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Dream Country

A radical reimagining of Shakespeare's comedy via Bergman and Jung.
A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Chamber Play - On The Run 2014
From left: Sarah Afful, Dion Johnstone, Mike Nadajewski and Trish Lindström in A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Chamber Play. Photo by Michael Cooper.

Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

James Joyce, Ulysses

The Stratford Festival doesn’t usually mount more than one production of a given play in the same season. I was going to say that this year has been an exception – but not really. Because, while there are two productions called A Midsummer Night’s Dream currently on stage at Stratford, the second, subtitled, “A Chamber Play,” is really another play entirely, albeit one that uses Shakespeare’s text as its basis and starting point.

Created and directed by Peter Sellars, this Dream, like Chris Abraham’s, recognizes that this is a play that needs to be “made new” in order for us to really hear it and see it again. Abraham’s departures are all intended to restore to Dream the spirit of love, to make us care, once again, about the fate of young lovers seeking their destined partners. Sellars’s method is far more radical. His aim, it seemed to me, was not to remind us what it’s like to care about these jejune young lovers, but to see how much the play, and its language, can mean once the lovers are no longer so young, in years or in experience.

Sellars has cut the play radically it so that four actors can play all the roles. Actually, that’s not right: Sellars has created four roles, each encompassing several parts from Shakespeare’s play. It’s not that the actors move in and out of characters, as in the Fiasco Theater production of Cymbeline. Rather, the characters display different sides of themselves by way of different characters in Shakespeare’s comedy. Some of these feel closer to their “social” personae, while others feel like deeper archetypes, erupting as a consequence of the pressures of the claustrophobic quadrangle that plays out on stage. The result is closer to Bergman than to Shakespeare, and absolutely riveting.

The story, as I understood it, is something like this. Some time before the beginning of the play, there were two couples. Helena/Puck/Hippolyta/Thisbe (Sarah Afful) and Demetrius/Bottom/Theseus/Pyramus (Dion Johnstone) are one couple. Hermia/Titania/Wall/Lion (Trish Lindstrom) and Lysander/Oberon/Moonshine (Mike Nadajewski) are the other. But these “proper” pairings have broken; Johnstone’s character and Lindstrom’s are having an affair, and Afful and Nadajewski, devastated, assay a variety of responses: pleading, raging, threatening, manipulating, even seeing if they can make a go of it as an alternative couple (they can’t). They must play the hand out fully, inhabiting their various roles, finding their various ways back to their proper selves and their truest, deepest loves, before they can reach reconciliation and forgiveness, as individuals, as couples, and as a quartet now bound together by something more than mere friendship.

What springs the recombination? Johnstone’s character is the Proteus of the group; he’s terrified of being defined. Ordered to play Pyramus, a lover, he would rather be the tyrant – or a ravenous lion – anything but the lover, which he plays only under duress. Whether it is Afful’s aching need that drives him away, or whether that gets the causality of her longing reversed, we don’t know – but his is a flight from commitment that is ultimately a flight from himself. Lindstrom’s character, on the other hand, has suffered some kind of terrible loss, involving a child (the changeling boy). Infertility, miscarriage, abortion, the loss of a born child – we don’t know what happened, needless to say, but it has left her numb, around a core of confined rage – a Lion surrounded by a Wall. Nadajewski’s dominant response is bitter, sarcastic and controlling.

The lovers journey passes through a much darker wood than the one Shakespeare placed outside Athens, one more than a little reminiscent of Sondheim’s; “Last Midnight” could easily serve as the theme song of this belated walpurgisnacht. I also heard an echo of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, particularly given the prominence of the missing child in Lindstrom’s character’s psychology, but more generally for the sense that the use of Shakespeare’s language is the most elaborate party game George and Martha have come up with yet.

And the great delight of the play is hearing just what a fecund game that is. The most surprising and heart-warming moments are the ones where Shakespeare’s comic scenes are suffused with deep emotion. Oberon’s observation of Titania with Bottom often reads to me as quite ugly – his latter pity irretrievably tainted by the fact that he has “won” the child by trickery. But in this play, he and Puck observe their partners entwined in love with each other, and his pity is the spirit of true forgiveness, a man seeing that the healing his lover needs (and therefore the only way he’ll ever get that child) can only come in the arms of another. Or later, when he has taken the form of Moonshine, and proclaims to his once and future love: “All that I have to say is to tell you that the lanthorn is the moon; I, the man in the moon; this thornbush, my thornbush; and this dog, my dog.” If you don’t cry at that, you are more Wall than she.

The juxtapositions created by cramming these particular characters together also revealed patterns in Shakespeare’s play that I hadn’t noticed before. I seem to be stuck on Nadajewski’s character, but nonetheless: playing both Lysander and Oberon brings out just how controlling Lysander is in his relationship, a quality one always sees in Oberon but that I’d never focused on in the young lover. Juxtaposing Bottom and Demetrius, meanwhile, gives Demetrius more of a motivation for abandoning Helena for Hermia than mere fickle fancy. The racial politics of the recombination – “Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt” and “Away, you Ethiope!” – are also played very loudly (Johnstone and Afful are both black actors, Lindstrom and Nadajewski both white), and for once to powerful effect (in most Shakespeare productions, I find calling attention to the Bard’s casual color prejudice to be something of a distraction).

As I say, I read a clear, powerful, Bergmanesque story, and I read the performances, both in terms of specific line readings and the integrated characters they were playing, in light of that story. But the performances are uniformly so visceral that even if I hadn’t seen a story, I would have been held by the individual moments. That was my wife’s experience of the play; she didn’t catch much of a story, and talked about the play more as akin to a concept album. And other theater-goers I talked to all saw different plays. So perhaps it’s a bit of a Rorschach blot, reflecting back the stories the audience brings to it.

But then, we always do that at the theater. And we should.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: a Chamber Play runs at the Stratford Festival’s Masonic Concert Hall venue through September 20th.

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