Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest

Celebrated poet and activist Aimé Césaire strikingly adapts Shakespeare’s Jacobean play through a postcolonial lens. The characters and plot are largely unchanged. Prospero conjures a violent storm to drive his enemy’s ship ashore on the island on which he is exiled with his daughter. Césaire sets the story specifically on an island in the Caribbean and depicts Caliban and Ariel as black slaves to Prospero. Their opposing voices echo Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

Written in the tumultuous 1960s, A Tempest uses intelligence, wit, and beauty to confront complex intersections of race, power, and anti-imperialism.

This staged reading is directed by Lanise Antoine Shelley, the Artistic Director of Chicago’s House Theatre and the 2021 Drama League Classical Directing Fellow.