Review: "Tempest Tossed" Intimately Adapts Its Shakespearean Namesake

Tempest Tossed

Adapted from William Shakespeare's The Tempest

Directed by Janina Picard

Music Direction and original music by Flavio Gaete

Presented by New Place Players at Casa Duse

16 Prospect Park West, Brooklyn, NYC

March 5-26, 2026

L to R (foreground): Clara Tristan, Craig Bacon, Anna Bikales

It can be challenging to convey to a contemporary audience the interactive, immersive nature of the early modern theaters where the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were performed. The notion that the play is something taking place in a different universe from the audience, behind that “fourth wall” as it were, is deeply engrained. However, New Place Players’ chamber adaptation of The Tempest, Tempest Tossed, performed in the intimate townhouse parlor of Casa Duse, brilliantly bodies forth this key feature of the early modern theater in a production that is at once historical restoration and contemporary revision of what has often been regarded as Shakespeare’s farewell to the theater.

Named in honor of the Italian actress Eleanora Duse and the site of performances by greats like Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti, Casa Duse’s cozy parlor, decorated with the autographed photos of opera and theater stars contemporary to Duse and other memorabilia, proves the perfect space in which to reimagine a play that is domestic at its core, about families and forgiveness. Framed with an invented backstory for Sycorax (Anna Bikales), the mother of the native-to-the-island Caliban who is only fleetingly referenced in the original play, the production not only develops a connection between her and Prospero (Craig Bacon) - she is a healer from Algiers who was banished to the island because her powers were no match for an outbreak of the plague in Prospero’s Milan - but it also makes her an authorizing voice in the play’s conclusion, blessing the marriage of Ferdinand (Blake Brundy) and Miranda (Clara Tristan) at the same time as she forgives Prospero for his treatment of her. While not softening the original language used to describe Caliban that has made the play the subject of so much post-colonial criticism (he is still the “thing of darkness” who was subjugated by Prospero), this revision integrates the non-Italian figures more intentionally into the play’s resolution by giving Sycorax voice and authority.

The production is carried by its consistently strong cast, all of whom also contribute to Flavio Gaete’s musical score, itself a highlight of the production. Jacquie Bonnet stands out as Ariel, showcasing the range of the character, who is both energetic, mischievous spirit and subservient to Prospero, while also using the space to its fullest potential in engaging and integrating the audience into her performance. Her singing of some of Ariel’s most identifiable songs from the original play, “Full fathom five” and “Where the bee sucks,” also demonstrated the creativity of Gaete’s music in using some original text to new music. Blake Bundy as both Caliban and Ferdinand not only shows his skill as an actor but also serves to blur the boundaries between two characters whom the original play wants us to think of as quite different, fitting with the integration of Sycorax into the play’s resolution.

In her performance of Agnes Shakespeare in the recent film Hamnet, Jessie Buckley movingly portrays being an audience member viewing Hamlet, a play thematically if not narratively connected to her recent loss of her son. The intimacy of the theater in the film, in which Buckley stands right in front of the stage, reacting audibly to the play, is of course a recreation of the space of the public theaters of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. But it is also a reminder of the role the audience plays in the production itself, part of the world of the play and informing the performance through its response to the actors. The parlor of Casa Duse is not the Globe, but in Tempest Tossed it serves as a fertile ground to reproduce this important if elusive condition of early modern theater, one that extends beyond the boundaries of the play itself as cast and audience alike mingle after the show, the community that together creates this winning production.

-Stephanie Pietros