So I’m here in Boston, directing a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Boston Theatre Works. I started rehearsals a week ago, and we have our press opening in about two and a half weeks, on February 3rd. David Lynn asked me to keep an occasional blog about the rehearsal process, and I’m finally sitting down to start it. Today, I thought I’d say a little about how I’m approaching the play, and then in future posts I can start to talk about rehearsals.
I’ve directed the play before, about a dozen years ago, so it’s been interesting to start over, and re-imagine the play for this production. In his book, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom calls Midsummer Shakespeare’s “first undoubted masterwork,” though he despairs, with typical disdain, that “every production I have been able to attend has been a brutal disaster.” Happily, his first opinion is widely shared, and his second is not. Midsummer has been one of Shakespeare’s most constantly produced plays for over four centuries, and in a wide variety of ways. Productions have featured children as fairies, the removal of entire plots, conversion into opera, live rabbits and even deer, and the creation of vast pastoral forest sets that took so much time to bring on and off that most of the actual text had to be left out of the performance.
When Boston Theatre Works approached me about directing Midsummer, they told me they wanted to work with a relatively small cast for the production. This was in part for financial reasons, but also as a sort of challenge, to see how the play might open up through a small ensemble. In preparing to present a proposal to the theatre, I began to think about what central issues in the play I might particularly be able to explore with a smaller group of actors. I found myself focusing on a crucial idea in the play: change and transformation.
In Midsummer, the characters we meet first, in Athens, are faced with apparently insoluble problems, and it is only through change–through experiencing new roles and perspectives–that they find their way past their problems, or, one might say, that their problems dissolve.
At the start of the play, Theseus, the Duke of Athens, has captured Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, and intends to marry her, but she does not seem particularly enthusiastic. A young woman named Hermia wants to marry a young man named Lysander, but her father wants her to marry Demetrius instead. Theseus tells Hermia she must obey her father’s will, or become a nun (softening the father’s demand that she obey or be killed). Additionally, Hermia’s best friend Helena loves Demetrius, but he is interested only in winning Hermia.
The four young lovers run off to the forest, where they undergo a series of transformations and changes of affection, brought on by the fairies who live there. In the forest we meet Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the fairies, who are engaged in their own dispute over an orphaned Indian boy. Also in the forest are a group of working men, the mechanicals, preparing a play for the Duke’s wedding. One of them, Bottom, is transformed into a donkey, and Titania is made to fall in love with him.
I ended up proposing a production in which the playing of multiple roles by individual actors is a crucial element. Doubling becomes one of the ways that characters expand their own experience, their sense of the breadth of possibility in the world. In the play as written, characters already experiment with taking on affections, species, and gender other than those they begin with. Doubling my ensemble of actors–I am working with a company of eight–becomes a means of exploring this central idea in the play.
The actors playing the four lovers in my production are doubling as four of the mechanicals. Puck, Oberon’s attendant, will also play Philostrate, Theseus’ attendant, as well as Robin Starveling, another of the mechanicals. Bottom will double as Hermia’s father, Egeus. I am particularly excited, however, about another set of doublings I am planning, one which I have neither seen nor read about anywhere in the long history of productions (though I have no doubt a more diligent search could turn up a precedent).
In 1970, the British director Peter Brook staged what became one of the most influential of all twentieth century productions of Midsummer. The production was startling in many ways, and one of Brook’s ideas was to double Theseus and Oberon, and to double Hippolyta and Titania. This made sense, as each couple is dealing with marital conflict played out as war or global disruption. In a way, the fairy king and queen became a dream version of Theseus and Hippolyta, and the resolution of the dream conflict in the forest helps resolve the conflict in Athens. This doubling has become almost the norm in the decades since Brook’s production.
I proposed instead to arrange the doublings such that each of the two switches gender in the dream world. Theseus becomes Titania, and Hippolyta becomes Oberon. This doubling allows the production to explore further the ways that change and transformation, the broadening of experience and the first hand knowledge of new perspectives, bring about the play’s comic solutions to its potentially tragic problems.
Of course, all of this sounded exciting to me in theory, but has led to plenty of complications in practice. More on that in another post.