If Shakespeare teaches us anything, it's that people fall in love in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of reasons -- good reasons, bad reasons, generous, selfish and silly reasons. Sometimes, in fact, the reasons are so frankly inexplicable as to suggest the involvement of magic.
Next month, the Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts and Sciences will address all of these possibilities and more when it brings one of the bard's most romantic comedies, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," to life on the Edison Theatre mainstage Nov. 13-15 and 20-22. Performances are at 8 p.m. Nov. 13 and 14 and at 3 p.m. Nov. 15. The schedule is repeated the following week, Nov. 20-22.
Set in ancient Athens, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" follows a pair of young lovers, Hermia and Lysander, through four days of magic, deception, romance and farce. Fleeing Hermia's disapproving father, the couple -- pursued by Demetrius, Hermia's unwanted suitor, and Helena, Demetrius' own jilted lover -- escapes into the forest and into the midst of a spat between the king of fairies, Oberon, and his wife, the queen Titania.
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Oberon, in a fit of pique, bids his mischievous servant Puck to procure a love potion and use it on Titania, which he does. But Puck proves liberal in the potion's distribution and soon everyone's affections have become hopelessly confused: Lysander and Demetrius are smitten with Helena (who chides them for mocking her) while Titania falls in love with Bottom, an unfortunate actor whose head has been magically replaced with that of a jackass.
"'Midsummer' invites us to contemplate a world gone mad with love," said William Whitaker, PAD artist in residence, who directs the 31-member cast. "It's this beautiful cocktail of love in all its guises -- young love, wild love, courtly love, arrogant, selfish, stupid love.
"I resisted settling on a fixed 'concept' -- of setting the action on a pirate ship or in a circus or anything like that -- because I really wanted to listen to the play," Whitaker continued. "Gradually what evolved was this sense of magic and dreaming and the kinds of things that only make sense in dreams -- or when you're in love. You make a big mess when you're in love. Sometimes you even fall for a jackass."
The spare set design, by Liz Burrow, a 1998 graduate of the School of Architecture, reinforces that sense of dreaming through the creation of what Whitaker calls a "bed-scape," a simple, flexible landscape formed from such elements as billowing drapes of cloth and huge, 9-foot pillows.
The production will feature live music performed by More Fools Than Wise, a group of 11 student singers who specialize in period music, and arranged by Jeffrey Noonan, instructor in lute in the Department of Music in Arts and Sciences. Noonan has adapted several period works and also written new music for some of Shakespeare's extant lyrics, which are included in the text.
Whitaker noted that several of the show's leads previously have taken part in the PAD's "Shakespeare's Globe" summer program, in which students travel to London and study at the rebuilt Globe Theatre, where many of Shakespeare's works were performed originally.
"Performing Shakespeare is not like performing, say, an Ibsen play or a modern musical," said Emily Levy, who plays the role of Hermia. "The summer program really helped us to develop the tools for communicating Shakespeare's language to an audience."
