A Stanford performance of Shakespeare’s classic play, The Tempest, is being attacked for sticking to the original story and not turning the play into a social justice-infused morality tale.
A Stanford Daily critic has accused the college’s Department of Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS) of “de-racializing” the play, condemning its actors and producers for not giving it a post-colonialist take.
According to Kai Kent (’17), The Tempest’s racial aspects set the tone of the story and the characters’ relationships to one another, and its critique of colonialist attitudes. Since 1950, the post-Colonialist take on The Tempest has become increasingly popular with the rise of social justice on campus, and adaptations like Aime Cesaire’s Une Tempete set the events in Haiti, rather than an island in the Mediterranean.
The Tempest revolves around Prospero, a sorcerer and the rightful Duke of Milan, exiled to live on a remote island with his daughter Miranda, and his adopted son, Caliban—a monster and the son of a powerful witch who lived there. Caliban is later enslaved after he tries to rape Miranda. As the story unfolds, Prospero plots his daughter’s return to status through manipulation and sorcery. At some point, Prospero conjures up a tempest that maroons a ship with the nobles who helped to depose him. His machinations allow him to clear his name, and bring about the redemption of all the characters, both good and bad.
It’s a classical romance, and not one with any intentional racial overtones.
The Stanford Daily critic claims that Caliban, the son of the witch Sycorax, “embodies the racialized ‘other’ against Europeans as sort of ambiguous combination of the white imagining of Native Americans and African slaves.” He also says that the European characters marooned on the island “imagine the utopian possibilities of an empty new world,” which isn’t at all how the story goes.
“I believe that in the modern context, there is an obligation when reproducing works which contain and perpetuate racism and justification of colonialism to contextualize them meaningfully and to make clear that we do not continue to support these values,” writes Kent. “The production itself was inexplicably racially problematic in ways that were not artistically or historically necessitated.”
The author also takes serious issue with the casting of The Tempest, calling out how the entire cast “was white or white-passing, including Caliban.” He also condemns Prospero’s enslavement of Caliban, despite the monster’s actions.
“The rhetoric of enslavement of a subhuman ‘other’ to protect a white woman’s purity certainly does not become de-racialized just because all of the actors can be perceived as white,” he says.
The author goes on to condemn the play for how two of its drunken characters, Trinculo and Stephano, perform a silly dance befitting of their personalities. He calls this “voguing,” an art form by “Black and Latinx queer communities.”
In other words, it’s cultural appropriation.
It’s worth noting that the actor who played Caliban in the play is a Jordanian student of Palestinian heritage, and that many members of the TAPS production come from diverse ethnic backgrounds. But when you’re woke about “white supremacy” in every aspect of life, I suppose anyone can be “white passing.”
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.