Forest for the trees?

This week the work of rehearsal has been all about "blocking" -- that is, figuring out the physical movement onstage. It's slow work -- sometimes tedious, sometimes fun-- and often during the process of working scene by scene, beat by beat, even bit by bit, it's easy to loose sight of the big picture.
Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy, and not just because it observes the generic convention of a marriage (or three) at its end. It has a lot of funny stuff in it -- fights and sight gags, plays on words, etc. But being who I am, I'm interested in the shadow side of this humor as well -- where the laughter of the play covers, just barely, the tensions that lay behind it.
Linda mentioned the penalty named in the first act for defying the patriarchy -- death (or celibacy) for young Hermia, if she does not marry her father's choice. By the end of the play, it all gets worked out, by hook or by crook, through many shenanigans in the forest.
We are working hard to figure out those shenanigans right now, but I'm trying not to forget that darkness of the set up, the stakes that face these characters. The scenes in the woods are all a little crazy, and we are playing with the idea that everyone's ids get a little "blown out" in the dreamscape of the fairy forest.
What happens when they return to civilization, however? How will the excesses of desire, jealousy, and new love, be regulated again? We're not there yet, I'm afraid to say -- so time will have to tell.

Character Presentations tonight!

Tonight and tomorrrow are my favorite rehearsals of the rehearsal process -- character night!

After a few days of working on the text, discussing themes, ideas and characters, I always invite the actors to create character presentations based on a set of questions that I assign them. They are encouraged to use a "sky's the limit" approach to their imagination, and they are assured that they will not be held to anything they come up with so early in the process.

And tonight they present their work -- I can't wait.

Here are the fill-in-the-blanks that I assigned them:
My name is ______
I'm from _______
My age is ______
Three things I know about myself from the text are:
Three things I intuit about myself are:
Some ideosyncrasies I have are: (3-5)
Some things I might do during the course of a performance are: (3-5)
My dream is:
My nightmare is:
A shape (in my body) that says everything about my character is:
A way of locomoting is:
Two gestures (behavioral or expressive) that illuminate my character are:
[the last three are demonstrated, rather than spoken]

I can't wait to see what these smart, creative actors come up with !