TempestPre

Pairing off

By H. Lee Murphy

Back in the summer of 1995, when the Borealis Theatre Co. in Aurora was staging its fifth annual Fox Valley Shakespeare Festival, the group hoped to present the classic pairing of "Hamlet" with the Paul Rudnick comedy "I Hate Hamlet." But another group was staging the Rudnick show in Chicago that season and the rights weren't available. "Hamlet" went on without its alter ego.

Now, six years later, the festival is finally getting around to "I Hate Hamlet." This time it's paired with Shakespeare's "The Tempest,"
which opens on July 13 and runs until Aug. 5. Jeffrey Baumgartner, Borealis's producing artistic director, typically directs at least one play each summer at the festival that he conceived and has managed from the start, but this year he's stepped back into acting roles in each production instead. Catherine Palfenier, the associate artistic director of Borealis, is directing "I Hate Hamlet" while a guest director, Chuck Hudson from Seattle, is staging "The Tempest."

Hudson knows "The Tempest" well. He directed the play with his own company, the Immediate Theatre in Seattle, in 1999 and then reprised it last year with Immediate. Hudson is a diverse talent. He graduated from Marcel Marceau's International School of MimeDrama in Paris --one of only three American-born graduates -- and later toured with Marceau through the U.S. He has worked with numerous opera companies, including the Minnesota Opera, where he directed Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" in March in Minneapolis.

Expect a "Tempest" with vigorous movement -- Hudson was a competitive gymnast as a teen. One of the challenges for any production is the opening-scene shipwreck in a loud, clamorous storm at sea. Most companies launch into a fireball of special effects to fulfill Shakespeare's vision, but Hudson plans a very different approach. "The movement of our actors on stage will create the storm," he promises. "Their sounds will be the only sounds of the storm that we hear. It will be very stylized."