What I learned. . .
This was my eighth or ninth production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I actually thought I’d directed the play more times than that, but that’s the total at which I arrived when I stopped to count up them all. The good news is that it’s a nearly perfect play, one that provides actors, designers, tech staff and their director with plentiful challenges, and no matter how many times I’ve gotten to work on it, I’ve always learned something new – and always had a ball being in the room with the words, the story, and the people who may be returning to the play for a second, third, or fourth time, who may be playing a different role than one they’d played before, or who may be discovering the play for the very first time. As popular as Dream is, it’s always a little surprising to find out for whom a production is their maiden voyage.
Steve Woolf , Mark Bernstein, and Edward Coffield (Repertory Theatre of St. Louis’s Artistic Director, Managing Director, and Production Director, respectively) were exceedingly generous in their support of this outing to the woods near Athens. We assembled a first-rate design team: Jim Kronzer (sets), with whom I’d been eager to work ever since we collaborated on a production of Brighton Beach Memoirs at Pioneer Theatre Company nearly a decade prior; Susan Branch Towne (costumes), with whom I’d worked on two previous productions of the play and numerous other large-scale projects; Lonnie Rafael Alcaraz (lights), who I first worked with at the Utah Shakespeare Festival and who is our resident lighting designer at the Great River Shakespeare Festival; Matt Williams, a former student from PCPA days, now a highly respected and accomplished choreographer based in New York City; and Barry G. Funderburg, a sound designer and composer with whom I’d worked on productions of Dream at American Players Theatre and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, but with whom it had been a long spell since our last shared assignment.
Add to that many of the experienced, accomplished hands that comprise the Rep’s permanent staff (Marci Franklin, costume shop supervisor; John Metzner, wig and hair designer – and the costume designer for the first production of the play I directed on the Loretto-Hilton stage, this one for Webster University’s Conservatory of Theatre Arts; Garth Dunbar, costume crafts supervisor; Kelli Kreutzberg, properties director; Nichelle Williams, technical director), and we could not have been in better hands.
When we first gathered to share design ideas for the production, I had sent advance thoughts about the play – mostly, that whatever period we chose for this Dream, it should be a good one for underwear, as I think the trappings of the restrictive world away from which the four lovers in the play run, need to be divested the deeper into the night and into the woods they travel – and therefore, the world they’re fleeing needs to be paternalistic, militaristic, and confining. Working from these notions, Susan came equipped with images from the Regency period as a launch pad for discussions, and though I find the Regency particularly attractive for men (handsome; romantic), I think it’s a little dull for women (all due respect to Jane Austen and her numerous interpreters). Plus, the Rep had recently staged productions of “Emma,” “Pride and Prejudice,” and “Sense and Sensibility” – so I thought audiences might be a little “Regency’d-out.”
But it was Susan’s collection of high fashion images that really caught my eye and led us to the look for this particular Dream. She had included some outlandish runway silhouettes and fabrics as a departure point for the world of the fairies (or “supernaturals” as I prefer to think of them), and after studying them, we opted to explore our own invented period, rooted in classical silhouettes, but created out of contemporary fabrics, most of which harkened to the natural world. We settled on “late Victorian with a twist,” as Susan deemed it; the results of her creativity and imagination are reflected in the photo collages in the gallery sections of this site.
I also talked about the role of forgiveness in Dream, and how a key moment, often overlooked – not just in my own productions but in others that I’ve seen – happens in Act IV, when Duke Theseus and his pre-wedding hunting party come upon the four lovers in the woods. Rather than punishing them according to the harsh and ancient Athenian law as Hermia’s father, Egeus, demands, Theseus chooses forgiveness, lets the lovers off the hook, and hastily arranges their marriages, to take place simultaneously with his and Hippolyta’s. Thus, Theseus moves from Old Testament punishment to New Testament forgiveness, establishing a new world order and making it possible for Hippolyta to feel confident about her alliance with her former enemy, soon-to-become husband. (Mythology, of course, teaches us that their happiness was short-lived, but Shakespeare isn’t particularly concerned with those follow-up details.)
Key to our success, however, was the Rep’s agreeing to bring in six actors three days early, ahead of the arrival of the rest of the cast. I was able to get much table work and staging accomplished with Oberon/Theseus (Alvin Keith), Puck/Philostrtae (Jim Poulos), Demetrius (Andy Rindlisbach), Helena (Gracyn Mix), Lysander (Jeffrey Omura), and Hermia (Caroline Amos) before the rest of the company came to town, which meant we were able to put all of Shakespeare’s Act III, Scene ii (the play’s centerpiece and it’s longest and most complicated scene) on its feet before the full cast settled in to rehearsals. This proved a real advantage when it came time for Matt Williams to choreograph the hallucinatory-like dance that I hoped would become a memorable climax for the production, as it took a significant amount of time working with a company of 20 actors to set and finesse Matt’s wonderful choreography.
A sidebar delight to the casting of the production, in addition to getting to work with six terrific students from the Webster University Conservatory of Theatre Arts’s training program, several professional actors with whom I had already-established working relationships and a passel of actors who were brand new to me, was that Gracyn and Caroline (Helena and Hermia) were both veterans of the Great River Shakespeare Festival’s Apprentice Actor Training Program. Getting to work with them in a new and different professional setting was immensely fun and completely gratifying.
Some production reviews seem to convey the notion that there isn’t a director overseeing the work, but more frequently, it’s the designers who are overlooked and who remain unmentioned in reviews. I’m pleased to say that this was not the case with Dream. The production reviews were uniformly rapturous, and just about every single one of them cited the entire design team for their vibrant, imaginative, and beautiful work. This was one of those experiences for which we set the bar particularly high and managed to achieve or exceed our goals in every single instance: design, casting, production values, and performance. I couldn’t have been more gratified – and though this A Midsummer Night’s Dream will be difficult to top, I look forward to the opportunity that comes my way to hang out with this gorgeous, challenging play.