ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Cuban actor Jose Juan Rodriguez Jabao and his company Teatro Buendia’s adaptation of The Tempest. While touring in Spain, Jose made the life-altering decision to stay in Madrid in order to fund his dying sister’s cancer treatments. The chapter discusses interpretation, adaptation, and mutation in acting, in culture, and in the body. The chapter includes readings of The Tempest as an early dystopian text, discussing the evolution of the body politic alongside that of the biological body, but it also looks closely at the evolution of the play itself from its colonial to postcolonial contexts and beyond. It is a consideration of the unexpected storms that blow through our biological and ideological realities and a call to attempt to see what Wendy Wheeler has called “the whole creature,” so as not to lose sight of the forest for the trees as we aim to tackle environmental crises. The chapter asks the question, why has The Tempest been so successful at adapting to different cultural contexts, remaining generation after generation a crucial node in the human umwelt?
