525,600 Productions: Measure Your Life in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

If you go to the theatre or catch an occasional Shakespeare-in-the-park, you have probably seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

If you are a performer, you’ve almost certainly been in at least one production of the play.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream has everything contemporary theatre companies can hope for: name recognition, fun parts for a variety of types, and almost-actor-proof comedic bits. Oh, yeah, and it’s public domain, so no royalties required.

There’s a lot to love in this story of two sets of star-crossed lovers. To be brief: Hermia loves Lysander, but Demetrius loves Hermia, but Helena loves Demetrius. The King and Queen of the fairies are fighting, Bottom and his mechanicals want to put on a play, and Puck messes with everyone for the lulz. That’s plenty of opportunity for comedy without not-funny-anymore scenes like the one where Petrucchio starves Kate or the court forces Shylock to convert.

At the time of this writing, I’ve seen seven live versions of the Dream, not to mention various video adaptations. I’ve everyone in faux-thenian togas and half-naked fairies in gymnasts’ tights. I’ve seen professional and amateur actors alike struggle with exactly how to play Demetrius’s too-serious rape threat to Helena. I’ve seen asses’ head masks, hairy make-up, and everything in between. Some parts I’ve played; some parts I’ve seen friends play; and all the parts are so familiar that I can pinpoint exactly which lines have been cut when the director decides the show needs to be shorter.

So why, you might ask, did I agree to go see the Stratford Festival’s newest production this weekend? (Hint: it’s not just because my sister, who was in her school production in eighth grade, wanted to.)

It’s not even because of the great reviews, which weren’t in existence when I purchased my ticket.

No, I was interested in the casting: Chick Reid as Puck, two male performers listed intriguingly as “Oberon/Titania,” and a female performer as Lysander. Gender-bending casting interests me in general, but in a play like Dream, which is very much about what it means for one person to fall in love with another and what kinds of sexual attraction are wrong and right, it could be hot ice and wondrous strange snow (Shakespeare joke).

One of the joys of theatre is its ability to re-birth the same play in different times and have the same words and actions mean different things. Our Hamlet is and isn’t the Elizabethan’s Hamlet, whether or not the director decides to produce a period piece exactly as would have been done in the Globe in Shakespeare’s day or casts a teleconference robot draped in a Hot Topic shirt as the Danish prince. They’re the same because they’re both Hamlet; they’re different because different things have happened since the Elizabethan time. Different context means different meaning.

Non-traditional casting means non-traditional context means non-traditional meaning, if done well. That’s why I was excited to see this Dream — because if the artists involved pulled it off, I wouldn’t be seeing the same show all over again. I’d be seeing it for the first time.

So, you might ask, did it measure up?

Does Puck put a girdle about the Earth in forty minutes?

This production is hands-down the best Dream I’ve ever seen.

So often, the unifying theme of A Midsummer Night’s Dream gets lost when the focus is on the moment-to-moment jokes and the comedic structure instead of the overall feeling of the play. This is the first production I’ve seen in which that feeling shone through: love may be silly and undignified and beset with troubles, but in the end, it is awesome, in all its forms. Whether you are a comradely band of workers, a political power couple, or naive young paramours, the human links between you and the rest are what make life worth living.

The framework of the production was a backyard wedding reception: as the audience entered the theatre, corsages decorated some rows. A few audience members sat on picnic blankets on the edges of the set.  The actors, adults and children, laughed together on the stage and let audience members come up to see the set. A few chatted their way through the auditorium. They told us we were here to celebrate the marriage of our mutual friends, the couple. And when the show finally started and that couple came out to riotous applause, the rest of the cast informed them their wedding gift was a special performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Why am I describing this so carefully? Because it set the groundwork for the show as a labour of love: stories and jokes and thoughts you work hard to share because not because you have high-falutin’ ideas about “The Art” or “The Great Works of Literature” but because you care about your audience. The people, not the play, are the thing.

And it worked. The show felt like the show that’s usually experienced only in the minds of the cast and crew, the one where you laugh at one line because it’s funny and at another because Mike made the weirdest face when he said it this time; where serious lines make you giggle because you and your scene partner have an inside joke about them; and where you love even the villains because the people playing them are your friends.

Those out-there jokes you toss out in rehearsal after a long day to make the other actors laugh, knowing the director will never let them onstage? It felt like we, the audience, got to share them with the cast: cheesy pop-music interludes, off-the-cuff horseplay, and irreverent line amendments. And although Dream can be be a snarky, malicious play — vengeful Oberon wanting to cause pain to Titania, the court tearing apart Bottom’s sincere efforts at theatre, enough sniping between couples that despite the weddings of the denouement, you doubt they’ll be happy together after the curtain falls — there was none of that in this production. We all laughed with the targets of the jokes and never at them.

So, did the non-traditional casting choices work? They couldn’t have been better: every performer shone in his or her role. Were those casting choices the best thing about this show? Not by a long shot. Every performer made his or her character so funny, so warm and quirky and human, that there was no best part to this show.

Even the choice I initially found peculiar — to have a male actor play a female Titania — helped mould the inclusivity of the show. Actually, it seemed to say after the initial confusion wore off, a man in a dress isn’t funny just because he’s a man in a dress. He’s funny because he is doing funny things. A man in a dress can still portray a female character worthy of our admiration and respect (and vice versa, though that’s more common in Western theatre), and there’s nothing weird about that.

My one criticism is that I would have liked to see an even more diverse casting — the inclusion of performers of colour mostly in small, non-speaking parts seems a major oversight in a production whose strength is that it welcomes us all into silly, loving, infinitely varied humanity.

But even so, this Dream made me smile. This time, it’s Lord, what fools we mortals be! — and every moment of foolishness is a joy.