The Univesity's Shakespeare on the Lawn (SotL) is gearing up for what the group's president, fourth-year Liz White, called a few nights of "pure, silly fun" with their rendition of A Midsummer Night's Dream which the troupe will perform from April 6-8. Their version of the play is colorful, boisterous and "sexed up" according to White. It includes original dance numbers, a capella adaptations of four Van Morrison songs and even a little gender-bending.
This performance will mark the ten-year anniversary of the formation of the group, which was started by several English majors and Engineering students with the intent to perform the lesser-known works of Shakespeare. Since that time, the group has performed most of those works and is now cycling through some of the more popular plays the likes of Hamlet. Midsummer will be the first comedy the group has performed in the last four years and features one of their biggest casts. The troupe, which is fully funded by donations and grants from Student Council and the Arts & Sciences Council, works along with other student groups such as First-Year Players, sharing "techies," production equipment and even actors. This year, however, over half of the performers have never been in a SotL production before.
The play's director, Katie Mason (CLAS 2005), has been dreaming up her interpretation of the play for the last four years. Midsummer is the story of a love triangle between Hermia, a young woman in ancient Athens, and two young men, Lysander and Demetrius. While Hermia is in love with Lysander, her father wants her to marry Demetrius, with whom her friend Helena is desperately in love. Hermia and Lysander flee to the woods, and Demetrius and Helena follow. These woods are enchanted, however, by fairies, including fairy King Oberon and fairy Queen Titania, who are fighting over a young Indian boy. The fairies decide to become involved with the lovers, and the hilarious and dizzying plot gets under way.
While SotL is known for changing the setting of Shakespeare's plays, they decided to keep this play set in ancient Athens. One major change from the original, however, is the recasting of Puck, the mischievous spell-casting male fairy and Oberon's servant, as a woman.
"Even before auditions we knew we wanted to do that, because one thing we wanted to play up was a sexualized relationship between Puck and Oberon, servant and master, but sort of a willingness to assume those two roles, dominant-submissive type things. It makes their interactions make a lot more sense to us because it gives them a reason ... for Puck to be so servile and so willing and so obliging ... it makes it more fun to watch them talk, rather than just one person giving orders and one person skipping off to do them. It also adds a lot of depth to Puck's character, which is a problem I had with the play when I first read it," Mason explained.
White added that they emphasized that Oberon seemed more attracted to Puck because she provides more of a counterpoint to him than Titania. She said that they "read [the sexual references] in very easily" and that Puck's gender change made an "incredible difference" to the tone and feel of the play.
Along the same lines, the character of Egeus, Hermia's father, was changed from straight to homosexual. Mason explained that it was a decision the actor, fourth-year Jamie Trowbridge, made. Egeus is one of the supporting characters which are usually played very solemnly in other renditions of Midsummers, but the actor's portrayal "makes the character very, very funny." Not one character in SotL's version is straight and solemn, however. Almost all of the characters deliver somewhat outrageous, over-the-top performances which are amusing but too much at times.
Mason herself commented on this aspect of the production -- "we're still at the point where we're actually pulling back more than trying to cram things in. [The actors] have so much energy and they just hurl it at you ... it's overwhelming!"
Despite the changes in sexuality or gender, Mason does not want the audience to misunderstand their position.
"We're not trying to a make a statement on sexual politics. It would be easy to do that in this play, but it's not what we're going for. Every character in this play is pretty much a caricature," Mason said.
Another obvious and interesting change to the original play is the addition of four songs which are mostly performed by the fairy chorus and at least one dance number which features Puck. While many members of the cast are inexperienced in singing and dancing, they spent long hours trying to put their musical numbers together. The group has been practicing three hours a day, four days a week for the last eight weeks to prepare for the upcoming production.
While Shakespeare does call for two musical numbers in the performance, "he does not call for Van Morrison," Mason said in between laughs. Mason explained that the two numbers Shakespeare wrote are usually cut from the production because they slow it down.
"I really liked the idea of including the music because it gives it sort of an ambience and it gives us a world in a way that costumes and lights and stuff can't," Mason said of her decision to add the songs. She chose Van Morrison because the themes of the songs fit so closely to those of the play.
Their performance of "Warm Love," the final number, did create a magical but funky ambience that set their performance apart from other adaptations of the play. The fairy chorus is no U.Va. a capella group, but their voices did blend together harmoniously, and they will surely entertain the audience.
Mason said that their changes are crucial to their performance's success.
"In a low-budget, amateur production of one of the most popular and performed plays of all times ... if you're not going to do something different with it, you're not going to do it justice," Mason said. "We're going for a very big, stylized, in-your-face style just to see what people think about it. We're trying to show people a Midsummer they've never seen before."
Shakespeare on the Lawn will perform A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Student Activities Building April 6-8 at 8 p.m. with an additional 2 p.m. matinee on Saturday. All performances are free.
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