Steinbeck’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

By Emily Ghods-Esfahani | Thursday, October 5, 2006

High-flying laughter was the theme last Saturday night, as the SITI (Saratoga International Theatre Institute) theatre group gave Dartmouth College its boisterous staging of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—a dream dusty made; albeit, not the dust of fairies in a dreamy wood, but rather the dust-choked air of the Depression era Midwest. The stage-craft and setting—from the soft plucking of a banjo strummed throughout the play, to the haloed street lights—reminded the audience of hopelessness redeemed, perchance, by fairies, by laughter, by love gone wrong, followed closely by the promise to make the world right again.

It’s good stuff, really, and Director Anne Bogart seems to get it ‘on,’ if only through a dark sepia glass. But the dramatic contrast between the dusty-depression and the fairy dust of the dream carried no real weight in the play, calling its affected depression era setting into question. Moreover, the intense physicality and, at times, slap-stick buffoonery of Bogart’s production too often kicks at and bruises the beauty, and the comedy, or in short, the rhetorical intentions of the Bard of London—and Stratford-upon-Avon…

Despite very accomplished acting, the actors are simply out-maneuvered by the complex subtlety of Shakespeare’s at-times-soaring, and at-times-dive-bombing language. In fairness, this occurs oft intentionally, and then again, it seems, without conscious intent. Instead of teasing the temper and humor from Shakespeare’s words, the crew is obliged to replace Shakespeare’s fulsome wit with their own agile dancing and prancing, or they force their overly affected gestures to affix comedy where comedy doesn’t belong.

For instance, in the scene where a love-sick Helena professes her love to an unattentive Demetrius, she likens herself to a spaniel: “I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius, / The more you beat me, I will fawn on you: / Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me, / Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave, / Unworthy as I am, to follow you.” A remarkable, if asymmetrical, confession. But in SITI’s production, Helena’s desperation in love is not Bruegelian grotesquery, but carnivalesque conceit as she straddles Demetrius’ leg and, as it were, consummates her love to him on that uncocked shank.

And surely, there are moments when the SITI group is working on the threadbare fringe of “taboo-land.” In the scene where Titania, Queen of the fairies, absurdly dotes on her newfound love, Bottom—whose head has recently been transformed into that of an ass—there is a moment that apes pornographic extremis in its dog-eared innuendo.

As Bottom is lying slovenly on his back, spicy red lights begin to pulsate to the beat of raunchy music. Titania’s minion fairies jerk each of Bottom’s limbs, as Titania herself unwinds a ball of yarn from the Ass’s tendered ass. Everything is synchronized: each lurch-n-jerk falls in time with each pulsing moan, and each hot-chrome flash scatters the meat of the nut in, “Man is but an ass if he go about t’expound this dream.” This threadbare concoction, fabricated by the SITI group, is one that Shakespeare, man of taste and letters, sensibly omitted from his play, no matter ticket sales or swishy taste.

Aside from these few problems, Bogart’s directing is superb. Bogart likes to use ‘parallel images’ as a leitmotif, and she uses them well: in the first scene between Hermia and Helena, their conversation is secondary to their motions, which are mirror-images of one another. As they reflect one-the-other in this scene, the viewer gets a taste of their role-reversal fully developed and resolved only later in the play.

The company’s nine actors held down 20-something roles in the play, sometimes playing many different parts in the same scene, at the same time. This effect came to its exquisite climax nearing the end of the play when the play-within-a-play, Pyramus and Thisbe, is being performed—outed, as it were. In the earlier parts of the play-as-written (with apologies to Ron Rosenbaum and his wonderful book The Shakespeare Wars) it is uncertain whether the players are deliberately mocking their roles as they over-exaggerate emotions with flailing arms and pumping legs. In Pyramus and Thisbe, however, the actors are intended to be mocking and sappy, soliciting laughter as Charlie Chaplin or Stan Laurel in their salad days. And it works! Unfortunately, when this technique is applied to the reality of the play—not the play within the play—SITI is more preoccupied with their self-limiting irony than such stuff which dreams are made on, to mime another of the bard’s comedies.

And, there’s no doubt about it: the SITI group’s humor borders on bullying; it makes fun of the Dream. When the four mismatched lovers awake from Puck’s magic charms, finally in love with their destined mate, a droll Demetrius remarks in monotone, “by the way, we are awake.” One wonders how Shakespeare could have missed this piece of staged wit. Ah, but the audience loves this stuff! But perhaps they would as well have loved the whimsical enchantment, organic and natural to the play and the play’s language—acutely felt in Puck’s well-staged epilogue.

A weak white light glows around him as he speaks the final words of the play: “If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended: / that you have but slumber’d here, / While these visions disappear. / And this weak and idle theme / No more yielding but a dream.” With these last words, “yielding but a dream…” he hops into a contorted profile as the lights blow out—and all that’s left is silhouette, shadow. That the best part of the play is a scene in which the stage directions, the actor, and the words the actor speaks are interwoven to dabble with and play on one another may prove that Shakespearean drama is better brought to light than ornamented; because as it is, everything else is smoke and shadow.

Steinbeck’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

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