Artist Interview: Peter DeLaurier
The actor, director, and longtime Lantern artistic collaborator discusses his role of Prospero in THE TEMPEST
Peter DeLaurier is a familiar and well-loved presence on the Lantern stage. Whether he’s starring in An Iliad, Underneath the Lintel, QED, and The Train Driver or directing Red Velvet or Hapgood, his work is always at home in our theater. Peter is also an artistic associate at People’s Light, a playwright and adapter, a co-founder of Delaware Theatre Company, an educator, a cellist, and more. He has been recognized with seven Barrymore Award nominations, winning two. As Prospero, Peter leads the cast of The Tempest, originally produced during Lantern Theater Company’s 2017/18 season and streaming May 4–30, 2021, as part of our new Plays from the Lantern Archives series. During the original 2018 run, he sat down with us to talk about the character of Prospero and how he found his way through the part.
Can you tell us about Prospero?
Prospero is the hero of Shakespeare’s last play, in a series of final plays that centered around loss and a little bit of hope, though they’re romances and not tragedies. But they all deal with despair over a huge psychic loss. And all of them deal with a daughter as well. I could try to analyze Shakespeare’s life and his loss, but he wrote a character and so I have to try to figure out what Prospero’s life and loss was. It’s about betrayal and revenge. It’s about forgiveness and mercy and reconciliation.
I don’t know how to pretend at a role, at a character. I can understand how things are supposed to look and sound and feel, how they’re supposed to come across to an audience. I can’t go out and try to play that thing. I have to find out what there is of me that actually corresponds to it. That is, I look upon my work as a subtractive craft, more like carving. More like taking away what of me is not useful for Prospero and making what is important rather than trying to understand what Prospero is and painting on myself. So I have to — in this play particularly — look at those moments in my life where there was huge psychic loss, where there was massive betrayal, and find those correspondences and make them work for Prospero so that what happens on the stage is really happening, and not pretended.
How does that process work? Is it different at all with Shakespeare, where you have rigorous meter and verse work?
It is different in kind, but not in essence, I think. I like to say that Shakespeare is easier to learn because it’s like learning the lyrics to a song. Except when you get into his later plays, the language is so complex that that really doesn’t obtain so much as it does in Romeo and Juliet or The Taming of the Shrew where the language is fairly regular, and really it is like learning a song. The Tempest was hard, and it took me a lot longer to learn this role than I thought it would. And I typically like to come to rehearsal without a book in hand, so that was a job of work on this one.
You’ve done Shakespeare before.
A lot. But never before at the Lantern.
Is there anything different about performing Shakespeare in the Lantern’s intimate space?
Just to the technical elements of presenting it. I don’t have to boom so much. Though in this case, the language is so dense that it really takes a fair amount of physical effort to keep it clearly articulated for the audience. I have to offer all the help I can in that.
I wonder if you could talk a little about Prospero’s magic.
I’m going to credit Sam Waterston for this; he was the best Prospero of the many I’ve seen. What really impressed me in that and what I’ve carried away from it is that magic isn’t free. Magic comes at great cost, so when you decide to use it, you have to assess the physical and emotional cost of it like you would any other choice you make in taking action. I wanted to make sure that nothing that happened did so blithely. It’s interesting to be able to say “I can take on this younger guy with a weapon just by hexing him.” Yeah. But you know, just like all the other magic, that comes at a cost. Putting my daughter to sleep when I need her out of the way. I wish I had a TV I could put her in front of! But everything comes at a cost.
Can you describe the experience of bringing a play from the rehearsal room into the theater with an audience?
Every time you get in front of an audience you think of all the things they don’t know, that they learn as you are revealing them, and what has to become so clear that you can be kind of blithe about in the rehearsal room. We [the actors] know this play! We’ve read it for years, we’ve been studying it. But for many people, this will be the first time they’ve encountered this story, these characters. You know, the first lines of the play on land, once you get off the boat, set up the whole father-daughter relationship, and you don’t realize that in the rehearsal room. She knows I’m her father, she knows I caused the storm, she knows I have the power to stop it. The audience doesn’t!
Is there anything you wanted to talk about that we didn’t touch on?
Like I said, Shakespeare had his loss. And I’ve had mine. And I can’t play his; I have to use mine to make it work. And Prospero lost a wife, and so did I. And so I’ve cast Ceal Phelan as the late Duchess of Milan. And she walks around with me onstage, inside Prospero’s locket, and it’s a hot object and it works for me.
The most difficult moment to play — and I didn’t understand it until I understood the depth of Shakespeare’s loss and angst and his need to work it out in the writing of this last play, and the connection of mine to his — is that moment when he says, “ Our revels now are ended. These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits and / Are melted into air, into thin air,” leading to a breakdown. “ Sir, I am vex’d; / Bear with my weakness; my, brain is troubled.” You can play that blithely, you can play that intellectually, but that’s not how it was written or why it was written. So, I needed to go pretty far inside to find the means to make those changes.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Related reading: Brave New World: THE TEMPEST and Science Fiction — Shakespeare’s tale of discovery, learning, and strangers is at home in a galaxy far, far away.
The Tempest is part of Plays from the Lantern Archives, a new series celebrating some of the finest productions from recent Lantern seasons, brought vividly back to life on screen. This performance was professionally filmed with a live theater audience in April 2018, and is streaming May 4–30, 2021. Visit our website for tickets and information.
