Remembrance of Midsummer past

Where does the performance of a play live once a production closes? This question, which I was considering yesterday at the closing performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Stonington Opera House, has been central to my understanding of the arts because theater, like dance and music, is one of those confusingly ephemeral art forms, at once fleeting and enduring. I wondered: Will this Midsummer last in my memory, in the collective memory of the community?

Increasingly, I've come to value art that asserts itself long after the experience of the art has ended. When it comes to Shakespeare, a handful of productions remain imaginatively for me: the 1995 Broadway production of The Tempest with Patrick Stewart, the 2008 Broadway production of Macbeth (but only because of Stewart's performance), the English all-male Propellor company's Taming of the Shrew at BAM, Wooster Group's post-apocalyptic Hamlet at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, NY, and John Wulp's As You Like It on Maine's North Haven Island in 1998. (Here's my story on Wulp's production in the Bangor Daily News.) The vision and aesthetic, the purity of performance, the sheer moxie made the works indelible.

This happens less commonly on screen with Shakespeare, but Max Reinhardt's 1935 film version of Midsummer with James Cagney as Bottom gave me as much insight to the character of Bottom as any reading I've done or seen. Bottom's transformation to an ass is a potent moment of self-realization -- bolstered by a Narcissus-like scene in which he looks deeply at his reflection in a pond and, then, achieves ultimate understanding with the ballad of "Bottom's Dream": There is no Bottom, there is no fixed self, only endless possibility. Watch the first four minutes of this clip of James Cagney and you'll see only part of why Reinhardt's movie makes my list. (Other reasons: Golden Age of Hollywood, Mickey Rooney as Puck, Joe E. Brown as Flute, Bronislava Nijinska's modernist choreography, the commitment to beauty in the midst of the Great Depression.)

Will Julia Whitworth's Midsummer make the list? While I suspect her production -- outrightly feminist, defiant of capitulation, fierce in its conception and performance -- will linger in my personal canon, only time can tell. Midsummer has never been my favorite play, but Whitworth -- who had also struggled with the "woo'd" by sword/wed in "another key" marriage contract -- found her own way into the text through the conceit of a forcibly drugged dream of the Amazon warrior Hippolyta. Very gutsy.

I've been struck throughout this run of Midsummer at the number of young people -- from tots to teenagers -- in the audiences at the Stonington Opera House. This defies the more typical older audience demographic nationally. But Shakespeare and Midsummer in particular work an uncanny magic on youth, and I can't help thinking that those young people will be the carriers of durable memories. In Stonington, where Shakespeare is now in the drinking water after a decade of shows, the youngest of theatergoers think about what they see. Morgan, who is 13, explained her take on the Whitworth production this way (and check out the kid in the background, too):

What I value in Whitworth's production is the drive to reach beyond the conventional -- not for art's sake but for understanding, including an ambiguous ending (which allows understanding in multiple directions). It's not clear that Hippolyta will love Theseus at the end -- and the 9-year-old boy who was with me declared that it didn't seem as if the deal would be a particularly good one for the Warrior Woman.

I spoke with several other young people at intermission on Sunday, including two 15-year olds -- Esther who is local and Tobin who is from Rhode Island. Like others who were buzzing with questions at intermission, the girls were deep in Shakespeare's world, enthralled in fandom. You can hear their thoughts in the short video below, but they nailed it for me: Taking risks can pay off -- even the risk of simply going to theater. Is risk-taking enough? Nope. Is liking the show enough, or even all that important? Nope again. I've disliked many a show that I also found meaningful.

What's important is that a long memory gets cast, like a shadow, like a dream. Or as Hippolyta says: "minds transfigur'd" to "great constancy."

And just for fun: