Lights! Sound! Costumes...& 3 days left

A few iPhone pics in a slide show...

Whooee.There is lots of work to do and plenty has been done. Lights are up, sound system up and today we worked on costumes and distributed T-shirts!  Everybody is doing a great job. Big ups to Carla Stanley for costuming the entire cast this morning in about 1.5 hours. The Royal mortals are dressed up to go clubbing at  the disco. The Fairey people are two clashing hippie tribes and the "rude mechanicals" are some country music loving "good old boys".  Most of are actors are young women under the age of 15, some by a decade...But they are all fabulous and look fabulous too. 

Peter Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream

Titania awakes but Bottom "waketh not".

An interesting take on MSND

Peter Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream 

By CLIVE BARNES

Published: January 21, 1971 

Many people have seen magic in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the magic of moonshine and fairyland, and-since no Shakespearean play has been so foully encrusted over with nineteenth-century romanticism-the magic of Mendelssohn and bosky scenery looking good enough to eat. Peter Brook has also seen magic in the Dream, but it is the magic of man. His production of the play, first seen last summer at Stratford-on-Avon and now gloriously come to the Billy Rose Theater, is also full of the magic of the theater.

It is a celebration of life and fancy, of man and his imagination, his fate, and the brevity of his brief candle in the light of the world. Shakespeare gave us "the lunatic, the lover and the poet," and Brook smilingly added the acrobat.

This is without any equivocation whatsoever the greatest production of Shakespeare I have ever seen in my life-and for my joys and my sins I have seen literally hundreds. Its greatness lies partly in its insight into man, and best of all its remarkable insight into Shakespeare. But it also lies in its originality. It is the most genuinely and deeply original production of Shakespeare in decades.
So-called original Shakespeare often is enough to make sensitive and sensible men squirm. It usually means strange texts, outlandish readings, battered phrases, rude glosses and impertinent additions. Here it means no such thing. Here it means merely that Brook has forgotten-not really forgotten, for on occasion he jokes about it-or at least ignored, that scaly accretion of time called a classic's performing tradition. Brook has behaved as if A Midsummer Night's Dream had been written just last midsummer by a young man with an archaic turn of phrase, an immortal gift for poetry, and no ability whatsoever to write stage directions.

He has taken this script and staged it with regard for nothing but its sense and meaning. He has collaborated with Shakespeare, not twisted his arm or blinded his senses, not tried to be superior, but just helped him out to get this strange play on stage.

Titania's bower and her people.

Helped by the designer Sally Jacobs, Brook has placed the play within three white and gleaming walls. Across the back are two white doors, and on top of the walls are battlements where musicians can play, actors run or wait, or even on occasion dangle scenery into the playing cockpit below. Its purpose? And for that matter, the purpose of an Oberon on a trapeze, a Puck who juggles with plates or dashes across the scene on Tarzan rope or runs on stilts? Why all this? Are they merely the tricks of Brook's fertile imagination; conjurations to while the time, and limn out a little talent? Emphatically no.
Brook has taken this play as pristine new and samite white. But he also knows that we take to the play our expectations taken from schoolhouse and playhouse. He wants, I think, to surprise us into listening to these lute-songs of the spirit with new ears and unencumbered intelligences.
His one liberty-and this has been taken in some circles as a mere literary conceit-has been to combine the roles of Theseus and Hippolyta with those of Oberon and Titania, that of Philostrate with Puck and that of Egeus with Quince. What sounds perverse in theory, in practice serves to emphasize the playwright's purpose. Shakespeare should have done such a combination himself. For a rare once, the director knows best.

For now the play takes on the shape of an allegory of love, with the actors, and their plays within plays, whether they be mechanicals or poets, all pointed toward some explanation of sudden love and eventual mortality. "What fools these mortals be," muses Puck. But here Puck too is mortal, and fairyland is only a dimension of love, for Theseus, Oberon and, yes, even, the comically tragic Pyramus, all are lovers.
Brook takes the elements of the theater and mixes them as if he were a chef trying out a recipe. Circus tricks, Indian chants, flamenco guitar, children's streamers, paper plates, mock and mocked Mendelssohn, all are thrown into some eclectic broth. Only the text is sacred, to be illuminated, or like some holy child, cosseted, and once in a while cuffed behind the ear, to show a proper religious irreverence.

This year our cast is very young and mostly girls...

The superb actors seem as dedicated to Brook as Brook is to Shakespeare. Alan Howard, humorous and compassionate as the Theseus/Oberon, Sara Kestelman, sensual and womanly as the Hippolyta/Titania, John Kane's supremely amused Puck, David Waller's humanistic and appealing Bottom, the Quince of Philip Locke, the lovers of Mary Rutherford, Frances de la Tour, Terence Taplin and Ben Kingsley are all masterly in the natural way of men and women surprised in life rather than actors caught acting.
If you have any interest in the theater, in life or in your fellow men, I think you will be transfixed by this Dream. And, if you haven't, well, even so, you might appreciate still the fun and the juggling. As Shakespeare would surely be the first to admit, jugglers have their place.

Week 2 of Midsummer Night's Dream

Here is the cast of Midsummer Night's Dream about to start week two of rehearsal at Royalston Town Hall. We are turning over the direction to some members of previous years casts. Asher was Bottom in our 2003 version of Midsummer, the first ever Royalston Shakespeare production. Maureen and Beth and I are still hanging around to help as needed.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play that was written by William Shakespeare. It is believed to have been written between 1590 and 1596. It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of the Duke of Athens, Theseus, and the Queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta. These include the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of amateur actors, who are manipulated by the fairies who inhabit the forest in which most of the play is set. The play is one of Shakespeare's most popular works for the stage and is widely performed across the world.

Left: Titania and her fairy band and Puck and Oberon, Royal mortals in the back row and rude mechanicals  in front

The play features three interlocking plots, connected by a celebration of the wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and the Amazonian queen, Hippolyta, and set simultaneously in the woodland, and in the realm of Fairyland, under the light of the moon.[1]

In the opening scene, Hermia refuses to follow her father Egeus's instructions to marry Demetrius, whom he has chosen for her. In response, Egeus quotes before Theseus an ancient Athenian law whereby a daughter must marry the suitor chosen by her father, or else face death. Theseus offers her another choice: lifelong chastity worshiping the goddess Diana as a nun.

Meanwhile, Oberon, king of the fairies, and his queen, Titania, have come to the forest outside Athens. Titania tells Oberon that she plans to stay there until after she has attended Theseus and Hippolyta's wedding. Oberon and Titania are estranged because Titania refuses to give her Indian changeling to Oberon for use as his "knight" or "henchman," since the child's mother was one of Titania's worshipers. Oberon seeks to punish Titania's disobedience, so he calls for his mischievous court jester Puck (also called "Hobgoblin" and "Robin Goodfellow") to help him apply a magical juice from a flower called "love-in-idleness," which when applied to a person's eyelids while sleeping makes the victim fall in love with the first living thing seen upon awakening (due to the god of love, Cupid, shooting a love arrow at a virgin queen but it, being deflected off a moon beam, flew into a patch of flowers, where the love potion, contained within the arrow, drained into the flowers, giving them their powers). He instructs Puck to retrieve the flower so that he can make Titania fall in love with the first thing she sees when waking from sleep, which he is sure will be an animal of the forest. Oberon's intent is to shame Titania into giving up the little Indian boy. He says, "And ere I take this charm from off her sight, / As I can take it with another herb, / I'll make her render up her page to me."[2]

Having seen Demetrius act cruelly toward Helena, Oberon orders Puck to spread some of the magical juice from the flower on the eyelids of the young Athenian man. Instead, Puck mistakes Lysander for Demetrius, not having actually seen either before. Helena, coming across him, wakes him while attempting to determine whether he is dead or asleep. Upon this happening, Lysander immediately falls in love with Helena since he is still under the influence of the flower. Oberon sees Demetrius still following Hermia and is enraged. When Demetrius decides to go to sleep, Oberon sends Puck to get Helena while he charms Demetrius' eyes. Upon waking up, he sees Helena. Now, both men are in pursuit of Helena. However, she is convinced that her two suitors are mocking her, as neither loved her originally. Hermia is at a loss to see why her lover has abandoned her, and accuses Helena of stealing Lysander away from her. The four quarrel with each other until Lysander and Demetrius become so enraged that they seek a place to duel each other to the death to prove whose love for Helena is the greatest. Oberon orders Puck to keep Lysander and Demetrius from catching up with one another and to remove the charm from Lysander, so that he goes back to being in love with Hermia.
Study for The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania by Joseph Noel Paton

Meanwhile, a band of six lower-class labourers ("rude mechanicals", as they are described by Puck) have arranged to perform a play about Pyramus and Thisbe for Theseus' wedding and venture into the forest, near Titania's bower, for their rehearsal. Nick Bottom, a stage-struck weaver, is spotted by Puck, who (taking his name to be another word for a jackass) transforms his head into that of a donkey. When Bottom returns for his next lines, the other workmen take one look at him and run screaming in terror. Determined to wait for his friends, he begins to sing to himself. Titania is awakened by Bottom's singing and immediately falls in love with him. She lavishes him with attention, and presumably makes love to him. While she is in this state of devotion, Oberon takes the changeling. Having achieved his goals, Oberon releases Titania, orders Puck to remove the donkey's head from Bottom, and arrange everything so that Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius, and Helena will believe that they have been dreaming when they awaken. The magical enchantment is removed from Lysander, leaving Demetrius under the spell and in love with Helena.

The fairies then disappear, and Theseus and Hippolyta arrive on the scene, during an early morning hunt. They wake the lovers and, since Demetrius does not love Hermia anymore, Theseus overrules Egeus's demands and arranges a group wedding. The lovers decide that the night's events must have been a dream. After they all exit, Bottom awakes, and he too decides that he must have experienced a dream "past the wit of man". In Athens, Theseus, Hippolyta and the lovers watch the six workmen perform Pyramus and Thisbe. The play is badly performed to the point where the guests laugh as if it were meant to be a comedy, and afterward everyone retires to bed. Afterward, Oberon, Titania, Puck, and other fairies enter, and bless the house and its occupants with good fortune. After all other characters leave, Puck "restores amends" and reminds the audience that this might be nothing but a dream (hence the name of the play).

Caleb Chase designed and Carla Stanley finished off this ass-head.

Midsummer 2011

A Midsummer Night's Dream 

directed by Asher Chase and Noah Dawson

Asher blocks the "rude mechanicals..."

 

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

THESEUS Duke of Athens - Ben West

EGEUS father to Hermia - Noah Dawson

HIPPOLYTA queen of the Amazons - Tobey Chase

QUINCE a carpenter- Olivia Dufour

SNUG a joiner - Owen McPhee

BOTTOM a weaver - Hanna Seghir

FLUTE a bellows-mender - Hannah Bartkus

SNOUT a tinker - Haleigh O'Regan

STARVELING a tailor - Marni Anair

LYSANDER- Casey Gallat

DEMETRIUS , in love with Hermia Yasmin Seghir

HERMIA daughter to Egeus, in love with Lysander Elizabeth West

HELENA in love with Demetrius- Emily Mangum

OBERON king of the fairies -Ben West

TITANIA queen of the fairies - Tobey Chase

PUCK or Robin Goodfellow - Marissa Gallat

PEASEBLOSSOM - Julie Gamble

COBWEB - Soleil

MOTH - Grace Dufour

MUSTARDSEED Samantha West