We are sitting around our kitchen table at the Ashcroft House on Deer Isle, where half the cast of Midsummer is housed. The rest of the cast and two-thirds of our band have arrived here after a day that included our first full run of the show, unbridled musical antics at the open mic in Blue Hill, and a field of impossible glimmering lights that could as easily have been fairies or stars as fireflies.
The table is covered with empty soup bowls...Stephanie is offering refills of the amazing chicken soup that she and Rebecca made yesterday...drinks in hand, the present company are debating the uses of Shakespeare's text. I'm typing away at the table, enjoying the inside-outside quality of writing while socializing.
Now the talk has moved to great concerts. "I saw Tori Amos in a coffee shop," says Tommy. Stereolab, Lyle Lovett, Cherry Poppin' Daddies, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Tom Petty, Concrete Blonde, Neil Young by himself in an old theatre with a stage full of about a hundred instruments...It is no wonder that people who speak of music as passionately as these people sitting at our kitchen table are drawn to Shakespeare, where the music of the language and the rhythm of the text add a dimension often wanting in contemporary texts.
Now we're talking about Michael Jackson.
It was exciting to run the whole play today. It is wonderful to be back in Stonington to make another play for this amazing community. And when we come out of a barn that was filled with homemade music into a misty night full of fairy lights flickering like nothing I have ever seen before...well, we're here to make a Midsummer Night's Dream, and live in one, for a few strange and admirable weeks.
But all the stories of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy's images,
And grows to something of great constancy--
But howsoever, strange and admirable
I hope I didn't just misquote my own line.
There is music in the living room now, and Jason tells me the backyard is full of fairies. The kitchen has emptied out. The company has moved into the next act, heading towards the only "free" day between us and an audience. Four nights will quickly steep themselves in days...
Stories from the Stonington Opera House
I was reading something recently about the power of art to form community. We always think about that as the community sitting in seats watching a play. But you give us the reach of art in your Midsummer story -- it brings people together outside the theater as powerfully and meaningfully as inside the theater. Under the stars, no less.
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