I’ve been asked to share an ensemble experience I had as it relates to Lacuna. In 1997, we were doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was the second time I had directed this play, and I wanted to try something very different. I had brainstormed with Marc some ideas about the play that I had, and had settled on doing it in a kind of environmental setting. In fact, we moved the audience around: they started in nice, neat rows for the Athens scenes, but when we moved to the wild and woolly woods, we asked members of the audience to move their chairs out into the woods with us: they could chose where to put their seats anywhere in the oval-shaped playing area.
Before we began working on the script itself, we spent a couple of weeks with Marc trying to teach us some of his weird stuff, some of which sunk in and we were able to use. I taught ways to approach and play Shakespearean text. Everybody participated. We had a large cast, ages nine to 40+, and everyone learned what was being taught, weird or not.
One of the first things we did was to have everyone write in little mini-journals their personal reactions to our three keywords: dark, dream, desire. Everyone got to go up to the chart paper on the wall to share their responses, and often it was the little kids’ ideas that provoked the most admiration. These ideas helped inform what we developed for the show.
One of the conceits we were working with was that the fairies had free reign. They were not just set decoration for Oberon and Titania; they were a real, unseen, and potentially dangerous force interwoven with the action of the play. As the “real” characters worked on their scenes, the fairies were given license to do whatever they wanted to do, both to and around the actors.
After a couple of weeks of this, the fairies expressed some frustration at not knowing “what they were supposed to be doing.” Acknowledging their frustration at the lack of shape to their part in the show, I formulated some guidelines with them. They had five choices: assist the action; thwart the action; comment on or parody the action; parallel the action; or ignore the action. Suddenly their work made sense to them, and as we polished up the production, we began to see more regular episodes develop in the fairy world that made for a fascinating counterpart to the official action of the play.
However, over in the official action of the play, things were not very stable either. The freedom of the fairies had given license to the rest of the cast as well. One night, we were working the “cat fight” scene of 3.2, when Demetrius awakens with the magic juice in his eyes and falls in love with Helena, whom he had previously scorned and who is also being pursued by a juice-influenced Lysander. On this occasion, Demetrius awoke, but the first person he saw, and it was perfectly clear, was Lysander, not Helena.
The two young men froze for a moment. “Play it!” I said, and they all took off, substituting pronouns on the fly as Demetrius now pursued Lysander while Helena was once again left hanging. The results were astonishingly funny, and when Hermia made her entrance, all four ended up in a puppy pile on the floor, aided and abetted by the mischievous fairies.
As the result of a discussion I had had online with the SHAKSPER listserv about whether the Titania/Bottom business would be as funny if we weren’t abusing a woman, we replayed the bower scene with Oberon as the victim. (Our own Greg Lee played Bottom.) We can now safely say to the politically correct crowd that the subjugation of women to sex with asses is not the reason that scene is funny. It’s just as funny when the King of the Fairies is seduced by the unreasoning powers of love.
Did we use either of those two experiences in the final show? No, but they shed light on the inner life of their scenes which remained in the final version. The actors were able to understand more vividly the absolute madness of the action of Shakespeare’s text in ways that just rehearsing the scenes could not have produced.
Likewise, my refusal to block the show in any traditional sense gave the actors the sense of being lost in a mysterious, ever-changing wood. “Where should I come in?” they would ask. “I don’t care,” I’d reply. “Wherever you like. You can even make it different each time.” And they did. So with lovers and mechanicals entering from heaven knows where around the oval, and fairies responding on the fly to the action, and the audience in a different place each performance, the sense of disorientation and midsummer madness was palpable.
What’s my point? This was a true company, one that worked together and developed its own language for one particular show. They had a sense of space and an awareness of what was going on onstage around them that has not been matched by any other cast I’ve ever worked with. Did we know what we were doing when we started? Nope. Were there moments of doubt and fear from cast members? Absolutely. Did people ask what the hell we were doing had to do with getting Shakespeare’s play ready for an audience? Nearly constantly.
But through this dark and muddled wood, we emerged with a really transcendent production, and I think participants in it would rank it, as I do, as a high point in their theatre experience. We challenged ourselves and grew in the process, and I think that’s what most of us are hoping to get from Lacuna.
And I have to brag about the end of that show: the playing area was surrounded by these double rows of curtain, the first a diaphonous violet, the second a drab, tan flannel. (Hey, we had $100 in the bank and this is what we had on hand.) These were attached to rectangular frames suspended from the ceiling. (This meant the fairies could lurk outside the playing area but still be seen.)
At the very end, as Puck made his closing “This has all been a dream” speech, the Rude Mechanicals came on to strike their props from “Pyramus & Thisbe.” Only they kept going: they began to lower the frames, collapsing the curtains around the oval and revealing all the actors, taking off their makeup, changing into their street clothes, running the sound system, etc. It was a striking image.
The last performance, the actor playing Puck finally convinced me to let him add, at the end of it all, our three words: “Dark. Dream. Desire.” It was even better.
Midsummer’s Night Dream is currently playing at the Shakespeare Tavern until April 9th. We should plan a trip to Hotlanta!
Marvel
One thing that really excites me about about the Lacuna concept is the opportunities it offers for development, both at the individual and group levels. While I have been active in acting and directing over the last 3 years (mostly stuff with the youth group I volunteer with), I have recently become frustrated over my desire to grow my craft. I finally signed up for and attended a class at the Alliance last fall, and was on the verge of doing so again. The opportunity to learn and grow on a regular basis alongside artistically minded Newnan folks is very appealing.
One clear challenge to the idea of group development is this: how do you build cohesiveness and a common language of the art without creating cliquishness and barriers to newcomers? How do you draw deeply upon the training, background, and experience of the well educated artistic types without discouraging input from folks for which this is a relatively recent discovery? I’ve never been all that shy myself, but vast creativity lurks behind the facade of many that are.
Kevin makes a good point. I hereby offer two rules for the group. The first is already known to NCTC/NTC denizens: “Be nice.” That should cover the cliquishness problem. Seriously, if anyone visits us, they should be involved and engaged from the get-go, so there should be no question of not letting them in.
The second is new, but I think we need to use it often: “Ollie ollie oxen free.” When this rule is invoked, and I’m serious, just say “Ollie ollie oxen free” out loud during a session, then that’s a reminder to our shybies to come out of hiding: we’re working in a safe environment that values everyone’s input.
And because of all the interesting work that went into it, history will remember that production as the definitive Midsummer Night’s Dream for the ’90’s in the Newnan-Coweta theatre scene.