The Carrie Furnaces National Historic Landmark has long hosted arts and culture events, and Quantum Theatre knows the site well: The troupe has staged hit productions of two Shakespeare plays there in recent years, “King Lear” and “Hamlet.”
Heather Mull
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Quantum Theatre
Karla Boos, who founded Quantum Theatre in 1990, is retiring at the end of next year.
What makes this summer’s Quantum-does-Shakespeare-at-Carrie especially notable is that, after 36 years at the helm, it’s founder Karla Boos’ final show as the troupe’s artistic director. And she’s going out on “The Tempest,” the classic that’s not only understood as the Bard’s own farewell to the stage, but often serves as a valedictory pick for retiring theater artists.
The show opens Friday, July 17, and continues through Aug. 23 at the Carrie site, known for the opportunities it affords to create spectacular visuals against the hulking concrete and metal backdrop of a long-retired steel mill.
In “Tempest,” said Boos, Shakespeare “says some final things to the world, and I can’t but find a resonance in that for myself.”
‘What’s past is prologue’
Boos, who grew up largely in West Virginia and studied theater in California, founded Quantum on a shoestring in 1990, while still working day jobs.
By decade’s end, the company had become her full-time gig and established itself as arguably the city’s most innovative theater troupe, staging visionary productions of both classics and newer works on purpose-built sets in nontraditional spaces: parks, cemeteries, disused warehouses and even, once, the empty swimming pool of the Braddock Carnegie Library.
Jason Snyder
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Quantum Theatre
Jerreme Rodriguez, as Caliban, with Carolina Ignacia Vargas Romero, as Miranda.
Quantum has sometimes dealt in the surreal and the avant-garde, as in 2015’s original immersive adaptation of José Saramago’s Nobel Prize-winning novel “All the Names.” But Boos’ abiding love of Shakespeare has manifested in 10 productions, starting with 1997’s “Antony & Cleopatra” in the South Side’s raw Industrial Arts Co-Op space (inside what’s now the Brew House).
Actors in that show included Jeff Carpenter, who two decades later would play the title role in Quantum’s 2019 “Lear,” and who directed its 2023 staging of “Hamlet.” Now Boos has cast him in another plum role, that of the embittered and vengeful magician Prospero in “The Tempest.”
“He’s just a Shakespeare empath,” she says. “He really is. I mean, Shakespeare speaks directly through Jeffrey Carpenter.”
Carpenter said he shares Boos’ enthusiasm for challenging theatrical projects, perhaps especially when it comes to Shakespeare.
“It’s sort of like climbing a mountain,” he said. “We don’t know what the outcome will be.”
The production also features frequent Quantum collaborators like acclaimed choreographer, Carnegie Mellon professor and Broadway veteran Tomé Cousin as the spirit Ariel, and Jerreme Rodriguez as the enslaved Caliban. Quantum newcomer Carolina Ignacia Vargas Romero plays Prospero’s innocent teenage daughter Miranda (“O brave new world / That has such people in’t!”).
Other familiar names in the cast include Mark Staley, Joe McGranaghan, Corey Rieger, Adrienne Wehr and Jennifer Tober. And other long-time Quantum associates include scenic designer Stephanie Mayer-Staley, costume designer Susan Tsu, and lighting designer C. Todd Brown.
‘This rough magic’
“The Tempest,” first performed in 1611, was Shakespeare’s final play. (He was only about 47.) The dialogue is rife with goodbyes, usually proffered in the voice of Prospero, who spends most of the play taking advantage of the chance to enact revenge on enemies who drove him from high office and stranded him on an island with his daughter, Miranda, and two beings he has enslaved, Ariel and Caliban.
Jason Snyder
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Quantum Theatre
Tomé Cousin plays Ariel.
“Lend thy hand / And pluck my magic garment from me,” he tells Miranda at one point. “So / Lie there, my art.”
Later, having taken retribution, Prospero says, “this rough magic / I here abjure,” and promises, “I’ll break my staff / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, / And deeper than did ever plummet sound / I’ll drown my book.”
On one level, says Carpenter, the play is a lyrical account of an artist’s need to re-integrate into normal society after devoting so much time and energy to creating imaginary worlds.
“No matter the amount of achievements we’ve had throughout the years, at some point we have to hang up our rough magic and make way for the next generation,” he said.
Prospero, said Boos, is also coming to realize how much he has wronged those around him, especially Caliban and Ariel.
Shakespeare, she says, “is ruminating on the amazing human condition of clawing one’s way to the top, where one abuses those underneath them until the next person claws their way and knocks you off the top. That is the endless cycle of the human condition, right? And Prospero is in the cycle 100%. He was the abused, and he is the abuser.”
‘Our revels are now ended’
Boos announced her retirement last year, though she’s staying on through this December.
Quantum expects to name her successor in the weeks after “The Tempest” concludes its run.
Boos spoke with WESA during rehearsals, about three weeks before opening night.
“I’m trying to be super present, as the kids say, right? You know, I’m really trying to enjoy every minute of it, and I am,” she said. “All plays are a mystery to be solved and yet Shakespeare, it just yields and yields and yields. And I have a group of people who are delving deep.”
Retirement, for Boos, is also a brave new world.
“It’s a mystery how I will feel when I’m not at Quantum anymore, right?” she said. “People ask me what I’m gonna do, and my answer is basically, ‘I don’t know.’ I’m leaving blank space in my life which I have not had in all this time, and to see what comes to me. You know, I’m feeling all the bittersweet feels, but I don’t know how I’ll feel in January.”