The play, being given its United States premiere by Redshift Productions at the SoHo Playhouse, works a scenario that grows increasingly improbable, but thanks to five solid performances, it is also eminently watchable.
Prospero's familiar lines were spoken on the Courtyard stage last week by Tim PiggotoSmith to an audience made up of RSC staff, builders, contractors, the people of Stratford and actors (including Anthony Sher) curious to see how the new playhouse would work.
The playhouse has worked with production partners before to put on a number of attractions, including "Little House on the Prairie" and "Les Misérables".
Born in Illinois in 1920, he grew up in California where he attended Pasadena Junior College and the Playhouse, and worked in west coast radio.
Aspiring to the theater, Mr. McGoohan started as a stagehand at the Sheffield Playhouse and worked his way up to leading man.
Margaret Roleke of Redding created the exhibition's lone participatory work, "Playhouse: Ballgame".
Even the eighteenth-century vogue for printed editions of Shakespeare, which often sought to rescue the plays from the perceived travesties of the playhouse, found his work faulty.
And Bronson Pinchot, now in "The Winter's Tale" at the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park, is in Westport Playhouse's last work, a musical called "Nicolette and Aucassin".
Underpinning all Routledge's choices – from her earliest days in rep at the Liverpool Playhouse to her work with Alan Bennett, who has written several roles for her, including that of the fussy, order-obsessed Peggy Schofield in the first of his television monologues, 1982's A Woman of No Importance – is her fascination with good writing, "this great, rich language".
