22 February 2004: Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
22 February 2004: Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge. Directed by Martha Clarke
A sign in a Route 9 men’s shop (I am informed by an interview in the Sunday Boston Globe magazine) declares, “It’s okay to look GOOD!” This message has not gotten across the Charles to Cambridge just yet, nor is it likely to arrive there in the foreseeable future. Martha Clarke’s production of MND is clothed resolutely in drab. And the stage comes as close to the raked-level indifferentiation of a razed-building lot as I have seen anywhere. It makes the set of Waiting for Godot, with its single bare tree, look sumptuous by comparison. Actually, there are three holes in the ground, with inter-communicating subterranean passages, used exclusively by Puck — who in this production is predominantly the rural scapegrace Robin Goodfellow; when he puts a girdle around the globe in forty minutes, he goes underground and, presumably, tunnels his way. The costumes are the kind of faux-Victorian cast-offs you might find in a consignment shop, and Theseus / Oberon himself (John Campion) has a great head of unkempt, scraggly hair that we might associate with a homeless beggar panhandling outside Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square. Even the top hat he wears looks like a dust-bin original. Gustav Doré is the real designer of these down-and-out costumes; Robert Israel, credited in the program for set and costumes, is only the adapter. What we have, in short, is a MND seen through an unexceptionably grungy lens, a vision of Shakespeare’s characters as members of the Legion of the Great Unwashed.
Of course, the audience, composed predominantly of junior and senior prep school students, “related” to it with no difficulty at all. In fact, they loved it, especially the scenes with the four young lovers. When Lysander, victim of magic flower juice, calls Hermia a “dwarf,” there was a huge audible “Eeeooo” from these much-engaged kids.
Meanwhile, I found myself getting into my “Shakespeare as barometer” frame of mind, deciding that some productions, this one included, of old familiar classics tell us much more about the cultural moment in which they appear than they do about the play itself — at the moment in which it appeared. The two program essays were, in this respect, noble efforts at irrelevancy. Gideon Lester, the ART dramaturg, gave us a perfectly intelligent piece of commentary on the high profile of subjectivity in the play, underlying a play-long concern with ambivalence. Emily Otto, a first-year student of dramaturgy in the ART Institute, wrote clearly and well about theories of whether MND was written on the occasion of a royal wedding and siding with Gary Jay Williams who in his splendid stage history Our Moonlight Revels argues that the play is much too subversive of patriarchal authority to have been appropriate for the celebration of an arranged marriage. Interesting, all of this, but completely beside the point of the production, whose