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In 'The Tempest: Esta Isla Es Mia,' Freefall Theatre merges Shakespeare and Cuba

 
Eric Davis wrote and stars in Freefall Theatre’s “The Tempest: Esta Isla Es Mia,” an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”
Eric Davis wrote and stars in Freefall Theatre’s “The Tempest: Esta Isla Es Mia,” an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”
Published May 19, 2015

ST. PETERSBURG

The set for the next production at Freefall Theatre includes 9 tons of sand on the stage. But don't expect a day at the beach.

The Tempest: Esta Isla Es Mia is an adaptation of one of William Shakespeare's greatest plays. Eric Davis, Freefall's artistic director, wrote the one-man play and will star in it. This will be the first one-person play presented on Freefall's main stage.

"It's Shakespeare's play, and then there's another story running parallel to the story in The Tempest," Davis says. "We were thinking about what would be an interesting piece to do as a one-man Shakespeare. The Tempest stood out because it's all about these themes of exile, banishment, solitude, about this island floating out in the sea."

The play's parallel story, set in the 1990s, has to do with a particular island: Cuba. Davis says, "Once I made that connection to Latin America, and to Cuba specifically, it developed a lot of resonance, that whole theme of a postcolonial world."

Davis decided to set the play in Cuba long before relations with the United States began to improve recently. He chose Cuba for the setting, "because of our community's connections to Cuba. We have this whole vibrant Cuban community here, and of course we're so close to Cuba."

The play's sole character, Yuri, is a Cuban theater teacher who decides to produce The Tempest, a play that he loves, with his students, using his own translation.

"The production comes to be viewed as subversive and dangerous, so there's a lot of political pressure on him," Davis says. "He leaves the country and tries to make his way to the United States on this small boat, which is where it starts to parallel The Tempest," with its story of Prospero, a deposed duke with magical powers, stranded on a remote island.

Yuri "sort of makes it," Davis says, coming ashore on a tiny island in the Florida Keys and interacting with the people who live there. "It doesn't exactly mirror The Tempest; it's more like the characters and the different events echo it."

In his research for writing the play, Davis discovered a pair of well-known essays about The Tempest by two noted Latin American intellectuals. Both essays address the play as an exploration of postcolonial Latin America by focusing on two of its more unusual characters.

José Enrique Rodó's essay is about Ariel, the powerful spirit who is Prospero's servant, as a symbol for postcolonial peoples. Roberto Fernández Retamar's is on Caliban, Prospero's resentful, part-human slave. "Retamar is directly responding to Rodó, saying Ariel is not us. Caliban is us," Davis says.

All of it, he says, ties into something Cuban national hero José Martí wrote that connects the DNA of the play to the Latin American Experience: "To trade masters is not to be free."

Contact Colette Bancroft at cbancroft@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8435.