A Midsummer Night's Dream by the American Shakespeare Center on Tour (2006).

Barrow, Craig

I really did not desire to see another production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in September, especially since I reviewed the play at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in the summer and had seen the comedy many, many times in the last forty-five years, but my students in a general education humanities course wanted to study the play and see the production, so who was I to say no? The performance was part of my university's 2006-07 Dorothy Patten Fine Arts Series, and the play was performed in the Roland Hayes Concert Hall at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, a venue that seats over five hundred in its steeply tiered seats and features a fenced orchestra pit for opera separating the stage from the audience. While the core of the Patten series audience is composed of high school and college students and faculty, probably half of the subscribers to the series are Chattanooga lawyers, doctors, journalists, and other professionals.

Even though I arrived a half-hour before the performance began, the actors of the American Shakespeare Center were already busy selling programs and CDs to the audience as well as singing and performing while the audience was being seated. The actors were not simply onstage but also in the aisles and the rows, justifying their behavior by bringing to memory the fruit sellers in Shakespeare's theatre. They did their best in a friendly way to provoke responses, and they received them, either in terms of applause, sales, jokes, or friendly conversation. They ushered about thirty people, volunteers, to both sides of the stage and seated them in the performance area. While the play was a sellout, with people sitting in the aisles and standing in the back of the theatre, the purpose of this seating on stage was to play off contact with the audience, those people on the stage and those in the tiered seating. The universal lighting of the entire theatre, audience and performance areas was a part of this plan. As the play program states in "Style: Original Staging Practices," Shakespeare's actors could see their audience; ASC actors can see you. When actors can see an audience, they can engage with an audience.... Leaving an audience in the dark can literally obscure a vital part of the drama as Shakespeare designed it. (1)

In the first scene with the Mechanicals in 1.2, Kevin Pierson, who played Bottom, buried his head in the lap of one of the girls from my class who was seated onstage in his repeated comic frustration in not being able to perform all the parts of the play. (2) While the girl was startled at first, the audience loved the interplay of actor and audience; such interplay occurred throughout the performance. The interplay with the audience had interesting corollaries, because in the course of performance, the audience did not lose attention when people were being seated well after the play began or when someone got up to go to the bathroom. No dramatic illusion was shattered; the actors were never upstaged by an audience's cough or sneeze. Perhaps the biggest surprise to the audience and to me was the absence of any intermissions. As "Style: Original Staging Practices" says, ASC tries to create "a continuous flow of dramatic action." (3) No one in the audience could lose the thread of the play's action because no break ever occurred.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Other staging practices of the company, such as doubling and the use of unadorned sets, did not have as great an effect on the novelty of the performance as the universal lighting and the performance without intermissions. While the company did cast men as women, creating some gender confusion among Titania's fairies, and women as men, when Robin Starveling is played by a woman, one did not immediately remember boys playing the parts of women in Shakespeare's day, which according to the staging practices of the company, was one of its intents.

All of the staging practices had as their origin the work the company does in its own theatre in Staunton, Virginia. The Blackfriars Playhouse is meant to be a recreation of Shakespeare's indoor theatre, and the stage practices that the touring company brings to new locations were developed first there.

At the heart of the comedy of American Shakespeare Center's A Midsummer Night's Dream are the Mechanicals. In nearly every case the actors hammed up every part, especially the wall. Kevin Pierson was a brilliant Bottom whose desire to act and bemused transformation the audience deeply appreciated.

What did not impress me, however, was the treatment of the fairies, and that may be because of all the stage tricks I remember from previous productions I have seen of the play. As the director, Jaq Bessell, confesses in "Midsummer Director's Diary," "I'm a keen advocate of bare-bones, original stage practice productions of Shakespeare, and yet on this occasion I confess I'd feel happier if I had a battery of technicians to help transport us to Fairy Land and back at the touch of a button. A smidgen of dry ice and some nice mood lighting would surely help matters, wouldn't it? No, we must create our illusory delights using only the voices and bodies of the actors as the first troupe who performed this play did." (4) The actors did their best, but because of the costuming, which recalled Spiderman or Batman, the world of the fairies did not convince, although Henry Bazewell as Oberon and Tyler Moss as Puck were excellent. Using popular culture to get at fairyland, however, seemed a poor idea. Lillian Wright as Titania in her orange-red wig had less queenly elegance and more barroom toughness.

Henry Bazewell's Theseus did an excellent job of courting Lillian Wright's Hippolyta through softening the justice levied on the usual indistinguishable lovers in the production. One had no doubt that red-haired Hippolyta commanded an army in the recent past. The usual color and height coding of Helena as tall and blonde and Hermia as short and dark-haired did not work in this production, because Anna Maria Sell had only darker blond hair as Hermia than Sybille Bruun as Helena, though their respective heights fit the descriptions in Shakespeare's text.

In the American Shakespeare Center production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the highlight of the production was the Mechanicals' performance of "Pyramus and Thisbe." As Jaq Bessel says in "Midsummer Director's Diary," "We laugh at actors who aren't very good. Were the play to feature a crew of incompetent sailors, or a group of amateurish accountants, I doubt it [A Midsummer Night's Dream] would have survived to this day. Films like Waiting for Guffman show us that, in fact, we love laughing at actors who aren't very good. In this play, Bottom and his fellow amateur actors are heroes because they try their best and it doesn't matter that they aren't good. It's the good-natured, doggedly determined way in which they prepare and perform their play that has continued to charm audiences for the past 400 years." (5) The romantic comedy featuring three pairs of lovers and the fairy world of Oberon and Titania is supplanted by comic farce in this production.

What amazed me about the performance by the American Shakespeare Center on Tour was the degree of rapport of the actors with the audience. In nearly fifty years of theatre going I have never experienced greater connection between players and audience. What I wonder is how well these same methods would work with other plays by Shakespeare such as the histories or Hamlet and Macbeth. Few roles in A Midsummer Night's Dream are all that taxing. Would the same strategies of the universal lighting and the performance without intermissions be effective in other productions? Perhaps I will be lucky enough to see another touring production in later years or visit Staunton, Virginia to find out.

Craig Barrow, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Notes

(1.) Theatre Program for the American Shakespeare Center on Tour (Staunton, Virginia, 2006), 6.

(2.) References accord with The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

(3.) Theatre Program, 6.

(4.) Theatre Program, 17.

(5.) Theatre Program, 17.