Much of the week taken up by reconnecting with Elizabeth after her seven-week East Coast gig, our daughter Jo visiting from Italy, and my own misery in the clutches of a cold. Still, slow movement forward.

Finished painting and gluing in the eyes of all characters except the five Ariels (which require more conception of the faces themselves) and most of the faces prepared for painting. It’s always fascinated me how radically the eyes affect the nature of the face.

For the Neapolitans (Alonso, his brother Sebastian, his son Ferdinand), they’re all brown-eyed. But Alonso I’ve tried to give a more distant (or inward) focus that suggests grief; Sebastian’s pupils are low, adding a bit to the sleaziness of the face; Ferdinand’s are large-irised and very centered, like Miranda’s, full of wonder. Gonzalo is a bit out of the loop: small, dark-blue eyes, grieving.

•••

The Milanese (Prospero, Miranda and his brother Antonio) are green-eyed; Prospero with a very direct gaze, pupils set high in the eye, emphasizing an angry brow; Miranda, like Ferdinand, big-eyed and direct; Antonio with small irises and slightly out of focus—you can never quite tell where he’s looking, what he’s intending.

•••

The conspiratorial clownshow (Stephano, Trinculo, Caliban) are designed for maximum disunity. Stephano, the would-be king of the island and chronic drunk, has wide-open idiot eyes; the dwarfish court fool Trinculo has a focus somewhere between terror and despair; and Caliban—conceived as a realistically deformed man with a cleft lip and heavily-lidded wall-eye—changes radically as the head is turned. A weird choice: he has blue eyes. His mother was Algerian; was his dad an English seaman? I guess I want to emphasize a kind of soft, baby-face quality in him, utterly at odds with the vehemence of his rage.

•••

For the Ship Master and Boatswain, well, just a contrast. The Boatswain is battling fro his life; the Ship Master seems already resigned to disaster.

In a regular stage production, of course, you don’t have control of the actors’ eyes: they are what they are. But in puppetry, even though the audience is seeing it from a considerable distance, the effect of the eyes is remarkable. I believe that evolution has programmed us to have an extreme awareness of eye focus and mood: is that stranger across the river looking at me with ill intent? So the process of painting the flat backsides of these glass globs and finding just the right way of setting them into the head—it’s like giving a soul to a soulless thing.

Starting now to cast the actors’ faces for masks—as puppeteers they’ll be visible as the spirits of the island. So gobs of plaster bandages, Vaseline, Saran-wrap, and patience, and then plaster positives from the plaster negatives, and then building up shells on the positives, and then actually designing what they’re going to look like. It does take time.

•••

A good time talking with a friend who has long experience in present-day ceremonial magic. Mostly valuable in confirming a lot of my instincts: the modes of trance=inducing; the physical toll of that; the great challenge of controlling an elemental such as Ariel; the great difficulty Prospero would have in moving so rapidly between contact with the human world and contact with the spirit world.

A new thought, too. There’s the basic folk wisdom of “Don’t invoke anything you can’t dismiss,” or more jocularly, “Don’t invoke anything larger than your head.” But in The Tempest, we start with a magical spell—the tempest itself—and there is no banishing of it. In fact it continues throughout the play, with the Folio’s stage directions of thunder at two points. My sense is that Prospero has indeed invoked something that gives him a great challenge to dismiss, and the play itself is the ceremony of a long, arduous completion of the spell. Only at the relinquishing of his power is the Tempest ended.

-Conrad Bishop