Thoughts (after all) about Shakespeare

Last week I began a post to talk about the thrills of working on and performing Shakespeare, but it got sidetracked with a report from an Every Brilliant Thing rehearsal in which I used an analytical strategy which I developed for As You Like It.

Today there will be no digressions.

By my chair in the living room I have one of my stacks of books-to-be-read, and one of those books is Shakespeare After All, by Marjorie Garber. Professor Garber writes clearly and entertainingly about the thematic design/complexity of Shakespeare’s plays. It is a big, thick book, one that I dip into every now and then.

This is what prompted my musings on Shakespeare, in case you were wondering.

After the ill-fated As You Like It (canceled one week before opening in March 2020), my next production was Midsummer Night’s Dream, for Southern Arc Dance, in April 2023. Paulo Manso de Sousa, Southern Arc’s artistic director, asked me to direct his ballet dancers in a production that would use dance as well as text. And we’d perform it in the garden of the History Center.

This was my third production of Midsummer, the only Shakespeare I have directed more than once.

The first was 1978. I drove to Roanoke, VA, got married to my Lovely First Wife, drove back to Newnan, and had auditions the following week. (We still do not discuss this appalling lack of marital commitment.) This was a summer student production, the Newnan Associated Summer Theatre Youth, aka NASTY.

It was a straightforward production, in what is now the Wadsworth Auditorium, proscenium and all. Interestingly, considering the next two productions, my original intent was to stage it on the front steps of the auditorium, but the traffic noise on U.S. 29 there was too much, so we moved it inside.

Costumes were vaguely Regency. I played Oberon. My old friend, the late Greg Lee, played Bottom. It was the first Shakespeare that Newnan had ever seen. It was a long time ago, but I remember the cast as being solid and adventurous. Most of them went on to further productions with NASTY and Newnan Community Theatre Company.

Apologies for not captioning the photos with IDs — all the files connected with that era are long gone, and my memory for names has only worsened in the interval.

The second production was in 1997. By that point, NCTC had moved into an old warehouse down on First Ave, the Manget-Brannon building, sharing the space with an artists’ collective. We were broke, and I seem to recall it was one of those periods where I had attempted to let go the reins and hand them over to others — and it was not an effective move.

I had gotten home from my first summer as assistant program director for instruction at the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program, and I had to figure out how we were going to mount a Shakespeare with no money. I reconnoitered what we had on hand, and all I found was two large bolts of fabric, one of tan flannel and one of lilac chiffon.

I mean to say, wot?

To this day I don’t know where that fabric came from. Perhaps a donation while I was out of town? In any event, I sat down with my friend Marc to brainstorm approaches to the text, and we came up with three words: DARK. DREAM. DESIRE. These were our themes.

We had just enough money to buy some 2x2 lumber, to make rectangular frames. Along the back we stapled the tan flannel; across the front, the lilac chiffon. We suspended these around the playing area. When the audience arrived, they saw a large white square wall onstage, and the opening scene (in Athens) was played in front of it.

After the second scene, when the Rude Mechanicals make their plans to rehearse their play in the woods, that white wall slowly lifted into the ceiling. (A crew on the second floor pulled the thing up with ropes.) From the curtains a troupe of very odd looking beings — the fairies — emerged and immediately began to “encourage” the audience to pick up their chairs and move them off the seating risers and out into the playing area. The tidy world of Athens was dissolving into the DARK chaos of the woods.

And it was CHAOS. The actors had free rein as to where they would enter and exit — after all, we couldn’t predict where the audience would be on any given night — and the fairies were given four guidelines:

They could observe the action.
They could ignore the action.
They could assist the action.
They could impede the action (as long as they didn’t actually derail it).

This resulted in hijinks and shenanigans and it was beautiful.

The chaos of II.ii and the mismatched lovers went even further, devolving into some rather athletic business. In one rehearsal, when Lysander awakes under the spell of the love juice and falls in love with Helena, it was obvious that the first thing he saw was not Helena, but Demetrius — they all froze, having blown the blocking. Before they could break out of the scene, I yelled at them to keep going, just change the pronouns.

It was wonderfully funny, and after Hermia rejoined the melee they all ended up on the floor in a big puppy pile, at which point I called “cut.” After that, Demetrius and Helena were more careful about where they positioned themselves before Lysander awoke.

I played Theseus; Greg Lee once again played Bottom.

At the end of the play, the Rude Mechanicals came out to strike their props. All around them the fairies sang their pretty little round, unseen, although Bottom thought he might have felt something. As the fairies left and Puck began the epilog, the Mechanicals continued striking… the actual set: They unhooked the ropes and lowered all those diorama walls, revealing the bare walls of the theatre and the cast changing clothes, removing makeup, etc. Puck finished his epilogue — “no more yielding but a dream” — and in the last photo above, intoned “DARK — DREAM — DESIRE.”

And that brings us to last spring, when I found myself teaching ballet dancers how to “do” Shakespeare.

This production was going to be even more outside-the-box than 1997’s version. We would begin on the front lawn of the History Center, at a cocktail party for Theseus and his fiancée Hippolyta. The Mechanicals were servers. Cast members would circulate through the party, chatting with the audience and gossiping. When Theseus ordered Philostrate to round up entertainment for their wedding night, the closest Mechanical would get excited, shove his tray into the hands of the nearest audience member, and go tell Peter Quince that his big break was here. Also, at some point Egeus would overhear the gossip about Hermia and Lysander, and zut! we were launched into the world of the play: “Full of vexation come I, with complaint/Against my child, my daughter Hermia.”

Once we were through I.ii, a flock of small fairies bearing glowing globes would appear and, after dancing, entice the audience to follow them to the garden in the rear of the house, where the rest of the play would be performed.

As in 1978, the traffic noise from the street was just too much, and so we cut the front lawn bit and just started in the garden.

And it appears that I don’t have very many photos of this show. I thought I did. Oh well.