Imperfect storm BTW’s Tempest blows strong but fitfully BY CAROLYN CLAY
	The Tempest By William Shakespeare. Directed by Jason Slavick. Set and lighting by Caleb Wertenbaker. Costumes by Gail Astrid Buckley. Music composed and performed by Warren Levenson. Sound by K. Bud Durand. With Kortney Adams, Douglass Bowen-Flynn, Allyn Burrows, Neil A. Casey, Spencer S. Christie, Jonathan Epstein, Elizabeth Hayes, Sarah Hickler, Richard La France, Ben Lambert, Bill Molnar, Susannah Millonzi, and Gerald Slattery. Presented by Boston Theatre Works at the Cyclorama at the Boston Center for the Arts through February 13.

If director Jason Slavick turns The Tempest into something of a love story centered on Prospero and Ariel, who can blame him? The most compelling performances in the Boston Theatre Works production are by Shakespeare & Company mainstay Jonathan Epstein as a thunderbolt-hurling Thor of a Prospero who painfully subdues the vengeance in himself and Susannah Millonzi as a singing, strutting Ariel, part Hilary Swank and part Carmen de Lavallade, who leaps into balletic poses supported by Epstein as if she were Peter Pan and he the harness. There is also an ingenuous performance by Elizabeth Hayes as Miranda, an amusingly Jeevesian turn by Allyn Burrows as potted butler Stephano, and a crack low-tech tempest to get things rolling. But there’s more Mardi Gras than rough magic in Prospero’s conjurations, and some of the supporting players don’t belong on the same island with Epstein and Millonzi.

The last of Shakespeare’s late romances, The Tempest is sometimes referred to as the Bard’s farewell to art, its wronged Prospero journeying not just to forgiveness but also to bookish retirement. Having spent 12 years perfecting his potent art in exile, accompanied only by his now-15-year-old daughter, Miranda, and the island naturals he’s enslaved, the deposed Duke of Milan gets a chance to strut his magic stuff when a voyage from Tunis brings his usurpers within his sway. Stopping them with a fearful storm, he has his control-freakish way with all and sundry, pausing along the way to spout great, brooding poetry before taking a lesson in compassion from the inhuman Ariel and turning, with effort, to absolution and the relinquishment of power.

The Tempest is a beautiful play, and Prospero’s part of it is given a forceful delicacy by Epstein, in a performance that moves from Gandalfian authority (complete with a leaf-sprouting staff) to simplicity and tears. Neither should this romance, for all its Weather Channel–worthy imprecations, be immune to the bare-Bard staging Slavick puts up at the Cyclorama, which proves a suitable if non-wooden O for its abstract twirlings (though the space is so reverberant that echo mars even good diction). But this production ricochets between disarming integrity and bellowing amateurishness in a way that grows frustrating.

There is soulfulness in Sarah Hickler’s crab-walking Caliban, who despite being the lust child of a witch and a devil has one of the work’s loveliest paeans to Nature: "Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises." And the resentful monster’s chosen deity, Burrows’s bantam-roosterish Stephano, abetted by Neil A. Casey’s whipped-cream-mainlining Trinculo, makes a comic contribution. Still, the reasons to see the show are Epstein’s moved and moving Prospero and Millonzi’s cocky but aching Ariel, a silver sprite in sneakers.

But every time the wracked muck-a-mucks from Naples and Milan put in an appearance, whining and declaiming in their 20th-century military finery, the level of professionalism dips precipitously. It is a problem inherent in low-budget, large-cast Shakespeare (even in a production streamlined enough to employ Caliban, disguised as a New Orleans floozie, in Prospero’s nuptial masque for his daughter) that the bench is seldom deep enough. As for Ferdinand, that first-come-first-served specimen of manhood who so bewitches Miranda, Ben Lambert plays him with an innocence that matches hers, and their besotted tussle over a log Prospero has consigned him to lug (here a velvety brown body bag of a thing) has an unexpected yet not unaffecting slapstick element.

But the arranged romance of Miranda and Ferdinand, however sweet, pales next to the piquant connection of Prospero and Ariel, who is frequently atop the magician’s shoulder, as weightless as air but hardly as sexless. It is in his domineering yet tender relations with Ariel that Epstein maps out his character’s journey. At first, his Prospero exercises a near-sadistic hold on her, forcing her to relive her torture at the hand of Sycorax as the usually upbeat nymph shakes in agony. Prospero is alone when, in Epstein’s reading, he thinks on his feet through "Our revels now are ended," struggling with intimations of mortality that push him toward reprieve. But we see him still wrestling, with Ariel as his intimate, as he’s torn between righteous anger (at his enemies’ "high wrongs") and forgiveness. In the end, it seems harder for him to part with Ariel than with his book or staff. "But yet thou shalt have freedom," he whispers, kissing the soon-to-be-elusive sprite on the lips. Abetted by charmer Millonzi, Epstein lays down the blueprint for a powerful, thoughtful performance on which one hopes someday to see built a more consistent production.