The Pickup's Culture coverage is brought to you by Tulsa Artists' Coalition Gallery, 40 Years of Empowering Tulsa Artists. Visit TAC Gallery to see American Highway Revisited by VC Torneden and Melinda Harvey Green, June 5 – 27, 2026.
Tulsa Shakespeare Company: The Tempest
Lynn Riggs Theater
through May 23, 2026
Shit’s heavy right now. This season of theatre in Tulsa has been a little heavy, too, full of revolutionary assassins, dead seagulls and brothers, axe murderesses, heady Civil War-era debate, and teens going through it. So we give thanks to the theatre gods for the Tulsa Shakespeare Company production of The Tempest that’s running at the rainbow-festooned Lynn Riggs Theatre through Saturday.
It’s spangly. It’s whimsical. It’s heart-thrumming. It’s messy (complimentary). It’s got men in corsets and some of Shakespeare’s best raunchy jokes. It’s anti-totalitarian, pro-liberation, and profoundly not part of any tech-generated hellscape. (Director Rachel Steed made a point of that in her opening remarks at the dress rehearsal I attended: “No AI was used in the making of this production!” Applause.) In short, it’s a place to take shelter in the shitstorm.
For all the greatness of his earlier works, Shakespeare’s last play is my favorite, a story about power and betrayal, conquest and isolation, shipwreck and abandonment and belonging—with a throughline about forgiveness that hits the tenderest spot in my heart. But I’ve never seen a production of The Tempest that makes total disaster feel so fun.
As in their previous productions, Tulsa Shakespeare Company throws the audience right into it from the first beat, with a fast-paced, storm-tossed scene on a boat (i.e., a bunch of chairs huddled up together) featuring six characters in all manner of dress: harem pants, orange wig, leather harness, tiara, mauve blazer, cowboy boots, combat boots, the works. This is definitely not Shakespeare that’s taking itself too seriously, but we still get the shudder of fear and tumult that launches this play, setting a course for the deeper themes that emerge in the aftermath of this initial storm.
That unseriousness turns out to be a crack that opens a door. This production holds that fine line between hilarity and heartbreak in a way that reminds me of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet—that is to say, with an appreciation for how gritty and grave comedy can actually be, and how tragedy is always one step away from absurdity.
The costuming here is smartly done, with costume designer Angel Ruiz throwing a dozen vintage shops’ worth of baubles and fabric across the shoulders of the actors. What looks like gender chaos becomes the euphoria of revelation: lost and found on a literal island, each of these people is outside a norm, outside the familiar, finding new ways to exist as the “delicate monsters” they are in this space.
Speaking of monsters: who isn’t one, really? The world of The Tempest is our world in miniature, as in so many of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s also an extended metaphor for theatre itself, one brought home in Prospero’s famous closing monologue, delivered here with searing clarity by Jenny Guy, who plays this internal-battle-ridden wizard in a way that brings out his scintillating doubleness, his precarity, his stumble out of authority and into grace. I fell instantly in love with all the creatures making their manic way at the Lynn Riggs Theater: Jeremy Geiger’s roaring drunk, pop-eyed Stephano; Davis Simpson’s grunting, sighing, lovestruck Ferdinand; J Tomlinson’s sweet Miranda (with an incredible wig change for the wedding scene!); Andy Axewell’s gruff, wise Gonzalo; Nicole Gray’s sweet-voiced Ariel; and Armando Rivera’s sassy-as-hell Iris, among others.
But it was Nicky Finch’s Caliban that fully slayed me. In a production packed with incredible physicality, with actors landing verbal daggers and hitting rapid-fire emotional beats in the midst of the most incongruous situations, this performance focused and grounded everything. Finch plays the play’s most famous “monster” as the rawest sort of human: twice-abandoned, full of rage, clear-eyed but confused, deeply brave and smart and broken, swathed in a poof of robes that link this being to no definable social order.
Tumbling into boneless backwards somersaults, limbs flinching, eyes vigilant, this Caliban sits at the center of this world as someone truly lost—but not terminally so. The light that wakes up in Finch’s face when Trinculo and Stephano arrive (bearing wine, ass jokes, and friendship) is the light of connection, the gift of fellow-feeling, the magic of language to bring what’s been unspeakable into one’s hands to be held, tended, and transformed.
This material—and Tulsa Shakespeare Company’s approach to it—is the best possible challenge to a reality that glorifies cruelty and derision, undermines the nobility of human effort, and insists that the only right outcome is a linear, binary, already-mapped-out one. Go get wrecked with this Tempest crew this weekend. Then please, bring whoever you are in its aftermath—messy, mended, disoriented, delighted—into your own real-life world next week. I’ve got dibs on Stephano’s black tutu.
