22 April 2007. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
22 April 2007. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Matinee. American Shakespeare Center, Staunton, Virginia. Performing in the Blackfriars Playhouse
While on a visit to my daughter and her family in Charlottesville, Virginia, I took the occasion to take my grandson to see this production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The production opened March 30 and plays until June 16, in tandem with Julius Caesar and Cyrano de Bergerac. I suppose the plan is to take the three plays on the road for an extended subsequent tour. A photo of the company on the page of the program listing the repertoire shows a dozen actors, eight men, four women; I saw all dozen doubled in the more-than-a-dozen roles of MND, to great effect. These plays are very carefully matched, I believe, and each play is planned so as to take maximum advantage of the very well-differentiated company’s abilities. This is a modern dress production. And, obviously, in the case of Shakespeare, a certain amount of cross-dressing occurs also, whether the actors are garbed in a generalized modern-day Athenian costume or a much be-feathered fairy suit.
The stage director is a guest director, Jag Bessell, and without derogating his work in the slightest degree it can be said that the house style — one might almost call it the house ethos — so overshadows what the individual director might do with the play that, in attending any performance of an ASC play, you know exactly what to expect. A few years ago, on a similar trip to Charlottesville, I saw their production of Comedy of Errors. A year or two before that, I visited the Playhouse and had a tour of it with the Executive Director, Ralph Cohen. I asked him how it was he ever put together such a thriving enterprise, including the building of a loose replica of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Theatre, in a small hill town in western Virginia. He said his vision’s fulfillment had a lot to do with extraordinary cooperation and support from local merchants and townspeople (this is evidently a wealthy place), but also from his determination to make Shakespeare accessible and to perform simultaneously three different plays, mostly Shakespeare but not entirely so, taking the productions on tour across America after their run at the Blackfriars. Evidently he has succeeded. The ASC has been in operation since 1988, and the Blackfriars opened for its first season in 2001. In 2005 the name of the company was changed from Shenandoah Shakespeare to American Shakespeare Center. By this year, the history of the company in the program indicates, no fewer than thirteen productions were mounted, six of Shakespeare and seven others, including works contemporary to Shakespeare such as The Tamer Tamed (paired, it seems, with The Taming of the Shrew) and A King and No King. The success is astonishing.
The foundation of it all is access. The audience is warmed up beginning half an hour before the play itself begins, by one or more actors who will go on to perform parts in the