This paper discusses the collaboration of Franz Marc and Hugo Ball to mount a production of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” in Munich in 1914. The play was never produced, but not for the reasons reported by earlier scholarship. This paper delves into the difficulties Marc encountered, and explains more fully than has been done before his essay devoted to this frustrating experience, “Das ‘abstrakte’ Theater” (1914). Also analyzed are two drawings Marc made of the Caliban and Miranda characters from “The Tempest,” and the influence of August Macke on Marc’s knowledge of and ideas about experimental theater, costumes, and masculine friendships.