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:

Tragical mirth in MIDSUMMER

A Midsummer Night’s Dream walks a fine line between comedy and tragedy – and never more so than in Julia Whitworth’s production running through July 12 at Stonington Opera House. Whitworth’s production begins with a haunting drum. Could it be a heartbeat of love? Or a martial call to war?

Then, in the midst of combat between Athenians and Amazons, a soldier and a woman warrior inexplicably kiss in the heat of battle. Is it love? Or a war crime?

Later, nectar from a magic flower makes one person fall in love with his enemy, another fall in love with his beloved’s best friend, and still another fall in love with an ass. So what if it's delivered by hypodermic needle.

From any vantage point, it’s a dark and stormy night on the outskirts of Athens, where Ray Neufeld’s humid, leafy set underscores the tightness of the air, the deepness of the woods – where shadows lurk and fairies work wondrous mischief.

And yet this production has some of the lightest humor imaginable. Three Stooges meet Fred Flintstone. The Marx Brothers. Lucille Ball. Goldie Hawn. Robin Williams. Their spirits are all in the rafters of this production.

In Shakespeare's own words: Very tragical mirth? Merry and tragical? Hot ice?

When I asked Dr. Esther Rauch, a literary scholar and retired vice president of Bangor Theological Seminary, how to think about these wacky contradictions, she said: “I think this play is best read as a kind of a riff on ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ It’s almost exactly a twin play, and they both are based on ‘Pyramus and Thisbe.’ But where ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is very serious, this is a send-up.”

What do Romeo and Juliet have in common with Midsummer’s four young lovers? What is the relationship between laughter and tears? City and country? Athens and Maine? For more, listen to my full conversation with Dr. Rauch or read the transcript.

Better yet: Dr. Rauch and I will discuss all of this – and more – in a talk back after the performance 7 p.m. Friday, July 10 at the Stonington Opera House. Come join us for a conversation about the course of true love and how it never does run smooth, whether you’re laughing or crying.

Painting: William Blake's "Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing" (1785)

Photo: Esther Rauch and Alicia Anstead

Getting to the Bottom of Midsummer

If you think A Midsummer Night's Dream is simply a walk in the woods, joke's on you. Director Julia Whitworth's takes the audience on such an entirely unexpected journey with the show that it's anything but a walk. It's a trip -- beginning with the siege of the Amazons and ending with, well, as a veteran theater critic I'm constitutionally incapable to delivering a spoiler here. Let's just say that if Shakespeare twists notions of love and marriage into a knotty bow, then Whitworth adds swords and shackles.



This is why I can't wait to hear the thoughts of Richard Brucher, a professor of English at the University of Maine -- and guest scholar after the 7 p.m. performance (TONIGHT, JULY 5) of Midsummer at Stonington Opera House on Deer Isle in Maine. He will be in the audience tonight and will join Whitworth and me for an onstage conversation with the audience after the show.



For a preview of his thoughts, you can listen to my interview with Brucher or read the transcript.



We'll be talking about how sexy this production is, and also about Nick Bottom, my favorite character in the play. I think he may be Brucher's favorite character, too, because old Bottom is so genuine. "Shakespeare gives him some wisdom about the unpredictability of love," Brucher said. "But of all the characters he seems to be the most willing and able to accept it when it’s offered to him. Nick Bottom is the only one who gets any sex out in the woods."

And believe me, Titania makes a donkey out of Bully Bottom.

TONIGHT: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, 7 p.m. July 5, Stonington Opera House, Stonington, MAINE.

Photo by Carolyn Caldwell, courtesy Stonington Opera House.

Mawidge is what brings us together

Here's the love situation in Midsummer: Hipployta is a war bride for Theseus. Hermia has the choice to marry the guy her dad chooses, die or become a nun. Helena finds true love only if her man stays drugged -- an early version of taking lithium, I suppose. And Titania, Queen of the Fairies, is essentially drink-spiked (by her husband, no less) into a night with a guy who has a donkey head. (Not going to explicate that one here.) Except for pandering to Queen Elizabeth, who never married (or rather considered herself betrothed to England), why would Shakespeare make marriage so utterly unappealing?

For one thing, he's working within classical conventions of "lovers." Goes back pretty far -- Ovid's Metamorphoses, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and, big leap, movies such as Princess Bride. One of my favorite scenes from that flick is very Shakespearean actually -- and very much on point for our marriage theme. You can watch it here.

Another way to learn more about marriage Shakespeare style is to listen to an interview I did recently with Stephen Greenblatt, world-class Shakespeare scholar, Harvard professor and author of "Will in the World" and "Cardenio," a "lost" play attributed to the Shake man. (Here's the Greenblatt interview.) Greenblatt told me that "all of Shakespeare's comedies are a little strange -- in fact extremely strange." When I asked him why get married if you're a woman in Shakespeare, he said: "Alicia, if you ask that question too strenuously, no one would get married." People don't get married based on cost-benefit analysis or rationality, he explained. They get married because they are desperately in love.

Wish I'd thought of that.