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Awake the Pert and Nimble Spirit of Mirth

A Midsummer Night's Dream staged as a gay wedding at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.
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A couple of years ago, I had a conversation with a rabbinical friend of mine about the prospects for the Conservative Movement of Judaism to approve some kind of marriage ceremony for gay couples. This friend was favorably inclined toward such a move, and so I asked him what he would imagine such a ceremony would actually look like – what the ceremony would actually consist of if it were to be taken seriously as a wedding.

A variety of trappings could, he thought, be unproblematically adapted from the traditional ceremony. The huppah, representing the creation of a sheltering home together, is pretty unproblematic; no reason a gay couple couldn’t make a home. The mingling of two cups of wine into one, to be drunk by the two celebrants, similarly; any children the couple might rear won’t have mingled genes, but two lives are certainly blending into one. The breaking of the glass – well, there are sexual overtones to breaking anything that wouldn’t be apropos, but the other meanings – superstitious (driving away evil forces), national/religious (remembering the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple), psychological (the broken glass cannot ever go back to being unbroken, so this couple can never go back to never having been wed) – all work reasonably well.

Very well – but what would you say? The traditional blessings, after all, are as highly gendered as you would expect them to be – they are all about brides and grooms, Adam and Eve, complementarity and fertility.

My friend thought for a bit, and concluded that a creative ceremony would find a way to link to that Edenic origin of marriage notwithstanding the absence of sexual complementarity – would focus on ahavah v’achavah, shalom v’rei’ut without saying that these can only be rooted in the union of a chatan and kallah. Which sounds laudable, but on a mythopoetic level it’s still a considerable challenge.

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I thought about this challenge after attending a performance at the Stratford Festival Theater of their delightful current production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Director Chris Abraham has decided to use Shakespeare’s Dream as a vehicle for undertaking precisely that challenge. Adding yet another layer of meta-theatricality to a play that already abounds with it, he’s set the play at a wedding. Not Theseus and Hippolyta’s, but two men – unnamed members of Stratford’s acting company – whose guests, fellow company members, decide to put on a play for the entertainment of groom and groom. Since an impending wedding at which a play will be performed is already the outer, meta-level of Shakespeare’s Dream, adding this additional layer sends kind of an explicit message: this production will explore what actually changes when the wedding we’re celebrating is for two men.

Before getting into how well this “works” on a message level, I want to start off by reiterating just how delightful the show is as a piece of theater. This is the most simply joyous Dream I’ve ever seen, and the joy suffuses every aspect of the production. These actors, playing some version of themselves in the frame story, seem like they are having an absolute ball, and you’d feel peevish not to join in. Little touches that perfectly suit the wedding theme – dressing the aisles of the theater with nuptial ribboning; having the underage wedding guests play the fairies (and having them sing a Bruno Mars number for the other “guests”) – all facilitate an atmosphere of celebration that’s infectious. You really do feel like you’re at an especially awesome wedding.

And there are clever connections made between the casting of the frame story and the play. The superlatively suave Scott Wentworth is supposedly hosting this wedding in his backyard, so of course he plays Theseus in the play. Mike Shara’s goofy bro persona is already familiar to audiences, and that’s the actor he plays in the frame – and of course he plays Demetrius. It even feels appropriate that the ever-game Barbara Fulton gets cast as the Moon’s dog.

As for the concept, Shakespeare’s play is a fecund text to put to this purpose. Dream is, on one level, all about the pagan fertility rites that express the primal mythical importance of complementarity. When Titania and Oberon are harmonious, vegetation grows properly; when they are at odds, the seasons themselves are thrown into disorder. Their love is cosmically generative. On the other hand, those self-same spirits have the power – and the inclination – capriciously to disorder a host of categories as they see fit. They can make a man an ass. They can make a fellow spirit love that ass. And, in a more serious vein, they can make a man love the woman he’s “supposed” to love – or, when they screw up, the woman he isn’t.

As well, the story of Theseus and Hippolyta suggests simultaneously that the determination to love without regard to social convention is a threat to the state (Theseus confirms: Hermia must die, or enter a convent, if she refuses to marry the man her father, Egeus, chooses), and that the inability or unwillingness to accommodate love where it happens to flourish is also a threat to the state (Hippolyta is routinely played as none too pleased by Theseus’s firmness with Hermia, so the happiness of Theseus’s own marriage depends on his ability to get Egeus to see reason, and accept his daughter’s choice). The arc of the play is from threatened order, through disorder, to a re-founded order based on properly reciprocated love rather than force and custom. It should be obvious how that arc would play well in this particular production’s context.

Abraham – or, perhaps I should say the company; this may be a decision we’re supposed to read as happening within the meta-theatrical frame – makes explicit the “progressive” reading of this arc by playing a bit with the gender of the casting. Lysander is played by a woman (Tara Rosling) – and also as a woman, one improbably mistaken by Puck for a man (Rosling isn’t nearly that butch), but more to the point: a woman in love with another woman (Hermia, played with exceptional sincerity by Bethany Jillard). Needless to say, this sharpens the conflict between Hermia and her father, a conflict that, in most productions, feels rather pro-forma rather than deeply felt. (It also makes nonsense of Theseus’s warning that, if she will not marry Demetrius, she must “abjure forever the society of men,” but them’s the breaks; that beat rarely connects with a contemporary audience anyway.)

Titania, meanwhile, is played by a man (Jonathan Goad or Evan Buliung, depending on which performance you see; they alternate playing Titania and Oberon), but as a – well I was going to say a woman, but of course Titania is not a human being at all, but a spirit (of no common rate). But she is unequivocally female. Finally, Puck is also played by a woman (Chick Reid), but that barely counts as cross-gender casting – certainly less so than having a woman play Peter Pan, as is done often enough.

These cross-gender casting choices struck some interesting sparks. Titania in particular was exceptional – both Titanias. Neither Goad’s nor Buliung’s performance is drag-y. They aren’t “signifying” woman in their performances in a campy way, nor are they trying to fool us; we we can see that these are men. The right way to put it, I think, is to say: they play Titania straight. What I saw in each case was a man showing us the woman inside him – not the woman he would play but the woman revealed. The result was two exceptionally affecting (and quite different) Titanias, with deeply felt (and conflicted) relationships with their respective Oberons. I saw the play twice, and will admit, I somewhat preferred Buliung as Titania opposite Goad as Oberon, partly because of Buliung’s fierce affection for the changeling boy she won’t surrender, and partly because his Titania was positively statuesque, and made Goad’s horned Oberon look like a cranky, frustrated little ram. But the other way worked marvelously, too; Buliung’s Oberon is fiercer than Goad’s, Goad’s Titania gentler and more queenly in her control than Buliung’s.

The lovers also work wonderfully well. There was little of the sense that one often gets in Dreams that these are a bunch of spoiled children, or that they are thin excuses for characters being put through conventional plot paces. Indeed, the meta-layering of the production actually served the lovers – when they appeared to be a bunch of actors engaged in romantic recombination, well, that works. Their bits of comic business actually play better because we know they are actors – because actors (most of them, anyway) fool around and do schtick on their own and for each other all the time. Lampooning the conventions of the play works better, sometimes, than playing them straight. Has anyone ever really believed that Demetrius would try to kill Lysander, or vice versa? Not really. So why not let them chase each other with cake knives?

The meta-ness of the production is a bigger problem for the rustics. Now, I will not hear a word said against Stephen Ouimette’s delightful Bottom – less self-aggrandizing than usual, more of the sort of guy who just wants everybody to feel good; one imagines him clowning about to distract Egeus from his rages. (Incidentally, in this production Egeus is played, by Michael Spencer-Davis, as a deaf man. It’s a choice I initially found random – until I saw how it made those rages play more poignantly because more apparently impotent. Here’s a man furious that no one will harken to him – but he does not speak, because he can’t.) Nor will I hear a word against Karl Ang’s dentally-challenged Snug, or Victor Ertmanis’s big-bearded Flute. Their “business” in the play-within-a-play is all delightful. But it’s stepped on, to some extent, by the frame. The whole play has been calling attention to the fact that it’s just a play; the actors have been clowning around the whole time, mocking the conventions and requirements of Shakespeare’s comedy in a warmly affectionate way. The rustics’ play, though still funny, is too close to more of the same to really slay ’em. (I’ve seen this problem with the rustics before, but Abraham’s production doesn’t run into anything remotely like the problems that Tony Speciale’s did.)

And Flute presents a distinct challenge. Broadly speaking, I’ve seen his assay at Thisbe played either of two ways. Either Flute is absurd playing a woman, and that’s the joke – or he’s surprisingly good at playing the woman, and that’s an even better joke. You can even do both simultaneously if you cast someone who is physically ridiculous as Thisbe and then have him play her straight. Given that Titania is already being played that way, the only option left is to lampoon Thisbe, and that’s the direction the production goes. (I did mention that big beard, didn’t I?) But I wondered what that particular choice meant in light of the larger frame. In this play-within-a-play-within-a-play, Thisbe is played by Flute, who’s played by one of the Stratford actors at this wedding, in a production intended to celebrate this gay wedding. Well, who is Flute in this scenario? He’s playing Thisbe as if he were Robert Preston at the end of “Victor, Victoria.” But is Flute Carole Todd? Is “Victor Ertmanis” (as played by Victor Ertmanis) Robert Preston.

I don’t mean to belabor this, but I did feel like this was a funny joke that could have been much funnier, and deeper, if we had been given a couple of hints about the character in other layers of the meta-narrative. I wanted Flute to be as real as Titania – different, but still real. Titania’s reality said something – something important – about how printed our gender is on our most essential selves: not as deeply as we sometimes assume, because we contain more variety than we represent. Which would seem to be an important idea for this production in particular.

But you know, I started out by saying that this was a “message” production that was making a point by setting the play at a gay wedding. And in the end, I’m not sure that the “message” was anything more than: here you are, and how does it feel? By the time the play-within-a-play-within-a-play is done, and the cast is up and dancing, and inviting you to dance with them, all these quibbles are forgotten. It’s a party. Go dancing. It’s only natural.

One last note: I hope this production has a life beyond this staging. Among other things, I think it would benefit from being staged in a space where it could be even more immersive. I know that’s kind of my thing, but, as I said, I saw the play twice, the first time from a prime center orchestra seat, the second time from cheap, partial view seats that were on the stage, in the middle of the action. And while it was a lot of fun from the orchestra, it was another order of wonderful from the stage. Now, I don’t know if it would have been as good if I hadn’t already seen the whole play – you miss a lot of visuals from the stage. But I think it’s actually essential to the full experience of the production for the audience feel itself actually to be at the wedding. So I hope Abraham gets an opportunity to stage this production again in a venue where that would be possible for everyone in the audience to join the dance.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream plays at Stratford’s Festival Theatre through October 11th.

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