Untitling The Tempest
Over the course of the 2021/2022 professional and academic theatre season—the first season following the COVID-19 lockdowns—there were 37 productions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This number, which represents an almost 300% increase from productions in the 2019 season, seems shockingly out of place amidst the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and national calls for racial equity and reform amplified by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020. While The Tempest could be argued to be a celebration of the magic inherent in live theatre, it is also a deeply problematic text that celebrates colonialism and racial inequity, framing its single Black character as a violent, ignorant slave.
As a historian and director long fascinated by The Tempest (it was the very first Shakespeare play I ever read, at 10 years old), I’ve spent the years since 2022 examining the American attachment to the play. The Untitled Tempest Project is one part of that examination, and one that I have been fortunate enough to conduct not only with the students and faculty of WWU, but with guest artists Keith Hamilton Cobb and Jessica Burr. Cobb and Burr are founding members of Project Untitled, a company dedicated to radically reimagining the American theatre production process by providing, above all, the time and space necessary for deep, critical discussions of Shakespeare’s work. Just days after the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024, the Untitled Tempest team began a 40 hour intensive with Cobb and Burr in which we discussed, dissected, explored, staged, deconstructed and reconstructed four representative scenes from The Tempest, encouraged by Cobb to “express anything and everything that the selected scenes make you feel, think, understand, not understand, care, and despise.” In short, our charge was to bring to The Tempest a sense of urgent curiosity—showing up with what Burr referred to as our “unfathomable humanity.” In naming how Shakespeare’s words resonated with our own lives, and in beginning to imagine how we might use them to create a new dramatic reality, we engaged in a process of world building, imagining for ourselves a more equitable and just future. We voiced countless questions, tried out ideas, theories, and approaches, spoke in draft, listened to each other, and held space for as many understandings of the play as we could. As Stage Manager Wren Wilhelm commented, what we were ultimately doing was “giving language to gut reactions.”
From there, we made the play you’re about to see. It’s not The Tempest. It’s only really partially about The Tempest. Rather, it’s about how we understand ourselves as theatre artists, as Americans in 2025, and as people confronted with an ever-changing national landscape. It’s about confronting the difficult, the unspoken, and the unbearable, and about finding—or creating—space for hope and for joy.
Over the course of the 2021/2022 professional and academic theatre season—the first season following the COVID-19 lockdowns—there were 37 productions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This number, which represents an almost 300% increase from productions in the 2019 season, seems shockingly out of place amidst the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and national calls for racial equity and reform amplified by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020. While The Tempest could be argued to be a celebration of the magic inherent in live theatre, it is also a deeply problematic text that celebrates colonialism and racial inequity, framing its single Black character as a violent, ignorant slave.
As a historian and director long fascinated by The Tempest (it was the very first Shakespeare play I ever read, at 10 years old), I’ve spent the years since 2022 examining the American attachment to the play. The Untitled Tempest Project is one part of that examination, and one that I have been fortunate enough to conduct not only with the students and faculty of WWU, but with guest artists Keith Hamilton Cobb and Jessica Burr. Cobb and Burr are founding members of Project Untitled, a company dedicated to radically reimagining the American theatre production process by providing, above all, the time and space necessary for deep, critical discussions of Shakespeare’s work. Just days after the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024, the Untitled Tempest team began a 40 hour intensive with Cobb and Burr in which we discussed, dissected, explored, staged, deconstructed and reconstructed four representative scenes from The Tempest, encouraged by Cobb to “express anything and everything that the selected scenes make you feel, think, understand, not understand, care, and despise.” In short, our charge was to bring to The Tempest a sense of urgent curiosity—showing up with what Burr referred to as our “unfathomable humanity.” In naming how Shakespeare’s words resonated with our own lives, and in beginning to imagine how we might use them to create a new dramatic reality, we engaged in a process of world building, imagining for ourselves a more equitable and just future. We voiced countless questions, tried out ideas, theories, and approaches, spoke in draft, listened to each other, and held space for as many understandings of the play as we could. As Stage Manager Wren Wilhelm commented, what we were ultimately doing was “giving language to gut reactions.”
From there, we made the play you’re about to see. It’s not The Tempest. It’s only really partially about The Tempest. Rather, it’s about how we understand ourselves as theatre artists, as Americans in 2025, and as people confronted with an ever-changing national landscape. It’s about confronting the difficult, the unspoken, and the unbearable, and about finding—or creating—space for hope and for joy.
