Worlds collide in playful ways in Midsummer

by John Glore

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream has served as a creative playground for many a director over the years. That’s partly because it’s one of the bard’s most joyous comedies, making it easy for artists and audiences alike to have fun with it. Moreover, for a director developing a production approach, the play invites a spirit of playfulness and imaginative freedom.

Without regard to historical fact, Shakespeare has combined three very different worlds in his play, commingling characters from the royal court of ancient Athens with a band of bumpkin tradesmen who might have walked straight out of Shakespeare’s Stratford-on-Avon, all crossing paths with a tribe of fairies out of the Renaissance folklore of the British Isles. The result is an imaginary and theatrical world whose primary locale is a woodland dreamscape in which anything can happen—where unsuspecting humans may easily find themselves getting tangled in snarls of lust and misunderstanding. A director’s imagination can move in interesting, surprising directions when given that liberated world as a starting point.

But before introducing the particular approach that SCR’s production will take, a review of the story is in order.

We begin in the court of Theseus, a ruler of civilized antiquity who stands for rigid rationality, for law and supreme order. Although Theseus is about to celebrate his own nuptials with his betrothed, Hippolyta, there is no room in Theseus’ strict world for as feckless an emotion as love. That’s the reason a foursome of confused young lovers must flee the court in order to pursue their romantic dreams.

The haven they choose, however, is a forest world where emotion runs rampant and subconscious desires reign—as embodied by a band of fairies who apply their mischievous magic to the lives of the humans in their midst. Adding fuel to the fire, the king and queen of the fairies, Oberon and Titania, are engaged in a wildly irrational battle royal that throws the whole world out of joint for awhile. This affects not only the refugee romantics but also the band of clownish craftsmen who have come to the forest, led by an endearing braggart-buffoon named Bottom, to rehearse an entertainment for Theseus’ wedding day. Little does Bottom know he will have a rendezvous with destiny on this delirious night, in the form of a fairy-prankster named Puck who manages to make an ass of him while also meddling in the love lives of the two couples from the court.

In short order chaos reigns in the dream-world. Yet by daybreak all has been set aright. Harmony has been achieved, not only between feuding familiars, but also within and between whole worlds. Where emotion and reason had been segregated in their separate provinces, they have now achieved a union, a marriage in the lives of those who experienced the dream.

Scenic Designer Cameron Anderson's tree branches move about, floating in the air.  The glowing branches appear to be covered in pale bark, but look closer—the bark is actually glowing pages from books.

Director Mark Rucker, one of SCR’s favorite interpreters of Shakespeare’s work, gives us a Dream that takes full advantage of the play’s creative possibilities. Working with his designers he has imagined a world that borrows its imagery from multiple places and times—just as the fairies in Rucker’s production have borrowed (or, more accurately, stolen) liberally from humans in order to acquire the raw material for their clothes and living places.

In some important ways Rucker’s vision of the play centers on his understanding of the true nature of the fairy world familiar to Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Today (thanks largely to popular illustrations from the Victorian era), we tend to think of fairies as generally benign creatures, diminutive, gossamer-winged, dressed in spider silk and flower petals. Rucker’s research indicated that the Elizabethans had a very different view of fairies and their ilk:  They were not necessarily small, and they were seldom nice. They made many kinds of mischief in the lives of the common folk and if you stumbled upon their abode in an enchanted wood, you did so with dread. Rucker’s fairies take their cue from that sensibility:  They are petty thieves with a decided mean streak. And if, in the end, they put things right among the humans whose lives they have disrupted, it’s only because it amuses them to do so, and because Oberon’s reconciliation with his fiery-tempered bride puts him in a congenial mood.

Rucker has assembled a first-rate cast for his Dream, including a number of actors who have appeared many times at SCR:  Among the veterans, Susannah Schulman (Titania) and Patrick Kerr (Bottom) join founding company members Richard Doyle and Hal Landon Jr. and longtime SCR stalwart John David Keller (playing three of Bottom’s company). Kathleen Early returns to play Hermia after making her SCR debut earlier this season as Catherine Givings in In the Next Room or the vibrator play. Her beloved Lysander will be played by Nick Gabriel, last seen here as the lovable art-lover Warren, in last season’s musical, Ordinary Days. The cast of 20 also includes quite a few fresh faces among the aristocrats, bumpkins and fairies of Shakespeare’s rollicking comedy.

Dream Friends

Michael J. Davis and director Daniel Sullivan at the opening of Hamlet.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream will come to life onstage with help from a staunch SCR supporter, Honorary Corporate Producer Deutsche Bank, a member of the Corporate Circle since 1992.  In 2000 the bank was Honorary Associate Producer of Amy’s View, and in 2007 joined the ranks of  Honorary Corporate Producers by helping underwrite Hamlet, followed the next season by The Importance of Being Earnest.

Michael J. Davis, West Coast Regional Market Manager, Deutsche Bank Trust Company America, is a member of SCR’s Board of Trustees.

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