New Swan 2018: A Midsummer Night's Dream

[I’m very happy to offer a post by Christopher Cassidy, assistant dramaturg on our shows this summer.]

Hermia and Helena. Helena and Hermia.  These faux-Greek names can get confusing.  To complicate matters further, these two women grew up together and are best friends! In some sense, Shakespeare intends us to be a bit confused, reaffirming Helena’s assertion that they “grew together/Like to a double cherry, seeming parted/ But yet an union in partition,/ Two lovely berried moulded on one stem” (III.2.208-11). And then there’s the matter of the love triangle.  Hermia loves Lysandra and Lysandra loves her. (We’ve made the character female in our production. More on this later.) But her father wants her to marry Demetrius. Demetrius loves Hermia, but Hermia isn’t interested.  And Helena loves Demetrius but he isn’t interested.  Then, because of Puck and Oberon’s mischief, Lysandra and Demetrius both fall for Helena. This in turn causes Helena to accuse Hermia of playing a mean trick on her with Demetrius and Lysandra.  Clear enough, huh? Hermahmah? And Helewah? Okay. What?  One of the trickiest parts of A Midsummer Night’s Dreamis distinguishing between the two. Fortunately, all of this can be clarified in production. Unfortunately, most productions don’t sufficiently parse the text to uncover the fact that Hermia and Helena have very distinct personalities. Continue reading “Helena and Hermia”

(In order to introduce our vision of this production, I’m reproducing part of a conversation between myself and Eli Simon, the play’s director, that will appear in the programme.)

Ian Munro: What inspired your approach to this production of Midsummer?

Eli Simon: I’ve long been contemplating the heterocentric nature of Shakespeare’s lovers—from Romeo and Juliet to Rosalind and Orlando to the four young lovers in Midsummer—and I decided to change Lysander to Lysandra. Love is love whether it’s straight or gay. Once that change was securely in place, it seemed natural to set the play in the 1950s, a time when being queer was shifting from intolerance toward the beginnings of acceptance.

IM: I think this is a very valuable intervention: beyond the ethical statement it makes, it opens up a lot of interesting angles in terms of how the play explores issues of love and desire. Of course, it creates some considerable friction with the patriarchal structures of the play, but that is worthwhile as well.

ES: Yes, it creates interesting frictions throughout the play. For example, Hermia and Helena’s friendship was extremely intimate—they often emptied their bosoms in counsel sweet upon primrose-beds in the woods—but Lysandra came between them by sweeping Hermia off her feet. All the lovers are at a time of exploration in love, desire, and relationships, and if nothing was what it seemed, all of this is heightened beyond the scope of their wildest dreams in the woods.

IM: What might take the audience by surprise about this production?

ES: We let the fairy tale live in the “real” world and the fairy world to have a more scruffy, edgy feel. This may not be how most of us think about Shakespearean fantasylands. This particular Arden is filled with danger and it’s often more of a nightmare than a sweet dream.

IM: Are there particular challenges you’ve faced directing this production?

ES: It seems as though everyone’s worked on this play…except me. I’ve never been in it, and it’s my first time directing it. What I’ve discovered is a frenetic energy with the trickery, music, and continual shifts of fortune. I’m focused on helping the actors channel that energy so that they aren’t consumed by the madness.

I mentioned before how terrifying the events in the forest were for the four lovers.  Lysander, madly in love with Hermia, suddenly finds himself madly in love with Helena.  And “madly” is the key term: in contrast to the rational world of the court, the woods is a place of irrationality, of madness and desire and unfathomable urges and experiences.

Among the mechanicals, Bottom is transformed into an ass, and then seduced by Titania, the Queen of the Fairies, who is under the spell of the love potion.  Upon awakening in the woods the next day, he declares:

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was…Methought I was—there is no man can tell what.  Methought I was—and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Patsy Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom. And I will sing it at the latter end of a play.

This is the role of art: it takes the things that are unfathomable, inexplicable, overwhelming, and makes them comprehensible.  It puts us in contact with the terror of human existence, what “the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen,” but it also protects us from those realities by articulating them, giving them a shape and form and meaning. Continue reading “Art and the Imagination”

Before they rehearse, the mechanicals must deal with (what they think are) some thorny theatrical problems.

One concerns moonlight. Pyramus and Thisbe meet secretly by moonlight, and the mechanicals can’t figure out how to bring moonlight into the great hall of the palace. They consider just opening a window and letting the real moonlight shine in, but in the end they decide that they must have an actor come in with a lantern to present the figure of Moonlight, and explain to the audience that he’s shining light on the scene.

The joke, of course, is that this isn’t how theater works. If you want moonlight, you have someone say, “the moon is so bright tonight,” and your audience will understand. Or, as Shakespeare had just done, you have a character—the very character who decides they need someone with a lantern—say, “meet me in the palace wood..by moonlight,” and you’re done. Shakespeare thus subtly contrasts his own theatrical prowess with the inept, stumbling mistakes of this comical troupe. Continue reading “The Lion”

The subplot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream concerns a group of Athenian citizens—later dubbed “rude mechanicals,” or uncivilized laborers, by a disdainful Puck—who have bizarrely decided to perform a play for the wedding of Duke Theseus: “The Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe.” Their hope is that their play will please the Duke and get them patronage, although they also seem caught up in the idea of theater.  They’re all terrible actors—especially Bottom, who will play Pyramus, who suffers from the delusion that he is a magnificent actor—and have had no theatrical training. Their leader and playwright can’t write to save his life. They have only the vaguest idea of how the theater works, in fact: what the conventions of performance are, or how theatrical illusion is created.  But they refuse to let any of this stop them.

Why does Shakespeare include the rude mechanicals, who seem so out of place, tonally?  Why does A Midsummer Night’s Dream end with the staging of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” which doesn’t advance the plot at all?

One kind of answer is that this (like most of Shakespeare’s plays) is a play about theater.  Having these untrained artisan bumblers put on a play allows Shakespeare to reflect on his own craft in both simple and complex ways.

Continue reading “Rude Mechanicals”

As in many of Shakespeare’s plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is mostly structured through two locations.  (Although there is, unusually, a third location that I will talk about in a subsequent post.)  We begin and end the play in the court of Theseus, Duke of Athens, and his bride Hippolyta, but in between we find ourselves in the woods outside town, ruled by Oberon and Titania.  The locations are similar in some respects—a point underscored in many productions (though not ours) by double-casting Theseus with Oberon and Hippolyta with Titania—but symbolically they are complete opposites.  The court is a human society, a place of order and civilization and the law, a place of rationality and reason.  The woods is a non-human society, a natural world, a place of disorder and danger, a place of irrationality, madness, and desire.

Continue reading “Into the Woods”

(To kick things off, I’m going to put up some general posts on the thematics of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in general, working my way towards some of the specifics of our production.)

Shakespeare’s comedies often seem kind of silly, and they often have titles that suggest their insubstantiality: As You Like It, What You Will, Much Ado About Nothing and especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which seems to suggest that the whole play is a kind of dreamy frolic, not worth lingering over. But the manifest triviality of the play masks a lot of serious material. A central serious focus of the play—from our opening exchange between Duke Theseus and Hippolyta, the Amazonian queen he defeated in battle and is about to wed, to the fate of Hermia if she does not submit to her father’s will, to the ongoing strife between the fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania—is gender.

Continue reading “Gender and Power”

For those unfamiliar with the play, a brief rundown of its ridiculous events:

Theseus, the Duke of Athens, is preparing for his marriage to Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. Egeus enters with his daughter Hermia and her suitors, Demetrius and Lysandra. Egeus wishes Hermia to marry Demetrius, but Hermia is in love with Lysandra. Theseus warns Hermia that disobeying her father could result in her being sent to a convent or even executed. Defiant, Hermia and Lysandra plan to elope that night through the woods outside the city. They confide in Hermia’s friend Helena, who was once engaged to Demetrius. Hoping to regain his love, Helena tells Demetrius of their plan; Demetrius heads to the woods, with Helena following close behind. Meanwhile, a group of Athenian workers have decided to perform a wedding play for the duke and his bride, despite their utter lack of theatrical experience or talent. They also go to the woods, in order to rehearse away from prying eyes.

The woods are ruled by Oberon and Titania, the fairy king and queen, who are at odds over a changeling child, held by Titania and coveted by Oberon. Oberon sends his servant Puck to acquire a magic flower that causes love at first sight. After drugging Titania in her sleep, Oberon tells Puck to use the flower on Demetrius, whom he observed acting cruelly towards Helena. Puck accidentally drugs Lysandra instead; his attempt to remedy this results in both Demetrius and Lysandra spurning Hermia and wooing Helena. They all quarrel, fight, and run mad through the woods, led on by Puck, until they collapse into sleep.

Puck also disrupts the workers’ rehearsal by giving Bottom, their buffoonish chief actor, the head of an ass. Bottom stumbles upon the sleeping Titania, who promptly falls in love with him and surrenders the changeling child to Oberon. Oberon gives her an antidote to the love flower, which Puck has previously used on Lysandra (but not Demetrius). As everyone awakes, all is well: Titania reconciles with Oberon, Lysandra loves Hermia, Demetrius loves Helena, and a bewildered Bottom is human again. Encountering the four lovers and learning of their changed affections, Theseus overrules Egeus and declares that all shall be married that day, including Hermia and Lysandra. After the group wedding, the newlyweds watch the workers perform their play, with much tragical mirth. The play over, the couples retire, perchance to dream again, as the fairies bless their marriage beds and Puck begs our applause.