Puget Sound Announces Fall Theater Production
October 2, 2006
TACOMA, Wash. – University of Puget Sound presents William Shakespeare’s classic comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at Norton Clapp Theatre on Oct. 27 and 28, and Nov. 1–4. Re-envisioned as the dream of a teenager in the 1980s, the production promises to capture the imagination of all who attend.
“Comedy demands a little distance,” says Geoffrey Proehl, professor of theatre arts and director of the play. “It’s not unusual to place Shakespeare in other periods, or this play, in particular, in a high school.”
High school, with its cliques and strict social hierarchy, its hormonal and emotional cast of characters, is a fairly universal experience. So too, says Proehl, is the love, loss, and bewilderment suffered by characters in the play, encapsulated in one line from the first act: “So quick bright things come to confusion” (I.1.154).
“What brought me to the play was an interest in that line,” says Proehl. “That’s something students understand very well—that things that are beautiful and wonderful can run into difficulty. One moment, someone loves you, and the next, she or he doesn’t. That’s a pretty common human experience.”
Originally, Proehl intended to set the production in another very common human experience—the prom. “Prom, as we all know,” he says, “is supposed to be this wonderful night, but it’s often miserable.” Instead, the play is set almost entirely in a magical forest, taking shape as the dream of Hermia, a student who has fallen asleep reading the play for a school assignment.
“Without losing the comedy of the play, we wanted to look at a real human issue—how something like love can, swift as a shadow, come to confusion,” Proehl says. “In high school, you have cliques. You have the National Honor Society kids, the jocks, the drama club kids, etc.”
Some of Shakespeare’s characters slip easily into the 1980s high school personas Proehl has assigned them, but not all. “It’s easy to imagine the play’s ‘mechanicals’ (a troupe of actors rehearsing a play in the forest) as the drama club,” says Proehl. “The challenge for us was to figure out who the fairies were.” The fairies drive much of Midsummer’s plot. It is their forest that serves as the set for the night’s adventures, and it is their magic at the heart of most of the trouble that takes place there.
Proehl considered several options for the fairies, including traditional country fairies, super heroes, and icons of Rock ’n Roll, before deciding on another group from high school—the Goth kids. Proehl saw several parallels between Goths and the fairies, citing a passage from The Goth Bible by Nancy Kirkpatrick: “Goth is a way of being that embraces what the normal world shuns…Romance is at the heart of what it means to be Goth, and consequently tragedy is always a sigh away.”
“This idea of shunning day-to-day norms,” says Proehl, “of sweeping away niceties, getting down to what you’re most passionate about, and the inclination toward the romantic, these are our fairies.”
Once the characters and setting were firmly envisioned, Proehl, his cast, and the production team went to work getting ready for opening night later this month. One of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a magical romp through the enchanting and befuddling experience of being in love, and it is brought to life anew on stage at Puget Sound. Midsummer is directed by Geoffrey Proehl, with scene design by Kurt Walls and costume designs by Mishka Navarre. The show runs Oct. 27–28, and Nov. 1–4, at 7:30 p.m., with a matinee Nov. 4, at 1 p.m. Tickets are available at the Wheelock Information Center, with remaining tickets available at the door. Cost: $11 general; $7 UPS student, senior citizen (55+), non-UPS student, and UPS faculty and staff. For credit card orders, call 253.879.3419.
Editors Note: The production team for A Midsummer Night’s Dream has created an online Wiki resource with production information, costume sketches, and more at http://oberon.ups.edu. High-resolution images are available upon request.
CONTACT
mediarelations@ups.edu
253.879.2611
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