Lighting Up ‘The Tempest’

There’s something quite magical and yet weighty in the way in which Lights Up! Theatre Company has taken a firm toehold in the Santa Barbara youth theater scene – one that has never been sorely lacking in the first place. Theater stage and screen veteran Amy Love has parlayed her professional and teaching background into a conservatory and company that quickly captured the imagination of local kids and audiences with such rousing productions as Big Fish, Something Rotten, and several others, not only enduring the pandemic that began in the company’s infancy, but emerging with a strong following.

So it’s rather appropriate that Lights Up! is launching its sixth season with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the company’s third mounting of a work by the Bard (if you count Something Rotten), one of his late plays and a piece that contains a mélange of magic, mirth, mayhem, and meaty meanings in its tale of betrayal, love, magic, family, and revenge set on an island – a “theatrical flotsam of high emotion and dramatic situation on a storm tossed sea.” 

“The Tempest encapsulates so much of Shakespeare, and the play is an allegory of the way Shakespeare spun up his whole life of playwriting and inventing all these characters and situations and working out his loves and joys and personal demons through his writing,” said Love, a self-described Shakespeare fanatic. “He puts it all down at the end of The Tempest. What you get is a sense of his love for the act of being, of inspiration and creativity in the language, the characters and the situations. It’s some of his best writing. I know it’s a cliché, but it really does feel like a love letter to acting and theater and directing to me.”

The magic of the works is literal, in that Shakespeare abandons any notion of naturalistic drama, instead employing magical devices to conveniently put characters right where they are needed, and has the title character address the audience at the end of the play – “little Easter eggs of self-awareness” that tickle Love’s fancy.

Love also tweaks things a bit by casting a female in the lead, transforming the character from Prospero to Prospera. 

“I love the idea of examining the mother-daughter relationship, exploring what that would feel like,” Love said. “We’ve also changed the role of Antonio to Antonia, who is her usurping sister who has taken over the dukedom back in Milan. I really enjoy delving into the new ideas that can be explored with two powerful women, how the power struggle plays out at the end… Shakespeare is just full of endless ideas, themes, and emotions to explore. We have only scratched the surface.” 

Diving below the surface has come during the rehearsal process, where Love is making sure that the actors get a good training in Shakespeare. 

“We spent a lot of time on asking: what does this make you feel? If actors stand on stage and just speak beautiful Shakespearean words, but don’t connect it to universal emotions and motivations, then no one really knows what’s happening. So we instantly went about making sure that the actors knew how they felt about everything they were saying. You have to make it real for them so that they can make it real for the audience.”

Lights Up!’s Tempest also added some musical elements that depart from the usual Renaissance fare, including the actors singing sea shanties as they put the stage set together prior to curtain and original music by company musical director Jezreel “Jay” Real. 

The company is also concurrently rehearsing its other two productions for the season, which features Cole Porter’s Tony Award-winning Musical Anything Goes at The Marjorie Luke Theatre in February, and Footloose at the Lobero in May. 

Lights Up! Theatre Company presents The Tempest at Center Stage Theater December 14-15.

Visit https://centerstagetheater.org for tickets and more information.