Good afternoon!

I have a feeling a recap may be in order. I am writing, in these “Going Out” series, about seeing live performances, specifically because that is something I have only rarely done in my lifetime, particularly over the past decade. I don’t think that I am doing anything particularly laudable in this, and I don’t assume that I have any particularly valuable insights when I do: the exercise — both the going out, and the writing about it — is more for me than for the reader, who I expect is both more experienced than me as a showgoer and equally if not better positioned to draw their own conclusions about the worthiness of the shows I’m seeing.

I skipped December for two reasons: because the December show I had bought a ticket for landed on a weekend when I was knocked out with illness, and because I spent the bulk of the month visiting family in Houston, where I reverted to being even more of a homebody than usual. I toyed with the idea of writing an entry on attending the Christmas midnight Mass with my parents, but ultimately felt that that would be too personal and not really in the spirit of the project.

But I’ve been back in Chicago for a month now, and on Friday evening I trudged through a sudden snowfall to Theater Wit on Belmont to see a play called Prospera, thanks entirely to the Chicago Reader’s coverage (I am trying to be better about actually reading through the Reader’s email digests instead of automatically archiving them). I was one of the first arrivals, so I purchased a drink to kill time/warm up, but even by showtime there weren’t many of us; in the end, the audience wasn’t quite double the number of performers.

Which meant that the small black-box theater, with its two rows of seating, was the most intimate experience I’ve had yet in this series. The “sci-fi reimagining of Shakespeare’s Tempest” was gripping even at this miniature scale, with the performers within arm’s reach. Tiffany Keane Schaeffer’s script did a good job rearranging Babylon 5-style technobabble into Shakespearean declamatory phrasing, and the frequent use of flashbacks gave depth and nuance to a story that could have been incredibly dull in a more straightforward telling.

Reimagining Caliban as an aboriginal alien named Kai-Lune (played by Blake M. Hood in a defensive crouch, nearly always signing along with speech) was one thing; reimagining Ariel as an A.I. interface wearing the face of her genius inventor Prospera’s dead wife (Janice Rumschlag, creepily fawning as Ariel and refreshingly earnest as Sybil) is something else, and for my money the less successful of the two, especially when Ariel receives her usual freedom at the end.

But both of those threads still engaged with ideas about humanity, technology, truth, and meaning in a proper sci-fi manner; the central fulcrum of the story, Prospera’s relationship to her Machiavellian brother Andarin (Jacob Watson as the show’s Antonio analog) drags into mere soap opera, with muddy motivations and unconvincing reversals. In that, of course, it’s just following the original Tempest, where the Antonio plot is rote intrigue compared to the more compelling fantasy elements.

The most successful part of the show for me was the self-aware budding romance between Prospera’s daughter Miri (Izzi King) and Ensign Dax (Hayden Lane-Davis), where the self-important technobabble eased off for more universal banter, meet- and continued association-cutes, and physical comedy: King in particular really shines.

The single set, which with different lighting and projections could be a spaceship, Prospera’s lab, the wilds of Halcyra-3, a courtroom back on the homeworld of Roma, the all-consuming Wormhole Matrix, and several other locations besides, was extremely well executed and thoughtfully deployed. I loved watching all the little bits of business with props; only the plastic toys used for the laser weapons pulled me out of the suspended disbelief.

Stacy Lind as the title character underplayed both Prospera’s arrogance and her vulnerability, making it hard to either root for or against her — which might well be the ultimate point. She’s a tragic figure, undone by the hubris of thinking about systems rather than people, but she’s also, ultimately, right about everything. I’m not sure that a play concluding on the bittersweet triumph of technocratic solutioneering and the cosmic personhood of artificial intelligence is quite the match for the current moment it wants to be, but I had a grand time on the way to the destination.

Ultimately, the vibrancy and ambition on display here made me excited about seeing so much more theater, both from this company and throughout the rest of the city. February’s outing is already scheduled for this Friday; as usual, it will be a change of genre.

Tell you about it next time.