A Midsummer Night’s Dream was directed by Ted Swetz, with whom I
had worked with on The
Country Wife two seasons
earlier. The director's vision included setting the play in an abandoned
theatre space. We used the First Folio as our script for the production, which
was extremely enlightening.
This was Ted’s twelfth production of Midsummer, and in a
preliminary workshop prior to rehearsals he pointed out that the First Folio is
essentially an acting edition in which the punctuation
clearly signals how performers should handle the pronunciation and
interpretation of different words and lines. I had never heard of this before,
since it was definitely not something that I would have learned in my studies
of Shakespeare in the strictly literary realm!
My dramaturgical packet consisted of a PowerPoint for all the members of the cast and crew. It contained over 500 slides, with photographs of abandoned theatres, paintings and illustrations representing scenes from the play, and production photos depicting great actors and productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream throughout history.
My dramaturgical packet consisted of a PowerPoint for all the members of the cast and crew. It contained over 500 slides, with photographs of abandoned theatres, paintings and illustrations representing scenes from the play, and production photos depicting great actors and productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream throughout history.
I also did much research into Shakespeare's flora and fauna, and
compiled a notebook with images and information on this significant aspect of
the play--especially "Cupid's flower" and "Dian's bud" that
are central to the onstage action. This project was quite challenging, since it
involved becoming an amateur botanist (and ornithologist) in many respects! I
had to identify not only which particular plants Shakespeare was describing
(since he often refers to them by their common name only), but also exactly
which species would have been growing in Elizabethan England. When researching
information for the character of "Mustardseed," for example, I was
amazed at just how many different types of mustard exist in the world! When
there was some doubt about this, I usually chose the wild form of the plant,
for obvious reasons.
Other dramaturgical research included investigating Elizabethan
carpentry and tools for the actor playing Peter Quince, and illuminating proper
pronunciation and meaning of certain lines of text. I was able to determine,
for example, how to pronounce "collied" in the line "Brief as
the lightening in the collied night" (1.1.145), and the meaning of the
word "oes" in the line referring to "all yon fiery oes and eyes
of light" (3.2.188).
