It’s nice to see a theater company come out swinging once in a
while. The Bluestockings’ decision to stage Mickle Maher’s challenging
Spirits to Enforce was an ambitious one, and it pays off in a
show that, while flawed, nonetheless has much to offer audience members
interested in theatrical fare outside the purview of the Samuel French
catalogue.
Twelve superheroes have taken up residence in a submarine outside
the island city of Fathom Town. They’re manning telephones in a
fundraising drive for an upcoming production of The Tempest, to
be performed by themselves; meanwhile, Fathom Town is increasingly
besieged by bad guys. The biggest, baddest guy of them all is the evil
Dr. Cannibal, AKA Caliban, who, hundreds of years earlier, on the very
same island, achieved literary immortality as the monster in
Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It turns out these superheroes are so
interested in The Tempest because it is the story of their own
past: The elemental spirits that once lived on the island are now
manifest as superheroes with identities like “Fragrance Fellow.”
All of this information is revealed to us in snippets of phone
conversation, as the superheroes sit at their phones, cajoling money
out of prospective audience members.
Most of the characters are defined largely by their superpowers, and
thus remain firmly in the two-dimensional realm, but they’re funny
nonetheless—Clara Liis Hillier as the Intoxicator and Terry
Lybecker as the Untangler are particularly good. Vivien Lyon,
meanwhile, grounds the kooky cast as Ariel, a spirit who was also in
The Tempest, and whose difficulty portraying herself threatens
to ruin the superheroes’ production.
I found that keeping track of the superheroes and their roles in
The Tempest (program notes serve as a helpful cheat sheet) while
simultaneously trying to piece fragments of phone conversation into a
coherent whole was quite difficult. The Bluestockings would have done
well to slow the show down a bit—the script is extremely dense,
and were a little more attention paid to clarity and pacing, the
audience would be able to get far more out of it.