Mark DeFrancis knew he’d be directing “The Tempest.” He knew it when he entered a Lovers and Madmen meeting six months ago to decide on a play with the group’s executive board. He knew it a year before that when he picked up “The Tempest,” and, after having read it “a billion times,” first looked at it with a director’s eye. Maybe it was in his head when he first became involved with Lovers and Madmen, acting in “Romeo and Juliet” two years ago, or perhaps fate had already deigned it when Mark, age 13, received the play from his father and thought, “Magic, fairies, storms! This is such an amazing play.”

Lovers and Madmen’s production of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” opens tonight at Shanley Pavilion. DeFrancis, the director and a Communication senior, said he hopes audiences will take away much more than a good time from the play’s supernatural characters and unbelievable story lines.

“I think that the reason you put a play up is to say something,” DeFrancis said. “If the audience leaves thinking anything, I don’t want it to be, ‘oh, she sung well,’ or ‘that was a lovely dance.’ I want them to be leaving thinking about the higher themes of this play, because that’s why it was written in the first place.”

“The Tempest,” written only five years before Shakespeare’s death, addresses the theme of forgiveness through an exiled magician, played by Dawen Wang, who must learn to forgive and to abandon his magic powers.

But “The Tempest” is more than just a sermon of forgiveness. It also can be quite a spectacle when a creative mind like DeFrancis is given free reign with the script. The director added song, dance and elaborate sets and lighting to the play.

“It’s a beautiful, beautiful play that Shakespeare wrote at the end of his life, and I think he wanted to put as much beauty into it as he could,” DeFrancis said. “It’s going to be an extravaganza.”

After only the second run-through, held a week ago in a basement classroom of Fisk, with desks stacked against the sides of the room and the stage indicated by lines of masking tape, DeFrancis said everything clicked for the first time.

Despite more than a handful of memory lapses, and a low ceiling under constant seige by Prospero’s broom-handle staff, Stefano’s liquor-bottle stand-in and Ferdinand’s sword, the cast showed a chemistry and energy that comes only with an intimate understanding of the script and hours of rehearsal.

“Woooo, doggies,” DeFrancis said after the two-hour run-through. “Wasn’t that fun? We’ve got a play all of a sudden.”

While giving notes to the actors, DeFrancis spoke quickly, pacing back and forth and nervously clicking his pen, giving the impression he was ticking off on a manual counter the thousands of thoughts running through his head.

Looking into DeFrancis’ deep-set eyes, one gets the feeling it would be impossible to know more than 50 percent of what he’s thinking at any one time. Though he gave the sport up several years ago, DeFrancis still bears the appearance of a rugby player: short and muscular with conservatively trimmed, rust-colored facial hair, contrasted by short and free-spirited brown hair.

While their friends were celebrating Halloween, the cast and crew — whom DeFrancis fondly refers to as “the kids” — gathered at Shanley for their first opportunity to get familiar with the space and to test the strength of the recently completed, but still unadorned stage.

For half an hour “Ferdinand” and “Prospero” rehearsed a fight sequence — complicated by the stage’s five-tiered construction — while DeFrancis and Shane Murphy, fight choreographer and Communication sophomore, looked on. With every run-through, Ferdinand, played by Medill freshman, Derek Thompson, rose a bit more slowly from his awkward and prostrate final position of the sequence. Sweat soon was evident at the tips of his short, brown hair.

DeFrancis’ staging carries a heavy eastern influence, from traditional Japanese clothing and katanas worn by the cast to the kung-fu-inspired opening sequence and the original score, reminiscent of Asian folk music and composed by Communication junior Jonathon Lynch.

Before composing, Lynch said he listened to as many styles of Asian music as he could get his hands on: from traditional to the “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” soundtrack. He chose the instrumentation of flute, cello and African drum to squeeze the most versatility out of a small budget and to emulate Asian instruments.

Just 72 hours before the first performance, as the cast made its first run-through on stage, DeFrancis remained confident of his group’s abilities and focused on his goal.

“The Tempest” is the first time DeFrancis has directed since high school, but Wang said DeFrancis’ ability to find nuances in the script made him a successful director.

“He really likes working around the text,” Wang said.

Although DeFrancis puts the play’s moral issues center stage, he is just as eager to show the audience a good time.

“You have monsters running around and fairies and fights and swords are drawn,” DeFrancis said. “It’s entertaining. That’s the other half of theater and I like to think that’s there too.”4

Music junior Tristan Arnold is a PLAY writer. He can be reached at [email protected].