In the last play he wrote alone, William Shakespeare set a wizard on a remote island and gave him the power to conjure storms, the temperament to seek revenge and the humanity to forgive those who wronged him. Prospero uses magic to control other people, not unlike what a playwright does with imaginary characters, and some consider The Tempest to be Shakespeare's personal fable of his life in art. Lost Nation Theater's production features the company's founding artistic director, Kim Bent, as the magician, surrounded by a cast of 13. Among the play's memorable lines is the observation "What's past is prologue," a notion all too true for these characters who nurse grudges and attempt to repeat treacheries. The plot is an intricate weave of past events recounted during a dramatized present that covers but an afternoon, from a shipwreck to the rounding up of all the survivors. That story gets told briskly, but every step in it is animated by history. The source of conflict has been simmering for 12 years, since Prospero, the duke of Milan, was usurped by his brother, Antonio, with help from the king of Naples, Alonso. Prospero was exiled in a leaky boat with his infant daughter, Miranda. By good fortune, they reached an island where Prospero could use the magic he was studying to subjugate the two natives: Caliban, the monster son of a witch, and Ariel, a spirit that witch had imprisoned. In the play's present, with Miranda now a young woman, Prospero learns that his scurvy brother and other nobles are sailing near his lonely island. Ariel executes the magic Prospero dictates, which raises a storm at sea to deposit the voyagers in conveniently separate groups on the island. Soon, four stories unfold: Miranda and Ferdinand, the prince of Naples, meet and fall in exuberant love; Alonso grieves his presumed-drowned son; Antonio plots another power grab; and Alonso's butler and jester meet Caliban and share the universal language of drunkenness. The text demands spectacle, but not the kind of knockout stunts that cause a modern audience to marvel at the movies. Shakespeare's theatricality can be produced with surprising little alterations of reality that an audience must enhance for themselves through imagination. In our minds, Ariel can be invisible, a banquet can disappear, and a storm can overpower a ship. Onstage, Ariel must express invisibility through movement, the food must vanish…