Dreaming of Midsummer

The Trinity College Dramatic Society’s “Shakespeare in the Quad” is a long-standing and cherished tradition that brings together students, faculty, alumni, and assorted theatre-lovers each year. This season, the TCDS will be mounting a not-so-traditional production of one of Shakespeare’s most celebrated works, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I sat down with one of the co-directors, Travis DeWolf, to find out how she, co-director Liz Laywine, and the cast and crew plan to take one of Shakespeare’s most inventive and popular comedies in a new direction.

Emma: This is not your first foray into the realm of TCDS Shakespeare; you directed Richard III last year. What is different this time around?

Travis: They are two different plays and I think each of them has different challenges. For Richard, being a history play, we had to figure out not only how to make our cast and crew understand the finer details of the script, but also how to impart those complexities to the audience. Pretty much everyone knows or has seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so we did not have to deal with those textual challenges. This allows us to pull apart the script and do something daring with it – because we have that basis of audience familiarity. We have imposed the play with our own challenges and taken a lot of risks in terms of structure and form.

E: You are going to be using three locations at Trinity College. What is the idea behind that?

T: There is a quote in the play: “In the field, in the temple, in the town.” So we’ve chosen our field, our temple, and our town. The quad is serving as the main forest location, we have Seeley Hall as Athens, and we have the Chapel where the mechanicals will hang out and the wedding will take place. We are going to be able to dress all the locations as much as we want. I wanted to give the show as much space as possible because that sense of being lost, that sense of scale, is so fundamental to the play. Having three locations gives us the space we need to create it.

E: All three locations are going to be in action for the play’s entire run-time. How is that going to work?

T: We are setting it up like an art gallery. When you go to an art gallery, you do not normally have time to see everything, so you get a map and select what you would like to see. We are encouraging people to adopt the art gallery approach for this show. It will help them detach themselves from that sit-in-the-audience-in-the-dark-and-be-quiet theatre mentality; we encourage the audience to participate, to wander. As in an art gallery, we will have informational plaques and booklets. We have Kevin Wong playing Philostrate, the master of revels, as the art gallery curator; he will be explaining things to people if they are confused or more lost than we intend. There are also eight assistant stage managers around to answer questions. We want to make this as transparent as possible so that people can really access it.

Visually, the art gallery concept will be apparent in costuming; each character or group of characters has a different art style they will be dressed in. Those art styles have been carefully selected by the creative team, composed of Liz and I, to reflect the characters. Puck will be representing street art - he will be taking on the role of the artist because he is the only character who directly has a hand in all of the storylines. Instead of love juice, he will probably be using spray paint.

E: The three-location plan is a departure from the more traditional theatre-going experience that most of us know. How do you think the audience should approach it?

T: I think that this is going to be the most challenging thing for the audience, and for me as a director, because I’m never going to be able to see my whole show, and the audience will also never be able to see the whole show. There are only two performances and an open dress rehearsal—a maximum of three times that you could possibly come to see this—which is not enough to see all of the things that will be going on, especially since things will be changing from night to night. There will be a lot of improvisation taking place, particularly among the mechanicals and the lovers.

We want to encourage people to detach themselves from the idea that they need to see everything. Like in life, we choose what we wish to experience and learn about and—consciously or unconsciously—we make the choice to ignore other things. That’s fine. For some reason, when we get into the theatre, we freak out if we miss a line. We feel pressure to see it all. For this production, we want to liberate that notion and give people the option to select what speaks to them. If somebody doesn’t like Shakespeare’s text, they can still interact with the story in other ways. They can get in touch with it through dance, mime, comedy, and other mediums. There are at least four different storylines going on at any one time.

When I read the script, I realized that the exchanges we do not see playing out on the stage must be really interesting. Theseus and Hippolyta, for example, are seen in the first scene and they do not reappear until Act 4. Their relationship, as seen in the text, has transformed by the time we see them again in Act 4. Audience members can choose to delve deeper into those unseen relationships and get our take on what has happened. This is not the only take, of course—we don’t have Shakespeare with us to tell us what happened—but this is our best guess.

E: You have a big cast for this show—twenty-five people—and that is a lot of ego to juggle. What is your game plan?

T: I think it is interesting that you use that word, because it is true and that is often a challenge in theatre. I am an actor myself, so I can say that. What I think is great about this production is that even though there are named parts and there are fairies—although we have given all the fairies names—there are no small parts, because everybody is performing for the exact same amount of time. It’s going to be a really interesting company because everybody will be expected to put the same amount of work into it.

I think this lends us the opportunity for a lot of collaboration. We asked everybody to bring in a talent for their audition, so we have a huge variety of skills at our disposal. We have a head of each department, but we are going to be relying on our actors and the skills that they bring to the table to make this as diverse a piece as we can.

E: You and your creative team have been dreaming up this show for quite some time now. What are you most excited to see now that things are taking shape?

T: I’m looking forward to seeing how people respond to it. One of my goals in doing this is to stretch peoples’ understandings of what theatre can be. I think, especially in a university theatre setting, it is very easy to put on a show that’s in a box, to put on the traditional A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I would love to have people embrace a different format and a different structure, one that might stretch their understanding of the play. Seeing people see the play is the scariest thing, but it is also the most exciting.