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| Calista Jones and Candice Tiffany Gordon. Photo by Kevin Ray. |
At the center of the storm stands Andy Start's portrayal of Professor Griffin Bates-cum-Prospero. Start anchors the production with a performance that is simultaneously charismatic and pitiable. His paternalistic coaching, his decision to cast himself in the lead, and his increasing blindness to the consequences of his choices sharpen the play's investigation of authority. Start makes Griffin both believable as an artist who believes deeply in his vision and culpable for the harm that vision produces. It is this precarious balance (or imbalance) which forms the tumultuous heart of this drama.
Ai Toyoshima's choreography is visionary, moving the argument off the page and into the body. Sara's Ariel solo uses sashes as wings in a ritual informed by Indonesian forms, a sequence that reads as both homage and provocation, precisely the point Rowan wants to make about borrowing, credit, and the dangers of appropriation. Marcus's Caliban emerges as a physical surprise, a hybrid of wrestling and dance that refuses ballet's usual kinetic vocabulary. These pieces insist that choreography is never neutral; movement carries history and meaning, and this production doesn't shy away from that complication.
Most importantly,
Dismantling Prospero remains unafraid to be simultaneously funny and uncomfortable. Conversations about cultural appropriation, consent, and institutional accountability play out in full view of the audience, and what might have become one-note satire complicates the viewer's sympathies. Rowan resists tidy conclusions, leaving characters and audience alike to navigate the unsettled waters of a campus in crisis. The resultant production is one which both entertains and challenges its viewers, one that acknowledges ambiguity without resorting to platitude.
Dismantling Prospero asks difficult questions and trusts its audience to sit with the unease in the storm that follows.
-Noah Simon Jampol
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