A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Southern Shakespeare Festival (review)

Southern Shakespeare Festival’s 2015 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dreammarked the resurrection of a Shakespeare Festival in Florida’s capital that had been on hiatus since 2000. In the interim, the centrally located Cascades Park was built, and its state-of-the-art outdoor performance space was an ideal location for the staging of Dream. Saturday’s performance was preceded by an all-day Renaissance festival. Rain threatened but did not follow through, and large crowds turned out for this big Bard-centric party in downtown Tallahassee. The community had missed its Shakespeare.

A Midsummer Night’s Dreamis among the more accessible Shakespearean plays, making it a natural choice for a community performance. But it is also a heavy play. Marriage as traffic in women, Elizabethan political ideologies, the discourses of rape and imperialism—the play’s topoi and the complex ways it engages in early modern cultural debates are the stuff of scholars’ dreams. Though I’ve seen both film and theatrical productions of the play, as a reader I still manage—in my focus on the Indian boy, the sentences of death or the cloister for Hermia, and the rape of Hippolyta—to lose sight of what shines so clearly in live performance: the sheer fun of the comedy, the festive climate of midsummer misrule, the fact that the rude mechanicals steal the show. Under Lanny Thomas’s direction, A Midsummer Night’s Dreamwas scintillating entertainment set in San Francisco during the Summer of Love. In the playing area, a system of scaffolding and ramps allowed free movement of the actors from downstage to upstage and stages left and right, with backdrops of tie-dyed tapestries representing the woods outside of Athens. A live band performed sixties classics with appropriate themes, such as “Do You Believe in Magic?”; at moments of festive disorder, those familiar notes from the Twilight Zone accompanied disorienting, psychedelic flashing lights.

Amid this fitting set and soundscape, Nick Johnson’s Lysander was a swaggering, guitar-strumming lover stealing away with Nora Bonner’s vociferous, free-spirited hippie chick, their passionate interplay displayed, for example, as they sung the stichomythia at 1.1.136–40. Laura W. Johnson’s Helena appeared in sixties school-girl attire, appropriate for a character played, eventually, as a “good” girl turned “bad.” Her naughtiness certainly became the vehicle for palpable sexual tension between Helena and Demetrius, played by Jake Armstrong as an uptight, square type (especially in contrast with the far-out Lysander). But when Demetrius threatened Helena, she turned the table: “The more you beat me I will fawn on you. / Use me but as your spaniel” (2.1.204–5) became a sexual advance, and Demetrius, menacing her chastity, was in turn chastened when she, sitting astride his prone body, begged him to do his worst. Johnson—both executive director of the festival and accomplished thespian—elicited gasps and laughs throughout the performance, as her Helena pouted and, at the least hint of favor from her beloved, languorously sighed, “oh yeah” (Fig.2). I was surprised and pleased by the director’s and cast’s willingness to “go there” in exploring the play’s references to rape and threatened female chastity, as well as female sexual prowess.

Of course...