Tony Rust must be a magician. What else could explain the eerie and wonderful magic that fills the stage in a new production he directed and designed of Shakespeare’s The Tempest that opened Friday, August 8, at Cottage Theatre?

The Tempest is a challenging oddball amid the Bard’s canon of 39 plays. Neither tragedy nor comedy, it has led scholars to devise a completely separate category, “romance,” which it inhabits along with three other difficult-to-pigeonhole shows ( Pericles, Prince of Tyre ; Cymbeline; and The Winter’s Tale) . It’s also thought to be the last play Shakespeare wrote on his own, opening just five years before his death in 1616.

All four “romantic” plays are about magic. In The Tempest , Prospero, an elderly magician and rightful head of a dukedom, has been

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