Ashland: Midsummer Night's Rave

Hm. I said yesterday that it looked like Ashland had decided to trust Shakespeare. I guess I spoke too soon. Lat night I saw the Midsummer Night's Dream, which is not a "play" so much as it is finals week at the drama school, where all the aspirants get to pluck something out of a hat and come up with an accent, or a decade, or a color, or a style; each then does his own turn while somebody tries to whip it all into a whole whose main theme is "loud." The result was a noisy melange of disco, Hog-farm Commune, Dick Tracy Sunday color panel, and--well, actually, mostly disco, complete with a strobe globe at the end--fitfully interlaced with words by some old coot. The audience (heavy on college students, here on a class assignment)--the audience mostly loved it: I can't remember that I've ever heard such ecstatic hallway chatter. And the truth is, it worked surprisingly well, though why they bothered drag the name of Shakespeare into this mishmosh is pretty much beyond me.

Okay, I exaggerate. Shakespeare actually did show through in a few spots. Item: I suppose the one real Shakespearean success of the night was Christine Albright as Titania. The queen of the fairies is pretty much of a disco queen herself, when you stop to think of it, with her posse and her toyboy and her assorted freaky entertainments. Dressing up like Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein would ber perfectly in character Kevin Kennerly as her Oberon just back from the gym, was as good as I've ever seen him, if I could see him inside that whacked-out costume.

And to be fair, the young lovers were pretty much on key, too, especially Emily Sophia Knapp as Hermia (who played it as straight as anybody in the company): this lot is after all, when you stop to think of it, a bunch of narcissistic twits, and so to play them that way wasn't at all a violation (they did tend to jog-trot the verse a bit, though, as they tried to hurry through it).

For the play-within-a-play--the "rude mechanicals" in their VW bus--let's just say that everyone in the audience seemed to like it except me. Okay, I grant you--I liked it too as noise, but as a reading of the text, it had about as much to do with Shakespeare as it did with the Internal Revenue Code. In particular Ray Price as Bottom the Weaver--Price did a splendidly comical imitation of Ray Price, but as to Bottom, the only connection seemed to be the way that Price was congratulating Bottom for having had the good sense to let himself be played by Ray Price.

Theseus and Hyppolyta were just another case of "whatever." It's pretty clear that neither the director nor the actors figured that the script had anything to the offer, so they decided to play around with comic-book costumes and comic-book furniture and then get them off the stage as quickly as possible.

On the way home a young friend asked me: well, after having seen this, would you rather see a more traditional performance? It's a good question. This kind of show is a bell you can't unring: once you've seen it so noisy, campy and over-the-top, almost any straight reading is bound to seem insipid. For Ashland itself, I suspect, the message is clear: MSN played to a full house of enthusiasts beside themselves with glee. Othello the night before had empty seats. I just hate to think what the next director of MSN will feel he has to do.

Afterthought: I have heard the great Stanislavski quoted as saying that too many actors think about what they can bring to the part, and not what the part can bring to them. Just sayin'.

Update: Turns out there is not just one "Shakespeare-The Musical" at Ashland this summer; there are two. Comedy of Errors appears in a modern avatar out West of the Pecos. It's an affable and plausible rework of what is, after all, a piece of Shakespearean juvenilia. The added songs are pretty insipid and the cast does run around a bit much (I suspect the whole thing would have been better about 15 minutes shorter). But once again, the management seems to understand its audience (I wonder, have they been watching the CD's of Slings and Arrows?).