Flux Theatre Ensemble

What is The Imagination Compact?
And how can I learn more about Flux's Midsummer?

Anthony Wills Jr.

Actor, The Royals, May 12th

1. What Shakespeare role would you like to play next?  
Othello

2.  What Shakespeare role would you like to play 
that no one will ever cast you in?  
Titania

3. If you had to date one of the Midsummer lovers, 
who would you date and why?   
Lysander: If I can't play him I'd date him

4. What is the first thing you think of when you hear the word "flux"? 
Acid reflux (sorry)

5. Fairies: colorful playmates or dangerous tricksters?
Tricksters

6. If the Flux Capacitor made time travel possible when the 
DeLorean reached 88mph, what do you think would happen 
if Flux Theatre Ensemble got theatre up to 88mph?
They'd rule the world!

7. Complete this sentence: "It's too late to go back now, 
I'll just have to do without my _______"  
Virginity

8. If a capricious fairy turned you into an animal against your will,
what animal would you be and why?  
Mink

9. How many licks does it take...?  
depends on how good you are at licking

10. If we could compact your imagination,
what color would it be and why?
Clear there's no recognizable color that can describe my imagination.

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What is The Imagination Compact?

1. What Shakespeare role would I like to play next? 
Angelo, Iago, Benedick

2. What Shakespeare role would I like to play that I won't ever play?  
Son from Henry VI Pt. 3 because of his one line:
ll blows the wind that profits nobody. 
 This man, whom hand to hand I slew in fight, 
 May be possessed with some store of crowns; 
 And I, that haply take them from him now, 
 May yet ere night yield both my life and them 
 To some man else, as this dead man doth me. 
 Who's this? O God! it is my father's face, 
 Whom in this conflict I unwares have kill'd. 
 O heavy times, begetting such events! 
 From London by the king was I press'd forth; 
 My father, being the Earl of Warwick's man, 
 Came on the part of York, press'd by his master; 
 And I, who at his hands received my life, him 
 Have by my hands of life bereaved him. 
 Pardon me, God, I knew not what I did! 
 And pardon, father, for I knew not thee! 
 My tears shall wipe away these bloody marks; 
 And no more words till they have flow'd their fill

3. What's the best Shakespeare production you've seen?
The best Shakespeare I've ever seen?  Tough...really tough... For the sake
of argument, I'll go with the production of Twelfth Night I saw a couple
years ago at the Gamm Theatre in Providence.  The solid, long-term
ensemble owns that little black-box theatre.  The cast relied on each
other to build a powerful world and tell consistent story...
and they executed jokes with skill and energy.  Hard to describe
a theatrical event without going into long-winded detail...
Oh, and for posterity's sake,
let me point out that Olivier's Othello is TIMELESS!!

4. Which of the Midsummer lovers would you date?
I like tall chicks, but Helena seems depressive... Hermia.

5. What do you think of when you hear the word "Flux"?
Flux makes me think chaos, disarray, change, in-between,
nor here nor there.

6. Fairies: Colorful playmates, or dangerous tricksters?
Faeries are dangerous, mutha-f*#ka!  Stay away from them!

7. Complete this sentence: 
"It's too late to go back now, I'll just have to do without my ______"
contract.

8. If a fairie turned you into an animal against your will,
what animal would you be and why?
If a faerie turned me into a sloth, I'd probably find a faster animal to kill me.

9. Who would win in a fight: the forest of Arden
or the forest of Midsummer?
Midsummer Forest would win over Arden!  Arden's peaceful
and full of apathetics (well, as many apathetics and as much apathy
as one can find in a Shakespeare
play)...Titania alone would crush them!

10. How many licks does it take?  
Let's find out!

11. Who would you rather have a beer with, Richard Burbage
or Will Kemp?
Kemp's funnier, but he might be crazy.  Kemp.

12. If we compacted your imagination,
what color would it be and why?
I think my compacted imagination would like like a craisin, because I love them!

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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.
Read the full story

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