UDM Theatre Company comes full circle with its landmark 40th-anniversary show: The Tempest, in addition to reaching the 400-year milestone in 2011, was the university program's first-ever production. For a script that feels like an ending as well as a beginning, this staging (directed by Andrew Huff) rides a current of youthful exuberance, its best moments found in the playfulness of playing Shakespeare.

Huff's self-aware, make-do concept isn't itself novel, but its introduction via a clever prologue establishes the tone with incredible efficiency. Dr. Arthur J. Beer, faculty member and the production's Prospero, leads the cast in a table read of the initial shipwreck scene. His few remarks, cuts and staging notes, are subsequently implemented in the same scene replayed, using Melinda Pacha's piecemeal set and Mark Choinski's richly hued lights in tandem to make a low-budget yet effective version of the spectacle. This is what we have to work with, the device says, and this is how we'll tell this story. With a complete framework accomplished in minutes, the rest of the production is free to explore theatrical work-arounds that cleverly honor and subvert the play's fantastical elements, giving dialogue and relationship top billing over magic intervention.