A Midsummer NIght's Dream

Just to maintain presence:

Though there has been no Spring, and this is certainly not midsummer, we went last evening to see the Guthrie Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was a lovely time, though at dinner, the soup arrived with the main course, and all seemed too rushed. The wine was nice, however.

I’ve always loved this play. I recall as an undergraduate discussing this play in class. Dr. Wise was reading aloud either the scene where Titania, the Queen of the Fairies, woos Bottom, who now sports the head of an ass, or the scene where Bottom and his colleagues put on the wedding play for the three betrothed couples. And the class laughed uproariously, and tears of merriment rolled cheerfully down my cheeks. This latter scene in last night’s production was handled well, and the audience (which included my children) laughed heartily.

But for me there was a hard edge to the play which I did not expect and which I did not appreciate. Oberon, the king of the Fairies, was harsh and loud, and he evinced a certain cruelty, hardness, and even a meanness which does not seem apt for this play. The sets, though spectacular, were not dream-like, and the music too loud and harsh to sustain the dream.

And I wondered what this production reflected about the times, what structure of feeling it held. This veered more toward nightmare than midsummer’s dream. The play had a strong military presence in the person of Hermia’s father and her failed suitor, Demetrius. Men wore military camouflage, and at one point Theseus and Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, embark on a hunt carrying rifles. The application of the magic potions is done with violence, and I kept thinking of William Carlos Williams’ short story “The Use of Force;” I found nothing magical here, nor even anything soft. Even mischievous Puck suffers physical abuse by the hands of Oberon, himself dressed in too many metal buckles and chains. This Dream was no respite from the world, nor did there seem hope for that world to be remade by the triple wedding at the play’s close. If Puck’s famous line, “Lord what fools these mortals be,” helps define the play’s action, these mortals were not fools, but merely cruel actors and stupidly insensitive players in a play they little understood or appreciated. And the fairies were hardly a benign force, but were, in fact, an amoral presence influencing human actions. This production comes out of a world which has at its center violence, and cruelty, and insensitivity. If at the play’s close, the fairies are sent out by Oberon to bless each bride-bed, I fear the nature of that blessing. The perfect society Oberon predicts is too hard to imagine from the societies of this production.