A Midsummer Night's Dream

Director's 
Note

Gentle friends, this is not your Mama’s Shakespeare! 

I wanted to take Midsummer back to its roots as a bawdy sex farce - a raunchy, wet, hot American British summer, as characters traipse through a wonderland of togas, glitter, sex with donkeys, and the queerest gaggle of gender bending fairies to ever frolic (half) naked through the verge. 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy about people who tell themselves that they can’t have what they want because of society’s expectations. At the beginning of our story our lovers are miserable - Lysander and Hermia can’t get married because of Hermia’s father, Egeus, who would rather see his daughter dead than defy his will. Demetrius is telling himself he has to marry Hermia, even though that means forsaking his former and true love, Helena. 

The adults in the tale aren’t faring much better - Hippolyta, Amazon queen and newly engaged to Duke Theseus, is struggling to adjust to Athens’ patriarchal ways, and even the tempestuous King and Queen of the Fairies are warring.

As the young lovers get lost in the woods however, all of society’s nonsense expectations melt away as they become pawns of the meddling Fairy King Oberon and his trickster servant, Puck. Meanwhile, the Mechanicals (a hapless troupe of laborers-turned-actors) decide the woods is the perfect place to rehearse the play they plan to present at King Theseus’s wedding day. Preening actor and giant ham Bottom (really his name) gets the dubious honor of being turned into an ass, though it does come with the added perk of bedding the Fairy Queen. 

Through a night of confusion, fairy orgies, and the influence of a purple flower that drips love potion, our characters are put through the wringer, but it is only through this screwball romp through the woods that they can be liberated to be who they truly are, and love who they truly love. 

Eventually, all's well that ends well, and the play ends with a quadruple wedding: Theseus and Hippolyta celebrate their honeymoon; Oberon and Titania reconcile for the umpteenth time, the sacred feminine and the sacred masculine combining, in joyful, exuberant defiance of the binary; our pair of young lovers, finally paired up and authentically happy, brush the leaves out of their hair and go get married. The Mechanicals finally get their moment to shine in their laughable play-within-a-play. Puck closes the play, apologizing very sincerely if anyone was offended and reminding everyone to please clap.

I fell in love with Shakespeare from the first moment I read Romeo and Juliet as a high school freshman. In the same year, I played a fairy in our FLHS Masques production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so being able to direct this piece for OLT has felt like a homecoming and a real blessing. I’m also honored to FINALLY bring Shakespeare to OLT’s mainstage, an effort about seven years in the making! And if you enjoy tonight’s performance and care to take in a tragedy, I’ll be directing a production of Hamlet right here this upcoming September. 

For now, please sit back, relax, and enjoy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”