Pioneer Theatre Company

William Shakespeare’s enchanting comic fantasy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, has beguiled and delighted audiences of all ages for centuries. The work of a young playwright, Shakespeare introduced themes and motifs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that would return in more mature forms in his later plays. But even at this early phase of his career, he demonstrated an unmatched and effortless command of verse writing for the stage and an inherent knack for knowing what will please an audience. Surely one of the most popular comedies in the English-speaking language, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has inspired painters and composers, and in the last century, numerous film directors who have wanted to bring Shakespeare, perhaps our most cinematic playwright (I’m convinced it was he who invented the technique of overlapping one scene while dissolving into another), alive on screen.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about many things: young love in extremis; sexual awakening; teenage defiance of parental authority; the transformative power of dreams and love; the presence in and influence on our lives of supernatural or otherworldly powers; the virtue of choosing mercy rather than vengeance. Beginning in a world out of sorts with itself, the play moves from chaos to order, from storm to serenity, from war to peace. Bad situations get worse and then worse situations get better until all is happily resolved. As the four young lovers leave the civilized world they have known and run to the forest - where in the best Elizabethan (and Freudian) traditions, anything can happen - and does! - the night deepens, reality shifts, and the supernatural world takes charge as the lovers are released into a magical dreamlike state.

Only after emerging from the night’s “dream” into daylight, only after deeper love begins to replace the heady but superficial state of love at first sight, and only after forgiveness is learned, can the repressive patriarchal world from which the lovers have fled resolve into a harmonious state.
Because of its inherent magical qualities and the universality of its themes and situations, it is tempting to move the time period of A Midsummer Night’s Dream away from ancient Greece and learn how other settings can illuminate - and be illuminated by - the play. Such is the case with our current production.

We have chosen the early 1900s for the “look” of this Dream, primarily because it gives us a formal and restricted world to escape from, the layers of which can be physically shed as the spiritual and psychological trappings of the civilized world are also released. And just as supernatural forces intermingle easily with the mortal world, our set attempts to blend the court with the forest, providing seamless movement from one environment to the other while reminding us of the close proximity of multiple realities. As for the “Supernaturals” themselves: We believe they exist without restriction of time or place; accordingly, their “look” is intended to be playful and eclectic, giving them a sense of power, light, and otherworldliness.

As with all his comedies, Shakespeare takes us to the edge of danger, lets us look into the abyss, and pulls us back in the nick of time with his redeeming safety net. As with all his plays, Shakespeare helps us understand the human condition by letting us see the world through the eyes of a host of memorable characters. In this instance, it is the lovers, the leaders of the supernatural world (Oberon, Titania, and Puck), and the “rude mechanicals” (Peter Quince, Nick Bottom, and their cohorts), who experience the most magical transformation of all: the power of the theatre. Indeed, the “rustics’” efforts to perform “the most lamentable comedy and the most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe” at the wedding of Duke Theseus and Hippolyta offer us not only one of the great comic catharses in all of dramatic literature, but also provide a genuine triumph of “the little guys.” With the success of their performance, the endless magical transformations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are complete.

“All for your delight the players are at hand,” Peter Quince assures us in Act V of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Welcome once more to the delightful, dangerous, and dazzling imagination of William Shakespeare!

Banner picture is PTC's 2007 production of Lost In Yonkers.