Character Questions with Julia Steudle
In her third production with Pigeon Creek, Julia plays the most characters of an actor in The Tempest! Here, she's writing from the perspective of Adrian.
Tell the story of the play from your character's perspective:
I’m not a very important person, really. Just lucky to have been born into the family I was born into, I guess.
I help Gonzalo. He has trouble walking, he gets really stiff sometimes, and that’s what I’m for. To be the supple bones he no longer has.
He invited me to sail with him to Tunis to watch the marriage of King Alonso’s daughter, Claribel, to the king of Tunis. It was a mighty fine wedding. However, on the way back home from Tunis, we got caught in a MASSIVE storm. I nearly covered my cabin’s floor with sick. The storm threw the ship around so bad, it almost split completely into two halves! The boatswain was yelling a lot. I could hear him from my room. After that happened though, I blacked out, and don’t actually remember how we made it onto the island. It’s a very exotic place. I think maybe the most exotic place I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been in The Pickled Duck.
Anyway, we lost King Alonso’s son, Ferdinand, along the way, but I saw him not too far from us in the water. I think I saw him swim to shore. He’s pretty strong. I definitely think he made it to shore, but when I told King Alonso, he didn’t believe me. And Sebastian and Antonio were no help! They kept antagonizing Gonzalo, and he gets in such a state sometimes, making my job ten times harder, and the king was still pretty despondent about losing his son.
There was a pretty music playing in the trees though. It made us sleepy. We took a nap, and woke up to Sebastian and Antonio holding knives above us. They seem suspicious, but maybe they were trying to protect us from lions. Who knows? I was asleep!
We went off to try and find Ferdinand, or what was left of him, I suppose, and ended up running into these weird islanders. Are sprites real? They disappeared awful quickly. And I think that’s what upset King Alonso because not long after the island-people-sprites disappeared, he ran off in one direction, and for some reason unbeknownst to me and Gonzalo, Sebastian and Antonio ran off in the other direction! Gonzalo told me to go follow them, and I tried to, but they’re faster than I am. I ended up losing them.
That’s okay though. I wandered around the island looking at things, and found this cool cave covered in old tapestries and drawings. I was a bit tired though, and the cave was rather cozy, so I ended up falling asleep. This island sure takes a lot out of you.
It was a nice nap. I woke up to a weird smell though and a pair of eyes not too far from my face. Apparently, I fell asleep in one of the islander’s homes! Oops… The scaly, island-person didn’t seem very surprised by me though. I think it had been studying me before getting closer to gauge how dangerous I was (I’ll give you a hint: not very). It turned out to speak pretty good English though, and also turned out to be a man named Caliban. He told me that everyone left.
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time someone forgot me. Usually it’s not on an island though. While I was a bit upset at first, I decided to look at it from a different angle. I no longer had to rub Gonzalo’s corns! Which was exciting. Caliban and I could rule the island! Mainly because we were the only two people on it, but so what? You don’t have an island.
