Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Folger Theater, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Sex, Love
We were in Washington, DC, on a work/mini-vacation trip, and
we went to see one of the less visited museums – the museum of buildings. It is in the judicial district and a very
large brick structure. When it was
built, it was the largest brick building in the world. It was built as a pension building for civil
war veterans and it has an incredible open atrium – five stories tall – in the
middle of it. It is a particularly
fitting building to be the museum of buildings because the columns that support
the brick walls surrounding the atrium are in all three classical styles – with
Ionic columns holding up Doric columns, and massive Corinthian columns dominating
the space – as if to teach us about the development of classic architecture. On the day we visited, this space was filled
with – a pop-up stage.
Apparently, the Folger Shakespeare Library is closed for renovations, and their stage is, too, so they are using various other stages around town to mount their productions. The last time we saw Midsummer Night’s Dream, it was on an outdoor stage in Door County, Wisconsin, and the stage at the Museum of Buildings (we were able to get tickets to come back to see the performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream) felt – because of the space above us – almost like we were outside again. And, of course, even if it is a bit past the solstice, it doesn’t hurt to see this play in the middle of summer.
The play is, as this Playbill pointed out, a comedy; not
because the two (or three, depending on how you count it) couples are able to successfully
get together at the end of it, but because the ragtag players who are in it are
able to mount a successful production at the end of it. The dream is, as it were, the creation of a
play – the mounting of it – and successfully inviting the audience to engage in
it, to feel it, to experience it, as they would a dream. And so, the measure of success of the play is
the measure of the experience of the audience member – the ability of the
audience member to experience the play as a dream, as their own dream.
This production was quite conscious and public about their
intention to engage the audience – to ensnare them or collaborate with them in
the dream production. They encouraged
audience participation at the beginning of it, made frequent allusions to pop
music, encouraged clapping along to much of the singing and dancing that they
did. They more successfully captured the
Reluctant Wife, because she is more familiar with the pop vernacular, but I
think they missed the mark with deeply enthralling each of us – ironically
because of the strength of the individual actors.
The play involves three largely unrelated sets of people who
are functioning in parallel but apparently without any actual overlap – much
the way that our dream life functions in parallel to our lived life with
overlap that is only apparent on inspection or, dare I say it, analysis… The first characters we are introduced to are
the Members of the Court of Athens.
Hippolyta is the Queen of the Amazons and she is betrothed to Theseus,
the Duke of Athens. Was Theseus a
Duke? Did the Amazons have a Queen? Does it matter when they are played by
African Americans as contemporary African Americans? Hermia, a young girl who is in love with Lysander, has
been promised by her father, Egeus a member of the Athenian court, to
Demetrius, who is desperately in love with her.
Meanwhile Demetrius is spurning Helena who is in love with him. Just so there is some balance somewhere,
Lysander, at least initially, is in love with Hermia.
Meanwhile, Theseus has commissioned Peter Quince to produce
a play on the day of his wedding. Quince
has an inept band of players, led by Bottom, to do this. Meanwhile, in a shadow world, The King and
Queen of the Fairies are fighting with each other and Titania, the Queen, uses an
assistant Fairy, Puck, to transform Bottom into an Ass and then, in a reversal
of Shakespeare’s writing, casts a spell so that Oberon, the King, foolishly
falls in love with the Ass, which will allow the Queen, she hopes, the ability
to take from the King the changeling – a young human that the fairies have
stolen.
In my own reading of this comedy, unlike in tragedy, which
focuses on the character and travails of a hero, here we are confronted with a
group of people. All of them are flawed
in obvious and ordinary ways. And the
loves that they experience here are fickle and complicated. Unlike the single minded lovers of tragedy –
and here we could take Romeo and Juliet – lovers who may be star crossed by
virtue of the social boundaries they dare not cross, but who are true and
constant with each other. Ironically –
certainly intentionally, Shakespeare does take the star-crossed lovers and makes
fun of them. The play that the troupe
performs on the triple wedding day at the end of the play is a vastly shortened
caricatured and funny version of Romeo and Juliet. It is absurd and awful, it is poorly acted,
and it allows the couples who are getting married – who are entering into a
sacred covenant, making sacred vows, laugh.
And we laugh, too, exiting the theater with a light-hearted step.
What does that say about us?
Are we fickle, too? Of course we
are. What are we to do, then, with Romeo
and Juliet? Weren’t we deeply moved by
that? Where do we stand on the comic and
fickle to tragic and serious continuum?
I, for one, was raised to be serious. Love – and the necessary compliment –
marriage – was serious business. When I
fell in love, it was to be forever. And
it was to be a deep and lasting opening up of an intimate relationship across a
shared lifetime. And I took it upon
myself to mold my character to be worthy of such an undertaking. (I know this sounds pretentious and crazy,
but it is true…)
At the same time, I was driven to be interested in a variety
of people – to be drawn to them, to flirt with them and, especially as I grew
older, to explore being close to not just one, but a series of people. Ultimately, when I married the first time, that marriage did
not last. Was my wife fickle? Was I fickle? Did the fairies interfere in our loving
relationship? Did we not understand each
other enough – though we were older and, as my brother-in-law who performed the
marriage ceremony pointed out to us when he opted not to offer pre-marital counseling
– we were both psychologists. Shouldn’t we have known what we were getting
into?
I was struck, in thinking about the structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that the book Hamnet,
which portrays a version of Shakespeare as married in Stratford and a man about
town in London, captures something of the tension between Shakespeare’s vision
of love in Romeo and Juliet (a deep and abiding love for a wife in Stratford),
and the temptations, perhaps especially as imagined by that wife, of a man who
spent much of his life away from her (The man about town in London).
Love is both serious business and light-hearted play. Peter Fonagy, a psychoanalyst in London who
is very interested in how we develop from children into adults, proposed that
one of the reasons sexual intimacy is so delightful is that our sexual selves
have not been supported and nurtured throughout our lives – they have mostly
been ignored. This means that they are
relatively immature – meaning that we can more easily engage in spontaneous
play from our sexual selves than perhaps from any other part of ourselves. I believe this can also get us into
trouble. We can play – and be drawn into
a relationship – and not realize – not have the wherewithal to realize that we
are in over our heads and that the other person is, perhaps, not the right
person for us. Shakespeare nicely sends this
idea up by having Egeus not understand that his daughter Hermia’s love for
Lysander is true and constant, though he also has the fairies demonstrate that
Lysander could become directed to love someone else. Fortunately for Lysander, and the play,
Hermia hangs onto her attachment – she knows what love is – and she wins
Lysander back.
If Shakespeare did, as Harold Bloom proposed, invent The
Human, he did so in all of the splendid variety that we as a group – but also
that we as individuals are. Not only are
the characters different from each other, they are different from themselves
based on the vagaries of fairies and of chance, and we are able to be made a fool
of by love – even falling in love with an ass…
Even if I did not resonate with the beat of this performance – even if
the strength of individual performances was so great that the play did not
coalesce into a deep and strong dream, but felt rather like one of those dreams
that barely holds together and barely keeps us asleep, there is something about
the structure of this play and its tension with the other plays in the oeuvre
that, like the columns in the building where it was performed, can teach us something about the structure of
the human experience – its variety and constancy – and all the while we just think that we are being entertained.
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