Mrs. Kemble’s Tempest

The action centers on a fictional portrayal of Fanny Kemble's farewell performance to her beloved audience. She has chosen a reading of Shakespeare's The Tempest as her swan song. As she reads, she slips in and out of the characters on Shakespeare's magical island and relives her own life as an actress, a mother, an abolitionist and a triumphant author. Fanny Kemble was a mid-19th century actress from a theatrical family in Britain. She married an American and was an early feminist, abolitionist, writer, and one of the most celebrated actresses to grace the 19th-century American stage. She argued politics with U.S. presidents. She inspired Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Henry James' Washington Square. She was the first entertainment superstar about whom newspapers gossiped; women imitated her, and men wore her likeness on neckties. After her divorce in 1849, she gave dramatic readings of Shakespeare's plays in which she performed all the roles.