Flux Theatre Ensemble

Well...it's over. As ever, the closing of a show is both a relief (free nights!) and a loss, and that is doubly so for me with this production. It was an overwhelming process, with the play continually opening up to reveal new opportunities and challenges. As I wrote in my director's statement in the program:

"All the characters in this wood have been torn in some way, and in this play of weavers (magical and otherwise), some are mended, and most are forgiven. And I am torn, too, for all the moments in the play I could not find a way, or time, to report. The play has streaked our eyes with Love, and we are chasing it through the woods, but it will not stay for us. And I know now Midsummer isn't done so often because it is easy, but because it is so hard. We got some of it, our own unique little thread of the pattern. I know you can never get all of this dream. I know it hath no bottom. And if you pardon that, we will mend."

I wrote that a few days before we opened, and it feels even more true a few weeks after we closed. I still dream of the play, and I haven't found a way to let go of it yet. What follows is an attempt to let the play go by sharing that little thread we found.

When I was working on the play before production, it was hard to find a working manual of the play. There was much theoretical opinion, but little record of how all the innumerable challenges and obstacles of the play had been and could be solved. The exception was Michael Pennington' User's Guide, which gave much useful advice even as it relegated the play to a lesser of Shakespeare's comedies; a relegation I am unwilling to make.

So here is my own User's Guide of the play, for whoever happens to find it. Maybe the discoveries and mistakes we made can aid another company in their own journey through A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Yep...all those decisions in just one little page of text!
Keeping the military nature of Theseus' court running through the rest of the play, we chose to make Egeus and Demetrius soldiers in Theseus' Army. This clarifies the nature of all the relationships in exciting ways- if Demetrius has fought in a war with Egeus, then Egeus' preference for him seems less arbitrary. And if Egeus was a general in Theseus' army, then he must expect a ruling his favor.
One nice moment we found to deepen the relationship between Egeus and Thesues was when Theseus mitigates the sentence of death to that of a nunnery - in our production, Theseus makes sure this mitigation is acceptable to Egeus, making both men a little more human, and articulating the balance of power between a dictator and one of his most important vassals.
Either to die the death, or to abjure
For ever the society of men.
In an effort to further humanize Egeus, we created a back story that while Demetrius and Egeus were fighting in a war to save their country, Lysander was wooing Hermia; making the betrayal even more hurtful to them both, and casting Lysander in a more morally ambiguous light. We strengthened that ambiguity by having Lysander at first treating the court case almost flippantly, checking his watch when Theseus asks him to step forward, and gesturing innocently if one of the soldier's is the man Egeus is speaking of, forcing Egeues' 'thou, thou Lysander' in response, and giving his-
You have her father's love, Demetrius:
Let me have Hermia's: do you marry him.
-a truly scornful feeling to it.
We also slipped in a little humanizing comedy, with Egeus having brought Hermia's box of Lysander's gifts as evidence in the court, displaying each awful thing as if it were a drug before dumping all of it on the floor:
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(Lysander: Jake Alexander, Hermia: Amy Fits, Demetrius: Brian Pracht, Helena: Candice Holdorf, Photo: Isaiah Tanenbaum)
One of the most stunning misconceptions of Midsummer is the idea that the lovers are indistinguishable from each other, when from the first lines they speak to the last, they could not be more different. Even under the spell of Love-In-Idleness, they manifest its power differently. And all four lovers undergo a different tear, and a unique mending.

Hermia, from the very first moment she speaks, shows real courage:

I know not by what power I am made bold,
Nor how it may concern my modesty
In such a presence here to plead my thoughts:
But I beseech your Grace, that I may know
The worst that may befall me in this case,
If I refuse to wed Demetrius.

She speaks this to Theseus, slayer of the minotaur and uniter/dictator of Athens, a dangerous man who has more important things to do than solve Egeus' domestic dispute. Furthermore, she is directly contradicting her father here, who has already told her what may befall her should she refuse to wed Demetrius - death. And amazingly, her gamble works, and Theseus mitigates the sentence to a nunnery. Perhaps Theseus sees a little of himself in her courage?

Her character deepens in the following scene with Lysander, where while intending to comfort her, Lysander surprises himself by discovering that no love can survive in this world; it is only a brief dream of heaven and earth before the jaws of darkness do devour it up. It is Hermia who rallies with him with this:

If then true lovers have been ever cross'd,
It stands as an edict in destiny:
Then let us teach our trial patience,
Because it is a customary cross,
As due to love as thoughts, and dreams, and sighs,
Wishes and tears; poor Fancy's followers.

The way she handles this adversity inspires Lysander to take huge risk - to run from the Athenian law and seek refuge miles away with his aunt, where they can be married. But Hermia does not say yes to this rash and dangerous proposal right away; rather, she thinks through the risk and gathers courage and says in one of my favorite Hermia passages:

And by that fire which burned the Carthage Queen,
When the false Troyan under sail was seen,
By all the vows that ever men have broke,
(In number more than ever women spoke)
In that same place thou hast appointed me,
Tomorrow truly will I meet with thee.

The Carthage Queen is Dido, who immolated herself when Aeneas betrayed her; and it is fascinating to me that in the moment of accepting this dangerous proposition, Hermia remembers a woman who burned to death for a betrayed vow of love; and swears by all such broken vows; and by doing so, accepts the danger knowing full well it could end in her own death, her own betrayal.

How can we not admire a woman who so bravely and knowingly risks everything for not only love, but the right of her own free will? and yet...and yet...

Before the time I did Lysander see,
Seem'd Athens as a Paradise to me:
O then, what graces in my love do dwell,
That he hath turn'd a heaven into hell.

This moment of realization, shared with her friend Helena in the moment of their parting, reveals that Hermia, while accepting the loss of exile, feels that loss keenly. This is not some romantic happy adventure, but the only option in a difficult world. And it is this moment of dark realization (that Lysander tries to smooth over with his poetry) that informs the next time we see Hermia, where she and Lysander are lost in the wood, and she refuses to lie next to him:

Nay good Lysander, for my sake my dear,
Lie further off yet, do not lie so near.

Now a new side of Hermia is revealed: she can be as cautious and brave; as traditional as she is daring; and some of this refusal must be in part connected with "what graces in my love do dwell, that he hath turned a heaven into a hell"; and not only that, but he has lost their way.

This fight (for it is a fight, however cleverly disguised in pretty riddling) results in the nightmare of Hermia being abandoned, like the Carthage Queen. When she wakes to find Lysander missing, how can she not in part believe he left because she refused to lie next to him? No wonder she is so eager to pin the blame on Demetrius, who may not be perfect but who is certainly not a cold blooded murderer.

For thou (I fear) hast given me cause to curse,
If thou hast slain Lysander in his sleep,
Being o'er shoes in blood, plunge in the deep, and kill me too:
The sun was not so true unto the day
As he to me.
Would he have stolen away
From sleeping Hermia?
I'll believe as soon
This whole earth may be bored, and that the Moon
May through the Centre creep, and so displease
Her brother's noontide, with th'Antipodes.

It cannot be but thou hast murder'd him,
So should a murderer look, so dead, so grim.

The Folio gives such a useful cue here, setting the question on its own line, because of course a part of her does believe it - Hermia's fear of abandonment is a constant throughout the play, hovering ghost like above and beneath all her lines. And our brave and cautious Hermia is now so transformed by that fear (and the fear Lysander may be dead) that she is "past the bounds of maiden's patience", and scares Demetrius from following her.

That maiden's patience will undergo a further explosion when her best friend Helena is revealed as the culprit of Lysander's disappearance. Though to us it is funny, there is nothing funny about your best friend sleeping with your love the very night you have refused to sleep with him. The levels of betrayal and regret are very strong:

You thief of love; what, have you come by night
And stolen my love's heart from him?

Shakespeare is always a master of revealing the infinite highs and lows of character, suddenly, like a top blowing off or a bottom dropping out. And here, in this moment, the bottom drops out for Hermia; and she tries to violently scratch out her best friends eyes. That she is thankfully unsuccessful keeps the scene funny; but the intent is not at all funny. We can only wonder what would happen if she really did get her hands on Helena in that moment. And we wonder how our brave and cautious, wise and resourceful Hermia has would up howling like a wounded animal and trying to scar her best friend's face.

But as she falls under Puck's sleeping spell, the last words she utters are:

Heavens shield Lysander, if they mean a fray.

In the moment of maximum confusion, fear, and loss; she is not thinking of herself, but the one she loves, the false Troyan who has betrayed her. And when she wakes, she will look at Lysander and say this:

Me-thinks I see these things with parted eye,
When every things seems double.

She sees Lysander, both as the adder of her dream, and the good man who loves her again. And one of the great mysteries of this play is how Shakespeare could create two such women as Hermia and Helena, and then give them nothing to say in the final act. After Hippolyta and Theseus, Hermia and Egeus are the next characters to experience the tearing action of the play, and though she is mended; it is an uncertain mending, and not one without loss and change.

(Helena: Candice Holdorf, Photo: Isaiah Tanenbaum)
Helena has the most text of any of the lovers (and the third most in the play), and of all the lovers, seems to spark Shakespeare's imagination the most. Every thought Helena has is twisted by her relentless imagination until every last drop of thought and feeling is wrung from it; her thoughts chase their own tail; endlessly qualifying and attempting to rewrite the unbearable fact of her love for Demetrius, and his betrayal of their betrothal. Listen to her thoughts pacing back and forth, trying to defang the pangs of her feelings:

Things base and vile, folding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity,
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind.

Nor hath love's mind of any judgment taste:
Wings and no eyes, figure, unheedy haste:

And therefore is Love said to be a child,
Because in choice he is so oft beguil'd,
As waggish boys in game themselves forswear;
So the boy Love is perjured every where.

It is almost as if by saying what love is, by what love is exactly, she can diagnose the illness and then propose a cure:

And I am sick when I look not on you.

She is trying to give to airy nothing (love) a local habitation and a name; but our lunatic/lover/madwoman fails to purge herself. However, while her imagination cannot defeat the love within herself, it is endlessly resourceful against Demetrius, and in their debate in the woods, there is no reason he can give to make her leave that she can't turn into a reason she should stay; perhaps most beautifully given proof when he reprimands her with:

You do impeach your modesty too much,
To leave the City, and commit your self
Into the hands of one that loves you not,
To trust the opportunity of night,
And the ill counsel of a desert place,
With the rich worth of your virginity.

And she responds with:

Your virtue is my privilege: for that
It is not night when I do see your face.

Therefore I think I am not in the night,
Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company,
For you in my respect are all the world.

Demetrius is no match for a mind that can make her worst faults his best virtues. Throughout the scene, she spins his straw into gold. And through this scene, we become aware that one of the reasons he has fallen out of love with her, and in love with the unavailable Hermia, is that Helena loves him not wisely but too well; she sees him for the good man he is even in his absolute worst moments; and that knowledge, that deep intimacy, is part of what sickens Demetrius.

But more on him anon. After Helena is finally outrun by Demetrius, she utters this terrible line:

No, no, I am as ugly as a Bear

And as she again compares herself to Hermia, we see that this goes deeper than just Demetrius' betrayal; it is also the betrayal of Hermia leaving their friendship for Lysander; and deeper still, a fundamental belief in her own unworthiness; and it must be partly that belief that makes the way she loves Demetrius drive him to Hermia. Because when Lysander professes his love for her, her first reaction is:

Wherefore was I to this keen mockery born?

Why should she assume that Lysander is mocking her? And when Demetrius begins to praise her, why shouldn't she believe that he has returned to loving her again (they are, after all, betrothed to her). And why, when her best friend Hermia enters, does she so quickly believe that Hermia has not only conspired with the men, but possibly contrived the whole game?

And then, one of the strangest passages in this very strange play pours out of Helena's mouth to Hermia:

We, Hermia, like two Artificial gods,
Have with our needles, created both one flower,
Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion
Both warbling of one song, both in one key;
As if our hands, our sides, voices and minds,
Had been incorporate.

So we grow together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet a union in partition,
Two lovely berries molded on one stem,
So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart,
Two of the first life coats in heraldry,
Due but to one and crowned with one crest.

Why does Helena (and for that matter, Shakespeare) in the heart of the confusion and at the very moment when we want the machine of the plot to kick all the way in; why this reverie of their childhood? The playable answer is Helena wants to remind Hermia of their friendship so she will stop the confederacy of the game; but another answer must be in this moment of confusion, all of it caused by love, Helena remembers the time when a different kind of love presided over their lives; not one of jealousy, lust and betrayal; but one of absolute innocence and union. It is hard to imagine this kind of union ever existing between the romantic couples. And in this play of rips and mending, this image of the two girls sewing themselves a world unto themselves takes on great power; as a reminder of what is lost when romantic love becomes our be-all and end-all.

We also see that this is the way Helena loves both friend and lover; with an absolute devotion and need for the kind of intimacy that erases the boundaries between souls. Contrast this with Hermia, who when Lysander speaks of their sharing one heart, asks him to lie further away from her. Of all the lovers, Helena comes closest to needing the kind of union that Bottom experiences with Titania, where the self disappears completely into the beloved and all mortal grossness is purged.

Will she find that with Demetrius?

And I have found Demetrius, like a jewel,
Mine own, and not mine own.

I don't know. Much of the answer to that lies in the great riddle of Demetrius.
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How does this entry relate to Flux's full production of A Midsummer Night's Dream?

Things are not good in Athens.

It's important to say that, right off the bat. Theseus, after jilting the Amazon princess Antiope, abducts their Queen Hippolyta. A war ensues between Athens and the Amazons, and while Athens eventually wins, the cost is the Amazon's way of life and many lives on both sides.



"Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword,
And won thy love, doing thee injuries"


(Aaron Michael Zook as Theseus, Frederique Nahmani as Hippolyta. Photo: Heather Cohn.)

How can this 'happy' marriage seem anything more than a ceremonial rape? It is no wonder that Hippolyta sees the moon as a drawn bow aimed at her, and Theseus must ask "What cheer, my love?"


Then Egeus comes in, demanding his daughter marry Demetrius or die; a fate mitigated only somewhat by Theseus in his proposal she join the nunnery.


(David Douglas Smith as Egeus, Photo: Isaiah Tanenbaum)

And according to Titania, her war with Oberon has created a series of horrific natural disasters that have led to famine, fields full of flocks dead from sheep-sickness, drought and flooding, disease, and the ruin of the countryside.

War, starvation, plague, rape, and a state that will not allow the pursuit of happiness; this is how Shakespeare opens his comedy; and we do the complexity of the this play a disservice to smooth that over. Instead, we should take Lysander's rhapsody on the impossibility of love in such a world seriously:

Or if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it;
Making it momentary, as a sound:
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That (in a spleen) unfolds both heaven and earth;
And ere a man hath power to say, behold,
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.

That such a world can be brought to harmony in the natural (fairy), domestic (lovers) and political (royals) spheres is nothing short of magic; and the darker we set the curse at the beginning of the play, the more surprising and well-earned the eventual blessing.

And the more dangerous and fraught with limits we make the human world, the more dazzling and dangerous we make the limitlessness of the fairy world; and the more sublime their union in the bower of Titania and Bottom becomes.
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How does this entry relate to Flux's full production of A Midsummer Night's Dream?

(Photo: Isaiah Tanenbaum. Hannah Rose Peck as Cobweb, Caitlin Kinsella as Mustardseed, Tiffany Clementi as Pease Blossom)

In Flux's Season of Transformation, the central theme is how life transforms the body against the body's will. In Midsummer, that transformation ends in marriage, and is therefore a comedy in the classic sense (order restored by the affirmation of life in the union of marriage). It is also, of course, ridiculously funny.

But just as a tragedy like Hamlet is also funny, we should not assume that a comedy (especially one of Shakespeare's) is without significant darkness. In fact, the darker and more dangerous the world of the play, the more satisfying the return to light. Given the centrality of the body to our season, we are setting a fairy world of limitless physical possibility against a mortal world fraught with loss.

Specifically, this means creating a stage language where the characters do not always reside in the bodies of the actors playing them. The fairies can be as small as a pin or as big as the stage; they can take corporeal shape and disappear in a blink; and their energy and agency can manifest in all sorts of theatrically surprising ways. By creating a fairy world that is bound only by the complicit imaginations of the actors and audience; we will draw a sharp contrast with the mortal world, where the limited humans, trapped in their bodies, have their hearts and shapes transformed by fairies against their will.

The primary language to accomplish this is shadow, drawn from Oberon's status as "King of Shadows" and Puck's end of play plea, "If we shadows have offended".

(Michael Davis as the King of Shadows. Photo: Isaiah Tanenbaum).

Examples:
-Oberon can manifest his will by throwing his shadow across the stage, and his first several entrances are preceded by his shadow's appearance.
-Bottom's initial transformation into an ass happens behind a backlit screen, projecting the openly theatrical costume change in shadow across the rude mechanicals.
-Puck's shape-shifting to terrorize the mechanicals is accomplished behind the screen, with the bodies of the fairies creating hog, horse and headless bear.
-Bottom's second transformation, the purgation of his mortal grossness by Titania, is seen through an increasingly rapid shadow silhouette thrown across the stage from various angles.
-The changeling boy is represented by a child's silhouette in a ball of light.
-The prologue and epilogue begin and end with Puck appearing, and then leaving, Oberon's shadow.

The secondary language is shared agency, where Oberon, Puck and Titania use the fairies to extend their being and accomplish their will.

Examples:
-Titania and Oberon use the fairies to extend their stage size: Titania with her long, snake-like train of moon-silver; and Oberon with his high and wide plume of dark shadow
-Puck steals the voices of the fairies to echo her shape-shifting terrorizing of the mechanicals.
-Puck steals the voices of the lovers to lead them astray.
-The fairies themselves share an agency, splitting the lines of the First Fairy amongst all five, both separate and connected, almost like a hive mind.

The tertiary stage language used to create the limitless fairy world is the rules of assuming corporeal shape.

Examples:
-The fairies have three states of stage presence: the first, a neutral state where they can be seen by Oberon, Titania and the audience but can only be felt or sensed by the mortals; the second, a wisp of light created by a hand held LED, that flickers in and out of vision when they speak or briefly manifest shape; and the third and most tangible (visible to mortals), a fairy created by the face of the actor speaking, and the hands of the actors behind, accomplished through face paint delineating the 'fairy body' and the LED held below the face, cutting it off from the actor's body. Having the face of the actor be the body of the fairy also reinforces the synesthesia of the play.
-Oberon and Titania can become invisible simply through will (or, more comically, by saying, "I am invisible", as in Oberon's case.)

The final stage language used is the linkage of the natural world to the emotional state of the fair characters.

Example:

-This is accomplished most notably through Titania's words regarding the natural disasters caused by the dispute between her and Oberon.
-Titania's train also becomes the river that Bottom sees himself in, and when Bottom accidentally steps in the river, Titania awakes and sees the angel. The river is both water and an extension of herself, which she will then use to wrap Bottom in a cocoon of her power for the purgation of his mortal grossness.
-When Oberon and Titania battle, the trees of the forest shake and bend as their unseen power shoots back and forth.
-Both Titania and Puck can make the trees move to block Bottom from leaving, or lead the lovers to their sleeping destination.

Of course, the greatest stage language used to accomplish the incorporeal limitlessness of the fairy world is Shakespeare's language, where Puck can "make a girdle about the earth in forty minutes" and the first fairy can travel "swifter than the moon's sphere".

And by creating this limitlessness, the mortal world, fraught with war, loss and a tyrannical state that denies natural love, will seem all the more dangerous and limited. With that great divide between the two worlds established, Bottom's sojourn across the divide becomes much more than just a goofy ass french-kissing fairy, but rather a mortal's rare brush with something divine.

(Photo: Isaiah Tanenbaum. Hannah Rose Peck as Cobweb, Caitlin Kinsella as Mustardseed, Tiffany Clementi as Pease Blossom)

And a more candid fairy shot to remind us that this is, after all, a play...
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How does this entry relate to Flux's full production of A Midsummer Night's Dream?

So just what, exactly, is actor driven magic?

Actor-driven magic:
-Is overtly theatrical, with no attempt made to conceal the trick. The audience's imagination must therefore be complicit in the creation of the magic.
-Lives primarily in the body of the actors, celebrating the expressive potential and erotic presence of the human body.
-Is tactile and collaborative, with actors working together to create the sense of a power that transcends their individual selves.
-Is playful, both in the sense of being pleasurable in the openness of it's possibilities; and in the sense of acknowledging that pleasure as the actor playing the role. This is not the same as alienation, where the presence of the actor removes the audience from the reality of the character; rather, the acknowledgment of that pleasure by the actor invites the audience to take pleasure in their own imagination's complicity.
-Takes a lot of additional rehearsal, with actors laboring heavily so that their play may seem light.

In practice, the above principles have led to these production choices:
-The costumes should seem like something the actors themselves might wear if they were in these situations, with less emphasis placed on specific time and place; and more emphasis placed on helping to bridge the difference between actor and role.
-The fairy costumes should be fluid and evocative through simplicity; to achieve those qualities, we are using fabrics that can shift to perform more functions than simply costuming the characters; and can help in creating the scenery in this dream-like play. This allows the fairies to be literally one with the natural world of the stage.
-The scenery itself should also be fluid and evocative through simplicity; to achieve those qualities, a forest is implied through poles that can also be brooms, swords, spears, walls of a house, columns of a palace and flats of a stage; the scenery transforms into props in the same way our costumes transform into scenery.
-Props, costumes and scenery all must feel like extensions of the actors' performances; and must never inhibit or distract from the power of the human body.
- Because the magic of the play-proper is actor-driven, the play within the play should also feature actor-driven magic, only hopefully more comically mis-guided than our own. Read the full story

How does this entry relate to Flux's full production of A Midsummer Night's Dream?

The sexual union of Bottom and Titania is the heart of Midsummer, and the epiphany that Bottom experiences afterwards is it's center of gravity. It is a union of the sublime and the grotesque; of the divine and the natural; of the tragic and comic; of the immortal and mortal.

It is also, above all, the union of two characters who deeply need the transformative power of love. By submitting to that power, they both emerge with a greater capacity to experience life.

Titania is love with her own grief. She has spurned her partner Oberon, and obsesses over the changeling boy of her lost Votresse. Her grief, and Oberon's anger over her lost affection, wreak a terrible toll on the natural world; for her emotional life is intimately connected with her governance of nature. Her partner Oberon, and the world at large, both need her to let go of her grief.

Bottom is an obsessive artist convinced his upcoming performance will only go well if his hand is firmly in every pie. Stressing as much as strutting, he lives solely in the imaginative world of his theatre, but lacks the generosity and trust a true artist needs to create. His play cannot go forward until he learns to let go fully into the human experience.

In one of the great ironies of the play, Puck and Oberon's malevolent trick meant as punishment serves to release Titania and transform Bottom. Submitting to the incomprehensible power of the Love-In-Idleness, Titania gives away her adored changeling boy without a fight. In the presence of love, her grief is forgotten; and even if we assume her reconciliation with Oberon is a qualified one; her re-emergence as his equal partner is whole hearted. No lounger bound by grief, she is released by the transformative power of love, and so able to once again experience life fully.

And there is extra resonance that this love affair took place with a mortal, made more mortal through his transformation into an animal. Titania's wound was a mortal one, made by a mortal woman, and so it makes sense Oberon's love would be unable to salve it.

If Titania's sex with the mortal Ass heals her mortal wound; Bottom's brush with the divine creates an immortal one. She has, after all, said:

I will purge thee of thy mortal grossness so,
That thou shalt like an airy spirit go.

Bottom has experienced the limitlessness of the Fairy Land; he has been purged of his mortal grossness, and then returned to it; and his epiphany that follows it is full of longing for what he may never have again, and regret for lacking the words to even say what it was:

Methought I was, there is no man can tell what.
Methought I was, and methought I had.
But man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say, what methought I had.
The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.

How can you express the divine? How can you bring the ghost into the room? How can you give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name? Bottom doesn't know, until he sees one way:

I will get Peter Quince to write a ballet of this dream, it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke.

Theatre, as Theseus will later agree, theatre is how you say what the eye of man cannot hear, and how you show what ear of man cannot see. Or at least, it's how we try.

Connecting the sexual union of ass and Goddess so directly to the act of making theatre changes the way we approach the play within the play; it is no longer just a comic gift tacked on to the end, but rather both a celebration of the power and mocking of the limits of the very attempt the play proper has been making. The play within the play should mirror comically our own attempts to give airy nothing a local habitation and a name; and Bottom's experience should burn through every ridiculous moment of their misguided but heartfelt Pyramus and Thisbe.

After all, when Pyramus says, "my soul is in the sky", Bottom must be thinking of when his own soul, purged of its mortal grossness, stretched limitlessly across the sky. In that moment, the sublime union of Bottom and Titania is mirrored by the ridiculous disunion of Pyramus and Thisbe; and all the airy nothing of the play lives in the ill-fated attempt of these players, these shadows. Read the full story

How does this entry relate to Flux's full production of A Midsummer Night's Dream?

(Christina Shipp as Bottom. Photo by Isaiah Tanenbaum)

Ah, Bottom...how I dote on thee! Misprized most of Shakespeare's creations, you are so often played as a series of bits and attitudes: they make you the pompous blow-hard tearing a cat, bumbling over malapropisms, braying like an Ass, possessed (as the critics would have it), of an 'invincible ignorance'.

Well...yes. And yet if that were all, how diminished a play Midsummer would be!

For Bottom is deeply respected by his peers as an artist: Flute says he has "simply the best wit of any handy craft man in Athens" and Quince goes further: "and the best person too". He is problem-solver, the one everyone looks to when there is something impossible that must be done. And like any artist who has not yet found his six pence a day, he is utterly committed to making it.

Through this lens, his overbearing behavior in the first scene is less comic arrogance than the behavior of a perfectionist; an artist who will play every role if that's what it takes to make the play work.

And through this lens, those first scenes stay funny, but more deeply so because I myself, and so many of us who strive in this theatre world, are not all that different; necessity has us playing many roles and we must believe we can carry them off, because if we do not, the play does not go forward. We are all trying to find a way to let the moon shine in so we can make our six pence a day. And if these first scenes are played with the urgency of a perfectionist determined at all costs to make something beautiful; there is a deeper journey that begins to take shape.

If Bottom's Ass head merely reveals what we already knew about him - he is an ass- then the joke is little more than a sight gag. But if we believe that in these first scenes, Bottom is something else, than the ass head is not an obvious reveal, but a subtler transformation.


Because sexual desire is about to become such a huge part of Bottom's life, it is worth asking what his relationship to sex and love have been before this. Judging from his behavior in the previous scenes (more interested in the tyrant than the lover), and in the moment of meeting Titania (trying to run from her at first), we can assume that desire is not a regular part of Bottom's day; except for his desire for the theatre:


When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer.

He even dreams of the theatre. This overwhelming desire for theatre has perhaps kept our Weaver from having too many significant sexual relationships; Bottom lives in a world of his imagination, playing Ercles in his mind as he works over his loom. He may not be educated, he may stumble wonderfully over words; but he is not stupid, and he is sincerely driven.

He is an artist of the mind who is about to become an animal of the body. Now, Puck's transformation takes on more significance. Bottom now becomes a creature of appetite, begging to be scratched and fed.

But this transformation is not the most significant of Bottom's journey. Titania promises:

I will purge thee of thy mortal grossness so,
That thou shalt like an airy spirit go.



There is no reason not to take her at her word. We do not see this purgation because Shakespeare doesn't stage everything that happens in their bower. But if we imagine what sex (if that's even the right word) with this Goddess might be like; if we imagine that this Titania, (whose every mood echoes out to change the weather, whose every whim changes the fabric of nature) does indeed through their intercourse purge him of his mortal grossness; if Bottom, for even a moment, does like an airy spirit go; then his final epiphany takes on a larger significance:

Methought I was, there is no man can tell what.
Methought I was, and methought I had.
But man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say, what methought I had.
The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.

Normally, this is played as if Bottom is unaware that he is mixing up the eyes and ears of the bible quote. But what if it is deliberate? After all, no one is stupid enough to think that eyes hear; and while one accidental slip is possible; a string of them can only be deliberate.

So if we take Bottom at his word, then he has had an experience that can only be described if eyes could hear, if ears could see, if touch had taste, if taste could speak, and above all; only if the heart itself had language; only then could Bottom explain what happened; then this is something more than just becoming an ass, which after all, is bizarre but could be explained. This is also something more than the scenes we've seen, both pre and post coital with Titania. Bottom is talking about something we didn't see because we couldn't; Bottom is trying to explain what it feels like to have your mortal grossness purged; he is trying to say what it feels like to be an airy spirit.

Then something fantastic happens: Bottom realizes he can't tell us, but he might be able to put it into a play:
I will get Peter Quince to write a ballet of this dream, it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke.

(It is, in fact, ballet - which meant something like ballad to Shakespeare's audience, and so is usually changed to that - though there is something lovely in keeping it as is - as if only dance, and song, could express what happened)

Not only lovely because Bottom is expressing the transformation wrought by his new desire through the medium of his old desire, fusing his old and news selves, but even more lovely because of this haunting phrase:

it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom

It hath no bottom: in this moment, Bottom is saying both that the dream was limitless and that he wasn't in it - his self was there and not there - he was purged of his mortal grossness and so became something limitless at the cost of his self.

Heady stuff, and dangerous to the playing of it; but the play's center of gravity is here, and all the choices we make in this production ripple out from it.

Then Bottom says:
Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.

What, and who, can he possibly mean? Whose death? Thisby's? Hippolyta's? Or Titania's? If Thisby's, why does he say "latter end of a play" instead of "the play"? If Hippolyta, why is he imagining the death of the new Duchess?

If it is Titania, then Bottom's "methought I had" may mean more than just a pair of ass-ears, or as many Bottom's mime it, a bigger dick. "Methought I had" could mean Titania herself, and he may imagine singing it to her in this ballad called Bottom's dream, at her 'death', which is his waking.

In the course of a night, our Weaver has gone from an artist trapped in his head to an animal in love with his body to an airy spirit purged of his mortal grossness, and he is determined to tell that story the only way he knows how, through theatre. And yes, he is ridiculous, but the laughter of wonder and empathy is richer than the easy mocking laughter that so often attends the role. And if, with wonder and empathy, we go with him all the way through these transformations, than we are brought to the heart of a mystery that hath no bottom.
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How does this entry relate to Flux's full production of A Midsummer Night's Dream?

Titania, Queen of the Fairies - she seems such a limitless creation that staging her can only diminish her...but Shakespeare has cut a mortal hole in her immortal fabric that makes her journey one of the most deeply felt in the play.

That mortal hole lives in these lines:

But she being mortal, of that boy did die, And for her sake I do rear up her boy, And for her sake I will not part with him.

After all the poetic multisyllabic words of her Votresse memory, she ends with three monosyllabic lines that tear at the heart. Death, difficult for us to compass, must be inconceivable for an immortal being such as Titania. She has forever to mourn for her lost love (a love beautifully incarnated by Erin Browne's contribution to The Imagination Compact.)

Is it any wonder then that the first thing Titania would do upon the Votresse's death would be to make her son an immortal changeling? Is it any wonder than that the first thing Titania does upon falling in love with Bottom is to say:

And I will purge thee of the mortal grossness so, That thou shalt like an airy spirit go.

Titania has learned her lesson: if you truly love a mortal creature, you must make it immortal as soon as possible or your beloved will die on you.

There is something moving about a world where even the Gods cannot reverse death; and that powerlessness stands in contrast to the powers over death manifest in our November production of the Angel Eaters trilogy.

Viewed through this light, Titania's journey is essential to the play; perhaps second to only Bottom's in this ensemble story. It is her obsession with the loss of her Votresse that begins the conflict in the Fairy Land, and brings them to both to Athens; it Oberon's spiteful revenge that brings the comically grotesque world of the Mechanicals into union with the Fairy sublime; and it is that unlikely love affair that allows Titania to let go of both the changeling boy, and the grief that bound him to her.

In the First Folio, Titania is listed as "Queen" until the moment she wakes to fall in love with Bottom: thereafter, she will always be listed as "Titania"; a fascinating textual change that further emphasizes this transformation.

And though I doubt that Oberon and Titania's reconciliation at the end of the play is one of perfect accord (as Oberon's wishes); there is no doubt she has been renewed by her dalliance with the Ass; she is able to resume her place as equal partner to Oberon; and through the letting go of grief, the natural order resumes.

So threaded through all her soaring poetry is the simple human story of an inconsolable grief made whole through love; and the fact that this wholeness is brought about by a mean-spirited revenge and a ridiculous ass is one of Shakespeare's most moving ironies. Read the full story

This blog entry is meant to be a touchstone for Flux's upcoming production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. This main entry will focus on the larger questions we are asking and risks we are taking in our production; within this entry, links will bring you (our intrepid reader) to the details. By sharing our process openly, our hope is to more deeply engage our audience as we wrestle with this subtly challenging play. (And if you are so moved, you can purchase tickets here)
So here we go...

Flux Theatre Ensemble's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream explores this classic through the prism of Bottom and Titania's sublimely comic and deeply unsettling union. Flux uses actor-driven magic to set a fairy world of limitless possibility against a mortal world fraught with change and loss. The transcendence of desire bridges these worlds, and the transformative nature of love leaves none unchanged. Join Flux Theatre Ensemble for a dream that hath no bottom. Read the full story