A 'Midsummer' Quartet

Anne Bogart, Martha Clarke, Edward Hall and Mark Lamos enter the visual world of Shakespeare's most fanciful comedy

Introduction by Randy Gerner

"But we are spirits of a different sort," Oberon says in A Midsummer Night's Dream. It's only a tossed-off remark, but it might as well serve as an apt avowal for all those stage directors who have taken the fairy-tale script to bed and awakened to discover that Shakespeare himself has administered the juice of "love-in-idleness" in their eyes.

If that flowering herb can cause Titania to become infatuated with a bumbling actor with the head of an ass, so have any number of maestros surrendered to the play's earthy lyricism and tipsy-erotic dream logic. In pushing the limits of the conceivable, the Dream has spurred experimenters to seek a radically new scenic language. Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, for one, asked in 1900 for "10 special flying fairies, 4 fireflies, 9 imps, 4 sea urchins, 8 wood elves," as well as live rabbits and birds. Max Reinhardt staged the play some 13 times from 1905 to 1934, each version offering bolder scenic choices that allowed for an awareness of artifice. In 1914, Harley Granville Barker and designer Norman Wilkinson set robot-like painted-gold fairies against a minimalist steel-gray canvas. "What is really needed," Barker suggested, "is a great white box." A half-century later, Peter Brook restated that challenge, replacing the enchanted forest with Sally Jacob's white-box set for his 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production, where Titania and Puck observed human follies while swinging on trapezes.

The irony, of course, is that A Midsummer Night's Dream was not popular in its day. Its love juice failed to stir the imagination of Elizabethan audiences, who first caught sight of it in the winter of 1596. The play was rarely performed until 1840, ushering in a rage for fairies, goblins, sprites, pixies and elves in the 19th century.

The 20th-century taste for the Dream—as Gary Jay Williams reports in his magisterial account of the play's production history Our Moonlight Revels—drops darker potions on our wakeful eyelids. Romantic strains have been smashed, in-your-face eros pointed up or gender and power conflicts spotlit in the nightmarish concoctions of John Hancock of San Francisco Actor's Workshop; Alvin Epstein of Connecticut's Yale Repertory Theatre; Liviu Ciulei of Minneapolis's Guthrie Theater; and Ariane Mnouchkine. Robert Lepage, in 1992, abstracted the young lovers' quarrel as a mud-wrestling event in a muddy bank around a pool. "We decided it would be a dangerous place," Lepage wrote in a program that alluded to Freud, Jung and Jan Kott, "like in those dreams when you want to run away and you can't because your feet are stuck." A glowering bulb swung above the gloom.

In the following pages, we've solicited comments from four master directors about their quartet of 2004 Midsummers. Like their historic predecessors, these directors seek the play's essence in a visual language—and each has chosen a single production photo as the emblem of his or her vision. Mark Lamos, no stranger to the Dream, recalls his bright, spirited staging for the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., which ran into Jan. '04. Anne Bogart, in her director's notes, discusses the SITI Company's The Grapes of Wrath–inspired interpretation, which ran through the end of February at San Jose Repertory Theatre in California. Director and choreographer Martha Clarke elucidates her stylish take on the play at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., where she mixed Beckettian darkness with slaphappy lightness, through Feb. 28. And Edward Hall, whose all-male Propeller ensemble performs its same-sex Dream at the Brooklyn Academy of Music March 16–27, speaks of guys exploring their feminine sides as he displays a Puck in net tutu and striped tights. And, yes, his actors kiss onstage.

Is it a coincidence that winter was the season for a Midsummer quartet? Probably not, for, as Oberon would say: "May all to Athens back again repair / Think no more of this night's accidents / But as the fierce vexation of a dream."


Mark Lamos

Shadows and Reconciliation

The initial ideas for this A Midsummer Night's Dream began with shadows: "If we shadows have offended..." I began working with the design team with that bit of text in mind. I thought about the way children use shadows to make theatre—remember sitting in the dark with a flashlight, trying to scare your sister? And thus the idea of the Changeling Boy as a central, synthesizing element came into play for us.

Costume designer Constance Hoffmann gave Titania and Oberon immense staffs that mirrored the boy's hobbyhorse. These two could therefore be seen as figments of a synthesizing imagination—the boy's attempt to reconcile the Father and Mother figures. At first the designers and I thought he'd be the only actor to fly, but ultimately a number of actors flew, whirling in and out of those moving shadows. Children have inexplicably made themselves central to my work for years, and here, to my surprise, it happened again. Anyway, as the great literary critic Harold Bloom points out, the Fairyland scenes may be seen as a custody dispute of sorts between Oberon and Titania for ownership of the boy.

Our production also played with scale—Titania and Oberon first appeared as 12-foot-tall winged creatures, gliding over the other fairies, who looked as if they'd stolen bits of cast-off clothing from various poor closets and jumble sales.

So our production began with a little boy in pale striped pajamas, carrying a flashlight and making shadows on the wall in a dark room. These shadows, enhanced by lighting designer Robert Wierzel with projections designed by set designer Leiko Fuseya, reappeared in Fairyland, tumbling across the set in a dreamy, undersea sort of way—and the boy was clearly the controlling element. He appeared in Titania's "bower," a be-twigged and rotting version of Hippolyta's chaise. He assisted the hissing, threatening fairies in the Lullabye: "Weaving spiders come not near!" Finally, after dancing the reconciliation dance with the fairy king and queen—choreographed by Sean Curran, inspired by Indian kathakali—he flew into Puck's arms at the end of the production as the entire company was quietly revealed, along with the backstage crew, moving forward to regard the audience and, ultimately, accept their applause. —M.L.


Edward Hall

A Different Creature

With Propeller, an all-male company, we always search for the "play within the play" to find a device we can then use to give the actors freedom to tell the story exploring every element of its manifestation. I chose this image of Simon Scardifield portraying Puck in Propeller's A Midsummer Night's Dream for one obvious reason: Since he signs the play off, it felt reasonable to ask for Puck to introduce the evening in a nonverbal way, and for us to follow him as a constant throughout the show. Puck is our way in, creating the form through which we describe the four strands of the story in Shakespeare's comedy.

In this photograph, Puck is sitting at the edge of the stage and talking to the audience. (Simon also doubles in the role of Moonshine in the mechanicals' play.) Puck is part male, part female, part sprite and part dancer. Since we're an all-male troupe, it's always good to have a bit of chest hair showing over the women's costumes. I knew I wanted Puck's hair to be short and roguish, like a punk rocker's. Michael Pavelka, Midsummer's designer, wanted it tinted. Simon ran with that idea and played the ballerina a bit in rehearsals. Then we thought the stockings would be good. Finally we ended up with the look in the photograph.

For the past seven years, Propeller has aimed to perform Shakespeare's plays as they would have been done in his time. We're looking to describe the plays using certain traditional aspects of Elizabethan performance and mixing it with a slightly modern or surreal aesthetic. Our actors provide their own musical accompaniment or convey environmental sounds through physical gestures. We tend not to rely on recorded sound or technology too much, because for us anything that the actors can create can intensify the connection between the audience and the story. When the actors portray women, we don't try to con the audience into believing that the man they see is actually a woman. Instead, we actively remind you that you are looking at a man. The actors do explore their feminine sides, as when they put on white powdered faces and rouged cheeks, and there are hints of gender and camp. But ultimately we strive to create a different creature, to transcend any literal idea of gender. By doing this, you can find yourself questioning more deeply the nature of the love, for example, between Oberon and Titania, and asking what it truly means when Lysander expresses his love for Helena. Having male actors portray all the Shakespeare parts can abstract stage relationships in very interesting ways so that you listen more acutely to the way the characters describe their feelings.

In Elizabethan England, actors could not physically express love on a stage in the way we do now. Instead, the writers have the characters talk about their feelings very beautifully. The more intense the feelings are in a Shakespeare play, the more eloquently a character will describe them. As I always say to actors in Propeller, "Don't feel love. Don't feel anger. Describe it. If your feelings are getting in the way of that description, stop."

When people talk about love in Shakespeare, they rarely define it as being heterosexual or homosexual; instead, I like to think that they are talking about the idea of love, which is a universal theme. During Shakespeare's time, the upper echelons of society were not so concerned with defining a person's sexuality as we are now. Sometimes, when you do same-sex Shakespeare, you can get closer to the ideas under investigation, and I hope we have done this in our production of the Dream. —E.H.


Martha Clarke

Nightmares and the Nature of Love

The photograph you see here is from Act 3, Scene 1, of A Midsummer Night's Dream, where Bottom, newly fixed with his ass's head, meets Titania's fairies for the first time. The fairies find him hilarious and laugh at him while performing a series of tight somersaults over his head in a move that my dancers call "popcorn." The tone of the image is deliberately ambiguous—simultaneously sweet, comic and nightmarish, depending on whose perspective we're viewing it from.

That ambiguity cuts to the heart of Midsummer, where different versions of reality are continually intersecting and contradicting each other. Such moments of dislocation and unease were central to our production. In the first act, for example, Helena's outpouring of grief—"How happy some o'er other some can be"—was underscored with a recording of a haunting Chopin nocturne. As she finished her speech, a strange man entered one corner of the stage and started playing the same nocturne badly on a battered, tuneless piano. Helena noticed him with puzzlement as she left the stage, passing the mechanicals as they entered for their first scene.

The pianist turned out to be Peter Quince, whose amateur performance transformed the tone and function of the nocturne, and acted as an elegant bridge between the two episodes.

For me, the play is a series of interlocking dreams and nightmares that reflect and echo each other, and somehow all deal with the shifting nature of love. The production opened with a man resting in a large yellow armchair, intoning Theseus's magnificent speech from Act 5—"The lunatic, the lover and the poet / Are of imagination all compact"—which seems to me to be Midsummer's DNA. As he concluded, "Or in the night, imagining some fear, / How easy is a bush supposed a bear," a fairy flew behind a scrim, Titania's Indian Boy in her arms, as if flitting across the surface of his mind. The man turned to see a silent woman in the wings, and before we knew it, the couple had become Theseus and Hippolyta.

My longtime collaborators, set and costume designer Robert Israel and lighting designer James Ingalls, created the sparest possible environment: The set was a vast, dirt-covered rake inset with four pits, out of which Puck would crawl; a few chairs; and an old table, on top of which "Pyramus and Thisbe" was performed. The set came partly from the rough spareness of Anselm Kiefer and the surrealist photographer Robert Parke-Harrison; the costumes and the visual imagery were inspired by Ingmar Bergman's films, Goya's etchings and the paintings of Johann Heinrich Fussli, Odilon Redon, John Atkinson Grimshaw and Picasso's Rose Period.

The fairies were played by three dancers who performed on wires, creating an ethereal complement to the crude, barren set. Although the fairies flew through the air at certain moments, much of the time they used the flying rig to animate their bodies on the ground, taking one step and landing eight feet further across the stage. It requires great physical control and a wonderful use of breath to make such a gesture look like a single stride, but when it works, it ís magic. —M.C.


Anne Bogart

Grace on a Barren Landscape

We share, in these United States, a culture in which the separation between poor and rich becomes more pronounced every day. Due to massive political manipulations happening before our very eyes, we are becoming a stingier people, close-minded and scared. The economic realities have a severe impact on SITI Company. We are a touring company and normally perform in theatres and arts centers across the country. Due to severe budget cuts, these organizations cannot afford us any more, due to our prohibitive technical requirements. I decided to take these realities seriously and incorporate them into the fabric of the conception of this production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I wanted to tackle the necessary magic in Midsummer, not with stage effects, but rather with the imagination and physicality of the actors. To begin with, our production features only eight actors—Barney O'Hanlon, who plays Puck, is the only one with a single role. Everyone else plays multiple characters: Athenians, mechanicals and fairies. I decided to set the play on a barren landscape inspired by the American depression-era dust bowl, when poverty was a way of life. I wanted to create the necessary elegance, lightness and magic from very little. Neil Patel designed a simple set with a mirrored floor and a backdrop of clouds, which you can see in this photo of Bottom and Titania. The props include a giant Victrola, an immense old-fashioned radio and seven "ghost-lamps," the kind you see on stage when a theatre is empty. Basta. And so I turn to the actors and say: "Please make magic."

From rehearsal, I've learned that the poverty of our times is not limited to the economy. Shakespeare had a much wider definition of what it means to be human than what we assume nowadays. Near the end of the journey of Midsummer, after being blinded by desire, darkness, drugs and magic, the lovers awaken to realize that they own nothing, know nothing and understand less than ever. And their lives are suddenly wider and better off for this awareness. What I see on the stage in Midsummer is a world luxuriant in imagination, color, passion and humanity. I want to infect my own life with this potential for grace. —A.B.

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