Dreaming with Shakespeare During a Summer of Chaos

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A scene from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Delacorte Theatre.Photograph by Joan Marcus Courtesy the Public Theatre

About three quarters through Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Hermia, who is in love with Lysander, wakes alone in the forest, in the middle of the night, and recounts a dream. It’s the only actual dream-telling in the play.

Help me, Lysander, help me; do thy best
To pluck this crawling serpent from my breast.
Ay me for pity! What a dream was here!
Lysander, look how I do quake with fear.
Methought a serpent eat my heart away,
And you sat smiling at his cruel prey.

This summer has seen two productions of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in New York: one produced by the Public Theatre and directed by Lear deBessonet, at the Delacorte Theatre, in Central Park, and the other produced by the New York City Ballet. There is also a new version of the Arden Shakespeare companion to the play, edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri, a Renaissance specialist and a translator of Tagore and others. This Arden edition—the first in more than forty years—is particularly helpful in offering a new, comprehensive production history of the play. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was first staged in 1604, after which it vanished until October of 1630, when it was put on at Hampton Court. In September, 1662, Samuel Pepys called it “the most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life.”

Since then, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” may be the most produced of Shakespeare’s plays (all those parts for fairies!), aside from “Hamlet.” In the past half century or so, the productions have included a number of politically charged stagings. In the nineteen-eighties, South African directors at the universities of Rhodes and Witwatersrand challenged apartheid laws by casting mixed-race and black actors in the play—including as Tom Snout playing the Wall, symbolizing racial segregation. Alexandru Darie’s 1990 production, in Romania, featured secret policeman. In Bhopal, in 1993, the Indian director Habib Tanvir’s controversial staging cast tribal people in central roles. In 2002, the film “A Dream in Hanoi” documented a collaboration on “Midsummer” between two theatre companies, one American and one Vietnamese. Sketches survive, made by a twelve-year-old boy named Stepan Pollak, who died at Auschwitz in 1943, for a performance at the Terezín “model” concentration camp. In 2012, a production at Moscow’s acclaimed Gogol Center, directed by Mikhail Serebrennikov, staged the play in four spaces: the broken-down greenhouse of the fairies and artists, a schoolyard dumpster, a penthouse, and a workmen's shelter. “What Shakespeare intended as lighthearted parody,” John Freedman wrote in the Moscow Times, “Serebrennikov convincingly and beautifully delivers as full-on tragedy.” On Tuesday, in part of what is seen as a crackdown on the arts, Serebrennikov was detained on charges of misusing over a million dollars of funds earmarked for productions. One charge is that the production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” did not occur.

In the madcap, weirdly moving recent Public Theatre production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”—in which the fairies were played by elderly actors in nightdresses—I realized that I’d never quite heard that snake speech before: a nightmare, in the middle of a play that I most readily equate with summer froth, a kind of Shakespearean Betty and Veronica comic strip. When I mentioned this to Shalita Grant, who played Hermia (at twenty-eight, Grant is a veteran of Public Theatre productions and currently stars in the television series “NCIS: New Orleans”), she said, “I had a few moments when I thought—I can’t do this. I’m supposed to be the funny girl in the corner! What I worked out is that I’m processing, through the dream, what’s happening while I’m asleep. I’ve heard Lysander saying to Helena that he loves her, not me! And then, it’s like life, you wake and the dream isn’t thoroughly available to you, but it’s there, the tail end, guiding you, and influencing your thoughts.” She paused. “Lear said, ‘I want you to find her strength. I want you to take the stage.’ ”

Lear deBessonet is a director who feels strongly about people—all kinds of people—taking the stage. Her productions for the Public Theatre’s Public Works projects have involved putting two hundred people onstage at a time—both children and adults, most of them non-professionals, and many of them performing for the first time—for adaptions of “A Winter’s Tale” and “The Tempest.” She took on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a project three years in the making, after she and Oskar Eustis, the director of the Public, decided that the play might be the best way to explore questions that had been preoccupying her in Public Works: chief among these were “What is magic?” and “What is magic in the theatre?” DeBessonet, who brings to her work a fizzy combination of erudition and enthusiasm, said, “For me, ‘Midsummer’ is about the fairies, but if I hear, ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme grows,’ and that’s a lithe person in glittery spandex, I’m out of there! Magic in the theatre isn’t fireworks. It’s much more related to human frailty and foibles. My deep feeling is that humanity itself is magic, in all of its brokenness and insanity and confusion.”

Annaleigh Ashford, who played Helena in the Public Theatre production, with a zest that recalled a young Goldie Hawn—wry slapstick shot through with Betty Boop incredulity—told me, “I’ve learned that, like film, Shakespeare is mostly a director’s medium. The way that we work with Shakespeare in the modern era mines and reflects the text, but it veers where the director wants to take it. Lear’s idea about the fairies is that there is an unseen circle, a place where we are all connected to each other, that we cannot see. To me, the fairies were a representation of those who have left their bodies but are still hovering on Earth.”

Helena is one of Shakespeare’s most beset characters—heaped with abuse, she’s an ingénue Caliban: the glum girl who arrives under a rain cloud. Ashford said, “You know when you have a day when nothing goes right? That’s every day, for Helena, who’s been hurt by love. It’s her plight, and it’s our plight—we’ve all been in love with an ass! Lear said, ‘This show is about what it means to be human.’ ” Ashford paused. “I sat next to Shalita in the dressing room, and I remember she was very struck by that.”

I asked Grant about this. She replied, “For me, I thought, Well, let’s see, Shalita. Being human can also mean racism, or sexism, or not having your voice heard. But I love that every single night I got to fail at that first scene—I have all the men around me say, ‘No, you can’t,’ and to say, ‘Yes, I can.’ Yes, I will leave my country and I will marry Lysander, and then to see, well, I didn’t calculate the cost of this! But to come out every night onstage, and to be rewarded with a happy ending—that’s the fairy tale.” Grant checked herself, with a catch in her voice. “We’re all watching the news. People were just happy to come into the park and not check their cell phones for two hours.”

The night I attended the performance, people were indeed happy to come into the park and turn their attention to the forest, where the set was enlivened by fairy lights and a forest slide that gave the high jinks a fun-fair air. The canopies of trees, real and artificial, darkened, and then were lit by moonlight.

One brings, of course, one’s own viewfinder to the theatre. And “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in particular, is about watching. The audience watches the lovers, who are watched by the fairies; the Mechanicals’ play is watched by the lovers and the audience. (In Adrian Noble’s 1996 film, the entire thing is watched by a little boy, who may or may not be dreaming.) It’s a play about spying, and about realms we can’t really touch that go on despite—and without—us, which is somehow worse. To me, over the years, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” has been a tale of teen love-trouble (background track: the Cars singing “My Best Friend’s Girl”); a country wedding; an aperçu, served up on the table of a long marriage when the Fairy King and Queen have lost some of their glitter; a custody battle. One summer, two of my daughters played Helena and Hermia in a summer production—and that’s there, too, in my mind’s inner eye. In this summer of chaos, it was the snake in the forest that caught my attention.

For a number of years, watching the New York City Ballet’s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” for me, has heralded the start of summer, as it did this June. Choreographed by George Balanchine, in 1962—it was his first full-length original story ballet—it opened the ballet season at the New York State Theatre in 1964, with Melissa Hayden as Titania, Edward Villella as Oberon, and Arthur Mitchell as Puck. It features, well, fairies in spandex; most of them small winged children from the School of American Ballet. Troy Schumacher, who is one of the company’s most buoyant and ebullient Pucks, told me, “The role is unique in that you are responsible for just about everything! Puck has twenty entrances—the most, I believe, in any ballet—and he is often carrying props! He’s the catalyst for the action, and everything depends on him!” The first time Schumacher danced Puck, his wife, Ashley Laracey, who is also a soloist at City Ballet, and often plays Hermia (in City Ballet parlance, Helena and Hermia are referred to not by their names but as the Red and the Blue for the color of the costumes they wear), stood in the wings with a checklist, to make sure that Schumacher got on and off stage. Schumacher continued, “It’s one of the most physically demanding parts I dance, if not the most technically demanding, but the reward is the extraordinary range of emotion: Puck is mischievous, joyful, kind, remorseful. Everything depends on him, but, within that, there’s a huge measure of freedom.”

“Magic is work!” DeBessonet said, when I asked about Puck, who in the Delacorte production was played by the sixty-two-year-old actress Kristine Nielsen, with a bowl haircut. “The fairies speak to what it is to be mortal. When we talk about immortality, we are talking about mortality; when we talk about the supernatural, we have to explore what is natural. And we’re talking about joy.” She thought for a moment, and then continued, “In the years when I was working on this project, I wanted a child, and I had a long journey to have it. I thought for a while I’d never have one. And here was this play about a changeling baby!

“In dreams,” Yeats wrote, “begin responsibilities.” The line is an epigraph to his book “Responsibilities,” published in 1914. The first poem begins, “Pardon old fathers, if you still remain / somewhat in earshot for the story’s end.” Watching the play, I wondered if we are at the tail end of the American dream—can we remain in earshot, and remember what the dream said? Whose dream are we dreaming? DeBessonet is particularly interested in the American pageantry movement, an early-twentieth-century phenomenon in which towns and cities across the country would put on pageants in which the theme was often civic unity. In the Boston pageant of 1910, the figure of “America” received members of different ethnic immigrant groups, who then formed one community onstage. “It was an idea about theatre, and responsibility, and democracy,” deBessonet said. She paused, then said, “There is something magical about putting people on a stage together. It produces a kind of radiance.”