Title: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Rating: 5 Stars
In my attempts at trying to find interesting things to do while I’m semi-trapped at home, I received an e-mail from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I’ve written about them before. They are one of a very small number of world class theaters that regularly perform Shakespeare’s plays. They’re right up there with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Toronto and The Globe Theater in London (which could break my heart by permanently closing due to the coronavirus).
I’ve been to the OSF at least three or four times. I’d made somewhat tentative plans to go back again this year. Of course, the world then came to an end and all such plans went up in smoke.
The e-mail notified me that, for their own evaluation purposes, the OSF had videotaped a couple of this season’s now cancelled plays. For a fairly modest fee, I could stream one.
One of the plays was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s a silly, lighthearted play that, according to legend, was authored as a wedding entertainment. Hungry for entertainment myself, I dutifully paid my $15.
The last time that I saw this play, I wrote about the plot. I really don’t want to do it again and it is a play written some 425 years ago, so the plot is pretty stable. If you need a refresher, click here.
The big difference between this production and the last production is scale. The production that I saw in Seattle was put on by Fern Shakespeare. It is a tiny little playhouse (there might have been thirty people in the audience) and its budget is minuscule (I think that my VIP ticket was around $15).
The OSF is world class. The playhouse and the stage is one of the finest that I’ve seen. The actors are all top notch. It’s not unusual to see actors that have been part of the OSF company for more than ten years.
The Fern experience has the simple charm of people putting on a show just for the love of theater while OSF is like watching people operating at the top of their game.
One of the challenges with Shakespeare is making it your own. After all, the plays are over 400 years old. A play as popular as Midsummer has been performed many thousands of times over the years. Unless you’re trying to do some ultra traditional Ren Faire kind of staging, how do you make it relevant? Given Shakespeare’s reputation has a master stylist of language, how much do you really want to fuck with it?
Well, if you’re the OSF, the answer is, a fair amount. The director wanted to emphasize the very light nature of the comedy. He did so by inserting music into the play. Puck sang a couple of songs. Lysander walked around with a guitar that he’d strum. Helena had a banjo. None of this is in the source.
In fact, the play started, not with a prologue, but the actor playing Helena doing crowd work. She explained that the play was a work dedicated to love. She then asked for a raising of hands for married couples. She winnowed down the hands to zero in on one couple in the audience that had been married some 55 years. This might seem unusual but the average age at these plays skew, ahem, a little on the higher side. She got some basic information about them. At the close of the play, she then sang a song specifically for them. Since the play concludes with three marriages and the King of the fairies reuniting with his queen, celebrating a very long marriage seemed appropriate.
The two women at the heart of the main plot, Hermia and Helena, stole the play. These are large comedic roles as, much to their frustration, their respective beaus Lysander and Demetrius fall into and out of love with them. Both women made very good use of the silliness. As sometimes happens with Shakespeare’s comedies, the male protagonists were both overshadowed. They just seem a little dull. Why are these vivacious women pining for such milquetoast men? At least when it comes to his comedies, Shakespeare just seems to write better roles for women.
As in the last streamed play that I watched, it was absolutely no substitution for a live performance. The sound quality at times was sketchy (in all fairness, I was warned before I bought the ticket). Even so, it was quite enjoyable and well worth it.
The experience did emphasize how much I do miss live theater. It’s completely unknown when we will feel safe enough to attend a play again, but given our country’s direction, it’s not going to be anytime soon.
Wear your mask. Social distance. Wash your hands. It’s really not that hard.
dorkenstein 