Teen Shakespeare

So we went to see Shakespeare in the Park today, even though it's not summer yet and that should have clued us in as to what to expect. First off, there was no lawn! Just two tiny strips of grass that sloped downhill from the stage, divided by a bike path. The show itself, A Midsummer Night's Dream, was recognizably a college production: mismatched costumes seemingly taken at random from the actors' closets (the velvet tracksuit, the low-rise jeans), and line readings cycling through the four basic types of Shakespearean over-enunciation--declamatory, angry, beseeching, and seductive--also seemingly at random. The whole production team consisted of one guy to the side of the stage hitting various things with sticks, and at one point he wandered off to take a cell phone call. As one friend said, the parodic play-within-a-play pretty accurately captured the spirit of the whole thing--a ridiculous but high-spirited amateurishness. It has a certain charm.

I hadn't thought about this play for a while, and--wow! First of all, it's obviously impervious to the vissicitudes of production, because if this version couldn't ruin it . . . The unmagical quality of the production also meant that you could see Shakespeare's brain more clearly than usual: the incredible efficiency of the storytelling, the tension between rigid structure and inventiveness, the orderly interweaving of the different plots always just managing to contain their centrifugal force . . .

But what I'd really forgotten is how cynical the play is about love. Maybe all of Shakespeare's marriage comedies are, because the fairy potions, the disguises, the mistaken identities all seem like ways of talking about the same thing, which is love's cruelty. In this play, love is an arbitrary, miserable compulsion, an open wound. Love meets with scorn; love turns into scorn; love is about vulnerability and vulnerability is about contempt.

To illustrate: two friends, Helena and Hermia, each love a different man, but both men love Hermia. Helena's scorned love has the purity of desperation. She completely debases herself: she says, "I am your spaniel." But neither her devotion nor her being generally considered a pretty good catch has any effect on her man, who is willing to say to her face, "I am sick when I do look on thee." A fairy prince tries to fix this unfair situation magically, but his assistant mixes things up. Suddenly, both men love Helena. The scene is chilling: neither woman understands what has happened. When Hermia reaches out for her lover, he says, "Out, loated medicine! Hated potion, hence!" He says he hates her, that he never wants to see her again. Bewildered, she reaches out again. Meanwhile, Helena doesn't buy the sudden reversal and begs the men not to mock her. This scene is not funny, and it is not about the supernatural; it is about the door between two people slamming shut. In the end Helena gets her man, but only because the fairy spell stays on him; their love is not real or permanent. The wall can always come down between them, and in that condition, trust is for fools. It's no accident that in the play-within-a-play Pyramus and Thisbe kiss through a wall; the truest and tenderest love, maybe, is the one that is already destroyed.

Or the truest and tenderest love in the play may actually be for the players themselves. Flawed and ridiculous as they are, they inspire and seem to be created out of a deep fondness that seems more genuine than anything the lovers feel for each other. This thought has been formulated many ways: agape versus eros, bros before hos. There's a mixture in it of disillusionment, renunciation, consolation, and hope. I don't know if I'm glad or not to see it here, in one of Shakespeare's sunniest plays (despite its nighttime setting). I appreciate the wisdom, but romantic that I am, I guess I just want to think that the Bard was happy with someone.