If you’ve been teaching for a while, you’ve probably at some point included A Midsummer Night’s Dream on a syllabus. Perhaps you’ve blasted through the play in a week or two, as I have. (When I teach Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, I use Shakespeare’s play to illustrate Lightness, the first of Calvino’s five literary qualities.) Or perhaps you’ve spent more time with the work, bringing in a novel—say, Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love or Chris Adrian’s The Great Night—that draws on Shakespeare’s lunatics and lovers. No matter. The next time you teach the play, do me (well, do your students) a favor: Add Donald Antrim’s “An Actor Prepares” to your reading list.
The story, narrated by the half-cracked Drama Professor Reginald Barry, leads off Antrim’s new collection, The Emerald Light in the Air. (It was originally published in The New Yorker in 1999.) Barry has been asked to stage Shakespeare’s “great festive comedy” as a way to commemorate his college’s founding; instead, the performance becomes a coda to a memorial service for a recently drowned faculty member. (“We’re going to have a tough house,” Barry tells his undergraduate performers, before the debauched interpretation begins.) The production itself is a thing of wonder: A crazed duck attacks a blind Puck, who sings (for the first time, as if possessed) gloriously and then drowns (actually drowns, I think) in a mucky pit. Mustardseed and Moth rip off their G-strings and “sixty-nine atop the tree-house stage set.” Barry himself, in the role of Lysander (“What would a skinny, balding, unmarried, childless forty-six-year-old Lysander—a PhD with hair on his back—mean within the context of an otherwise college-age show?”), snuggles with the cheerleader-outfitted Helena, while the other players, “the demons and mere mortals,” couple in the gloaming. The college’s president is heard to shout, “Reginald! This is criminal! Criminal!” Again, no matter.
Does Antrim’s story grow, as Hippolyta would have it, to something of great constancy? It does not; it must not. But it ends, as it must, in the “deep of night, late even for the fireflies. A few appeared here and there. Soon they would be gone. In the meantime, the Lord of Athens lit a cigarette and waited in the wings.”
