Flux Theatre Ensemble

Both immediately accessible and thematically adventurous, The Flux Theatre Ensemble's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, at the West End Theater, rewards audiences of all degrees of familiarity with the play.
Guided by August Schulenburg's supremely intelligent direction, the entertaining production is clear and easy to comprehend even for the uninitiated...
...but it's also driven by fresh insights that will captivate those who are well-acquainted with Shakespeare's oft-performed comedy.

(Photo: Shalin Scupham, Bottom: Christina Shipp, Titania: Kira Blaskovich, Pease Blossom: Tiffany Clementi, Wisp: Charlotte Graham)

The ensemble's spirit of thoughtful exploration can be keenly felt throughout the show. Indeed, while some of the production's more curious choices don't work, others turn out to be wonderful,

most notably the casting of actresses in the traditionally male roles of Puck (Nitya Vidyasagar), the mischievous fairy,

(Photo: Shalin Scupham, Cobweb: Hannah Rose Peck, Mustardseed: Cailtin Kinsella, Moth: Michael Swartz, Bottom: Christina Shipp)

and Bottom (Christina Shipp), the braggart actor who is transformed into a donkey. (In the latter instance, we're not watching a female play a male character. The production has re-imagined the character's gender.)

Finally, the production gives fresh thematic emphasis to the play-within-the-play that comprises most of the final act.
Even though we may already know that theater brings a transforming magic to our mortal world,
it's a pleasure to have a production as delightful as this one to remind us.
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(Learn more about Flux's Midsummer here.)

Our first review is in from Backstage, and they've kindly made us Pick, calling it "a production of engaging lucidity and immediacy..."

"In addition to his imaginative and intelligent staging within the usual budgetary confines of Off-Off-Broadway..."
(Charlotte Graham as Wisp, Kira Blaskovich as Titania, Tiffany Clementi as Peaseblossom, Hannah Peck as Cobweb, and Christina Shipp as Bottom in rehearsal)
"...Schulenburg has melded his 20 actors into an effective ensemble..."
"...Both the spookiness of a magical forest at night..."
"...where young love is thrown into turmoil..."
"...and the comedy of the clownish mechanicals as they attempt to become thespians are nicely realized"

"Bottom is played by Christina Shipp, who physically is little more than a slip of a girl, but she attacks the role with an uninhibited comic flair."
(Michael Swartz as Moth and Nitya Vidyasagar as Puck in rehearsal)
"Another notable characterization is Nitya Vidyasagar's petite and playfully malicious Puck, who, with her immense eyes and quirky movement, almost looks computer-generated and personifies the meeting of the real and the fantastic, the light and the dark, within Shakespeare's classic."

It is a generous review, taking into account the whole of our relationship with the play by including the note about the Imagination Compact; and as this reviewer came on our first and only preview, with all the little errors that are heir to it, I am especially grateful that he focused on where the play is going. Please join us on that journey! Read the full story

(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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Hey all,

So, a quick break from Gus' deep exploration of this already-deep play to remind you about the Early Bird ticket discount for select dates. That discount expires at midnight tonight! So if you've been thinking about coming during the first week but you haven't bought your tickets, now's the time to do it!

Using the code IC512 at the Theatermania site will net you $12 tickets to the following dates:

Thursday, June 5 @8pm
Saturday, June 7th @8pm
Sunday, June 8th @3pm
Tuesday, June 10th @8pm
Thursday, June 12th @8pm

Tickets for opening night, June 6, is not discounted, but includes a free and awesome party, so it's like it's discounted!

And look how awesome our Titania (Kira Blaskovich) is! Read the full story

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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What is the Imagination Compact?

And how can learn more about Flux's Midsummer?

1. What's the best directed play of Shakespeare's you've ever seen?Inspired and brilliantly funny production of The Winter's Tale by a grad student at Trinity Repertory Company about five years ago.

2. What Shakespeare play would you most like to direct? King Lear. But not for about another twenty or thirty years. I need to bea little bit older and a little bit wiser for this one.

3. What's the strangest choice you've seen a director make in a play ofShakespeare's? To have two actors act out the last act of Macbeth with small plastic dolls. It was awkward. And I couldn't sneak out of the theatre without beingnoticed. Bad experimental theatre in Spain.

4. Favorite Line of Text: "By the twitching of my thumbs, somethingwicked this way comes." (Macbeth) It's just so perfect! And it inspired a Ray Bradbury novel!

5. Fairies: colorful playmates or dangerous tricksters? Oh, they are dangerous, my friend, very, very dangerous.

6. If we could compact your imagination, what color would it be and why? Emerald green: rich, mysterious, signifying growth and new life (plus, I strive to be ecologically friendly!)

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