A fresh start The Tempest examines the ruler and the ruled BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

William Shakespeare had a stormy though successful career, and when he penned The Tempest in 1611 he’d also had plenty of practice observing the relationships between ruler and ruled, despots and the desperate under them. A Providence College theater department production (through November 13) is doing a good job wrapping this entertaining story around that concern.

Dominating the stage is a tree of knowledge that holds and dangles precious items, flotsam and jetsam washed ashore with the castaway lord of the island, Prospero (Geoffrey Dujardin), and his daughter, Miranda (Laura Cheely). Books and a chessboard for him, a bird cage for her. The set design by David Costa-Cabral asks: What’s important to civilized people when all else is lost?

Prospero is the rightful Duke of Milan, exiled there 12 years before by his usurping brother Antonio (Erik Andersen) with the collusion of the King of Naples, Alonso (Kyle Mallory). The two men and their entourage are shipwrecked on the island, thanks to the storm Prospero whipped up using his sorcery powers.

Court conspiracies were the meat of Shakespeare’s history plays, not to mention Elizabethan gossip. On this occasion, the jealous younger brother of the king, Sebastian (Nick Cipriano), takes this grown-up Lord of the Flies occasion to plot with Prospero’s evil brother to kill King Alonso and wrest away the throne.

Everywhere in this play characters are biding their time until they can take over, or at least get out from under someone else’s power. That’s the way the world works in this social microcosm, and it can be as innocuous as Miranda wanting to marry and Prospero’s spirit servant Ariel (Jessica Grygiel) wanting her freedom.

The recent shipwreck victims have been carefully dispersed around the island, and all think that the others must have drowned. The king’s son Ferdinand (Brian McCormack) is on his own, and the sorcerer arranges for him and Miranda to meet, since the young man would be a good catch politically as well as romantically. Much of the delight of this play comes from the innocence of Miranda — the handsome Ferdinand is the only man she has ever seen, besides her father and Caliban (Halleluyah Walcott), the island native Prospero enslaved. In The Tempest, Shakespeare asks us to give our fellow human beings a chance to start afresh — he even forgives his enemies at the end, when he takes back his dukedom.

One way to look at this play is as an elaborate frame around a central broadly comical scene. The drunken cabin boy Trinculo, played with delightful restraint by Dan O’Reilly, takes shelter under a cloak where Caliban is fearfully hiding (soon to discover the joys of the grape himself). Then the pompous and pretentious Stephania — Lisa D’Alessandro at her best here — is baffled to encounter this two-headed monster. Matters go from bad to verse.

There’s usually a problem in college productions of The Tempest with a young man playing Prospero. That is finessed here not by reminding us that any sorcerer worth his wand could make himself look younger, but rather by the physical and psychological authority that Dujardin establishes. He keeps Prospero grounded in concern that serious business is at hand.

Everybody can be content, Shakespeare suggests in this play, if they simply find their places in social hierarchies and accept the responsibilities of their rank or the limitations of their lot in life. When Miranda encounters the rest of the shipwrecked party, she exclaims: "O brave new world that has such people in it!" If everyone were to behave as tractably as Shakespeare here demands, what a tea-party-happy time we’d all have.

As Hemingway had a character say, in a scene that ostensibly suggested a similar sunny scenario, "Isn’t it pretty to think so?" Shakespeare had only five years to live when he completed this, his last play. And while his realistic cynicism was intact, he was simply hoping that those of us carrying on after him would just learn how to get along.

Director John Garrity is wisely suspect of that prospect. At one point when an exuberantly helpful Ariel, looking forward to her promised freedom, is abruptly approached by an appreciative Prospero, the sprite shrinks back warily. A sentimental monarch can turn on you on a whim. Caliban here is cast as a handsome African-American rather than a gnarled monster, and in the closing tableau he is raising Prospero’s discarded sorcerer’s staff like a victory banner. When oppressed peoples gain power, the iffy sequence starts all over again.