“I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.”
I was reading the director’s note in the playbill before the curtain came up on the debut performance of Rollins College’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The cast, the director said, had had only 5 weeks to prepare for opening night.
Some of the actors had never played Shakespeare before.
None of them, I am sure, had ever bombasted a blank verse while hanging upside down from a silken sheet.
Annie Russell Theater
If you live in Central Florida and have never seen a play at the Annie Russell Theater at Rollins College, hie thee hither anon.
The theater was built in 1931 and, I am told, retains much of it’s original design and charm.
The oversized red cloth seats feel like thrones compared to what you’re required to contort yourself into in other, more modern, venues.
And there is ample space between your knees and the row in front of you, which means no Falstaffian-shaped, lifetime patron en route to his center seat is going to squeeze his sagging derreirre in your face.
They even gave us two tickets for the price of one, which meant we were able to see live Shakespeare for the same amount it cost us to see Benjamin Button.
(Actually, we only saw the first half of Button which is a testament to how bad we thought it was. My wife didn’t even want to hang around long enough to see Brad Pitt get young.)
Reviewing a Shakespeare play is unlike reviewing any other.
You don’t, of course, critique the play itself.
It’s Shakespeare, by Jove!
That leaves you with the staging, the directing and the acting.
Of which I am an expert in none.
It doesn’t matter, though, because I suspect that trying to define what constitutes a good production of a Shakespeare play is lot like trying to define obscenity.
I can’t do it, but I know it when I see it.
Friday night at the Annie Russell, I saw it.
What stood out for me was the physicality of the performances.
It’s no small task for an actor to play Shakespeare straight side up, but the young man who played Oberon, King of the Fairies, spoke a full quarter of his lines suspended upside down from a silken sheer.
The student actor who played Bottom the Weaver spent half of the play crowned with an oversized asses head.
A half a dozen or so fairies spent the entire play flitting around the stage on their haunches.
And last, not least, Puck, albeit a chubby good fellow, several times sprinted from one end of the stage to the other, truly seeming to “put a girdle about the earth in forty minutes.”
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, of course , timeless.
Written in 1598 when Will was just 34 years old, it explains the inexplicability of love as the machinations of fairies who have far too much time on their hands.