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Wednesday, August 17, 2022

A Midsummer Night's Dream - Love, Sex, and Fairies

 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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