Updated Cast Announced for Staged Reading of Aimé Césaire's A TEMPEST (UNE TEMPÊTE)

Red Bull Theater (Jesse Berger, Founder and Artistic Director | Jim Bredeson, Managing Director) today announced the cast for the special event staged reading of celebrated poet and activist Aimé Césaire's A Tempest (Une Tempête), a striking adaptation of Shakespeare's celebrated Jacobean play through a post-colonial lens, translated from the French by Philip Crispin. A collaboration with the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) and The Drama League, the event will be presented in-person with a simultaneous livestream.

A Tempest (Une Tempête) will take place LIVE in person on Monday February 28th at 7:30pm at FIAF Florence Gould Hall (55 East 59th Street) with simultaneous Livestream broadcast. Video-on-Demand will be available through Sunday March 6th until 11:59 PM EST. For tickets to the in person event, Livestream, Video-on-Demand, or more information, visit RedBullTheater.org.

Featured in the cast will be Jay O. Sanders (Broadway: Girl from the North Country; Off-Bway: The Michaels, The Gabriels Plays, The Apple Family Plays - Public Theater) as Prospero; Kimberly Exum as Ariel (B'way/National Tour: The Book of Mormon); and Isaiah Johnson as Caliban (B'way: The Color Purple, Side Show, Peter and the Starcatcher, The Merchant of Venice; George Washington in Hamilton National Tour); with Carson Elrod (Red Bull: The Alchemist; B'way: Peter and the Starcatcher, Reckless, Noises Off; Off-Bway: The Tempest, Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well - NYSF; The Liar, The Heir Apparent - CSC); Isabel Ellison (RBT debut); Manoel Felciano (Red Bull: The Alchemist, The Changeling; B'way: To Kill a Mockingbird, Sweeney Todd - Tony® nomination); Enid Graham (B'way: Honour - Tony® nomination, Theatre World Award; M. Butterfly, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Fortune's Fool, Dinner at Eight, The Constant Wife; Off Bway: Coriolanus, King Lear - Public Theater; The Long Christmas Ride Home - Vineyard); Anthony Michael Martinez (Romeo & Juliet - CSC; Antony and Cleopatra - Folger Theatre); Paul Niebanck (RBT: The Revenger's Tragedy, The Changeling, The Spanish Tragedy; LCT/B'way: In the Next Room (or the vibrator play); Off-Bway: Mint Theater: A Picture of Autumn; Keen Co: Boy, A Walk in the Woods); Anthony Venturini (RBT debut); and C.J. Wilson (RBT: The Clandestine Marriage; B'way: The Big Knife, Glengarry Glen Ross, Festen, Henry IV, Long Day's Journey Into Night, Gore Vidal's The Best Man; Primary Stages: Happy Now? - Lortel Award nomination; Atlantic Theater Company: Hold on to Me Darling - Lortel Award nomination, Voysey Inheritance; Public Theater: Merry Wives of Windsor).

This reading will be directed by Lanise Antoine Shelley, the Artistic Director of Chicago's House Theatre and the 2021-'22 Drama League Classical Directing Fellow.

In Césaire's A Tempest, the characters and plot are largely unchanged: Prospero conjures a violent storm to drive his enemy's ship ashore on the island on which he is exiled with his daughter. Césaire's island is located specifically in the Caribbean and Caliban and Ariel, depicted here as black slaves to Prospero, are centralized. Their opposing voices echo Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Written in the tumultuous 1960s, A Tempest confronts complex intersections of race, power, and anti-imperialism with intelligence, wit, and beauty.

A Tempest marks Red Bull Theater's return to its in-person Revelation Readings, an ongoing OBIE Award-winning series that offers audiences the unique opportunity to experience rarely produced classic plays performed by the finest actors working today. This will be the first-time that the organization has livestreamed an in-person event.

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