A Midsummer Night's Dream (review)

It is no accident that A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of the most iconic and canonical of Shakespeare's plays, is so often the occasion for the most iconoclastic and brilliantly experimental productions. In the early twentieth century, it was the play Harley Granville Barker used to cut away decades of ornament to rediscover an imaginative process that had been all but erased by illusionist sets. Some sixty years later, it was the play Peter Brook chose to re-establish the simple and powerful bond between actors and audience, a shared celebration of dreams, imagination, and theatre itself. In the spring of 2006, Anne Bogart brought to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival a stunning and simple production of A Midsummer Night's Dream that got at the heart of the play's mystery and its beauty. In language that evokes some of Peter Brook's radical questions, Bogart, in her director's notes, outlines her goal. Essential to her experiment was a design for doubling that went beyond even Brook's experiments. "In our production," Bogart explains, "we had to seriously ask: What is a Fairy? What is a Mechanical? What is a Lover? How does the same body encompass all those aspects of life?"

These are, of course, exactly the questions this play has always asked of us. Is this hawthorn brake a tiring house? How can Demetrius be "mine own, and not mine own" ? How can a tragedy be merry? What happens to us when we fall in love? into dreams? into a play? How do we look with the mind? Do we wake, or do we sleep? When we find ourselves in such strange states of consciousness and engagement, auditors and actors both, do we become our own and not our own?

The production was set on a bare stage, marked by only a giant 1930s-style radio, a phonograph of similar vintage (the twin "sources" of much of the production's music), and a ghost light, a quiet image of this haunting, metatheatrical production. Behind the stage was a screen onto which were projected metamorphic clouds, or far-off mountains turned into clouds. At times the lighting cast shadows of characters on the screen, creating a kind of doubleness for each actor that hinted at the ambivalent performative "selves"—fairy, courtly, and mechanical—contained within a single actor or auditor. Seven of the SITI Company's eight actors played multiple roles, one from the court, a second from the fairy world, and a third from Peter Quince's company. Jeffrey Fracé, for example, played Theseus, Oberon, and Quince, the "leaders" of these three worlds. Ellen Lauren played Hippolyta and Titania, as well as a robed, choric figure who opened the play by speaking Titania's 2.1 description of the earth's "distemperature." Christopher Spencer Wells played Egeus and Bottom. For the most part, though, characters from each of the play's three worlds were embodied in the same actor. Akiko Aizawa played Hermia, Starveling, and Moth. Karron Graves played Helena, Snug, and Mustardseed. Randy Harrison and Stephen Webber also each personated three characters: Lysander, Flute, and Cobweb; Demetrius, Snout, and Peaseblossom respectively. The exception was Barney O'Hanlon, who played only Puck, depicted in this production as a link between the fairies and the mortals, a role reinforced by his status as theater manager. Puck distributed the set's few props and choreographed...