The Tempest

presented by African-American Shakespeare Company

Saturdays and Sundays, October 25-November 9,

Saturday 8:00PM, Sunday 3:00PM

Buriel Clay Theatre, African-American Art and Culture Complex,

762 Fulton Street, San Francisco

$15-$34

http://www.african-americanshakes.org/productions/the-tempest

http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/750085

“The year is 2020. SYCORAX, the mother of all multi-product industrial conglomerates, based in Milan, is under investigation. The charge: dumping millions of tons of garbage in the Pacific, causing a floating island of debris the size of Colorado. Unhappy with the company’s lies and dumping practices, Prospero, a duke of Milan and former CEO of SYCORAX, threatens to testify before congress. He is quickly dismissed, his dukedom usurped, and banished to sea with his young daughter, Miranda. Miraculously surviving, they float up to the shores of this very debris field, the island of SYCORAX. He makes the island, with its single inhabitant, the deformed spawn Caliban, his home, and plots his revenge.

Assisting Prospero in his endeavors is an Application, Ariel, which he discovers from reclaimed parts scavenged from SYCORAX’s trash. Ariel becomes his personal assistant and knowledge navigator capable of holographic manifestations and manipulation of weather patterns. When Prospero’s enemies, ‘by Providence divine’, show up on his radar, he and Ariel treat them to a storm of biblical proportions. All of their lives are tempest-tossed and ultimately re-ordered. Mankind is seen at its worst, and monsters and machines show themselves to be human. Nothing is the same after man’s tsunami of greed, the very planet is scorched from unwary amassing of wealth and the resulting environmental destruction. If virtue can win out over vengeance and avarice, the storm can be weathered.”