Red Hen presents the second installment of our reading series "Fluid" at The Edison. Featuring Nicelle Davis' two-part play, "Caliban," sequel to "The Tempest."
Free! (two drink minimum)
Ages 21+, sophisticated dress code enforced
Nicelle Davis’s latest collection of poems, In the Circus of You, is available from Rose Metal Press, and The Walled Wife is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in Spring 2016. She is Editor at Large of The Los Angeles Review and has taught poetry at Youth for Positive Change, MHA, and with Volunteers of America in their Homeless Youth Center. She is the recipient of the 2013 AROHO retreat 9 3/4 Fellowship.
"On the Island of Caliban" is a brand new play-in-verse continuing William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Focusing on the character of Caliban, this modern language deconstruction of the bards classic text, presents an “everyman” Caliban for today’s society; Caliban tackles universal experience by exploring the realities of what left him/her alone on the island.
Split into five separate personae, and played by many genders, ages, or races, Caliban, is kept company by malevolent stage directions, Ariel’s chastising severed-tongue, and his personal revelations. In the disillusioned states of dreaming, memory, and illness, Caliban discovers the truth and himself/herself.
Rounding out the cast of players is a withered forgetful Prospero, a silenced domesticated suburban Ariel, and a tortured Miranda—all longing for something other than what they bargained for.
Through emails, mixed media, imaginative design, and poetics, "On the Island of Caliban" violently thrashes after The Tempest to look unflinchingly at the damage left after the Shakespeare’s storm.