The Tempest Cultural Appropriation Analysis

On November 10th, the Brown/Trinity MFA actors, of the class of 2017, came to JMW and performed The Tempest by William Shakespeare, for the entire school in the gymnasium. The theatre majors had also previously seen Romeo and Juliet performed by the same class about a month ago. Each year, the MFA program features one area of social discussion for each play; for The Tempest, they covered cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation is a sociological concept, which views the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of a different culture as a largely negative phenomenon (Wikipedia). In an effort to highlight this topic, the director, Kyle Vincent Terry made the enslaving of Caliban, David Samuel, and Ariel, Rachel Clausen, prominent …show more content…
The acting in the play was adequate, definitely better than in their previous production of Romeo and Juliet. In this production it seemed there was evident trust among the actors. In Romeo and Juliet, the actors seemed very hesitant and unsure of their motives, while in this production, the trust was clear and the acting improved because of it. In general, the leads were not as convincing as I hoped they would be, they were decent, but were not standouts. That being said, there was one actress who truly played her part, Rachel Clausen, who played the part of the spirit Ariel. Clausen seemed to genuinely embody her character and it was clear that during the rehearsal process, she found someone way to empathize with Ariel. For instance, when Ariel asked Prospero, if he loved her, the audience could see and feel the questioning dread Ariel was feeling, this only could have been accomplished if Clausen herself fully understood her character inside and out, which she did. In addition to the powerful empathy Clausen was able to convey, she also had a clear great-established relationship with Prospero, which was evident by the amount of trust Ariel had in him. When the two spoke it wasn't uneasy nor did their

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