A Midsummer Night's Dream

a midsummer night's dream Titania, rendering by Fabio Toblini, 2018 Titania, rendering by Fabio Toblini, Barbara Gaines Table of Contents Artistic Director Preface . .1 . Carl and Marilynn Thoma Chair Art That Lives . .2 . Bard’s Bio. 3 Criss Henderson The First Folio . .3 . Executive Director Shakespeare’s England . 5. The English Renaissance Theater . .6 . The Courtyard-style Theater. 7 Timelines . 9 . .Chicago . Shakespeare Theater is Chicago’s professional theater dedicated to the works of William Shakespeare. Founded as Shakespeare Repertory in 1986, the company moved to its seven-story home on Shakespeare's Navy Pier in 1999. In its Elizabethan-style Courtyard Theater, 500 seats a Midsummer night's dream on three levels wrap around a deep thrust stage—with only nine rows Dramatis Personae . .11 . separating the farthest seat from the stage. Chicago Shakespeare also Who's Who: What's in a Name? . .12 . features a flexible 180-seat black box studio theater, a Teacher Resource The Story . 13. .Center, . and a Shakespeare specialty bookstall. In 2017, a new, innovative Act by Act Synopsis . 13 performance venue, The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare, expanded CST's S omething Borrowed, Something New: campus to include three theaters. The year-round, flexible venue can Shakespeare’s Sources . .15 . be configured in a variety of shapes and sizes with audience capacities The Nature of Comedy . 17. ranging from 150 to 850, defining the audience-artist relationship to best serve each production. Now in its thirty-second season, the Theater has Perspectives produced nearly the entire Shakespeare canon: All’s Well That Ends Spirits of Another Sort . 19. Well, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, What the Critics and Artists Say . .21 . Cymbeline, Edward III, Hamlet, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, King John, King Lear, A Play Comes to Life Love’s Labor’s Lost, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Performance. 29 Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Conversation with the Director . 32 Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Pericles, Richard II, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen Classroom Activities and Resources of Verona, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and The Winter’s Tale. Chicago Before You Read the Play . .36 . Shakespeare Theater was the 2008 recipient of the Regional Theatre As You Read the Play . 47 Tony Award. Chicago’s Jeff Awards year after year have honored the After You Read the Play . .67 . Theater, including repeated awards for Best Production and Best The Performance: Preparing and Reflecting . .72 Director, the two highest honors in Chicago theater. Since Chicago Classroom Warm-ups and Community Builders . 77 Shakespeare’s founding, its programming for young audiences has been Teaching Midsummer with Film . 83 an essential element in the realization of its mission. Team Shakespeare Techno-Shakespeare . 90 Suggested Readings . 95. supports education in our schools, where Shakespeare is part of the required curriculum. As a theater within a multicultural city, we are committed to bringing Shakespeare to life for tens of thousands of middle This Teacher Handbook grew out of a team effort of and high school students each year. Team Shakespeare’s programming teachers past and present, Chicago Shakespeare includes free teacher workshops, student matinees of main stage shows, Theater artists, interns, educators, and scholars. post-performance discussions, comprehensive teacher handbooks, and Chicago Shakespeare Theater gratefully acknowledges an abridged, original production each year of one of the “curriculum the groundbreaking and indelible work of Dr. Rex plays.” Team Shakespeare offers a regionwide forum for new vision and Gibson and the Cambridge School Shakespeare enthusiasm for teaching Shakespeare in our schools. In 2012 the Folger Series, whose contributions to the field of teaching Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, honored that vision with the have helped shape our own work through the years. prestigious Shakespeare Steward Award. The 2018-19 Season offers a student matinee series for two of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s full- length productions: in the winter, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Marilyn J. Halperin Director of Education Dream directed by Joe Dowling, and in the spring, Shakespeare’s Hamlet Ray and Judy McCaskey Chair directed by Artistic Director Barbara Gaines. Also this winter, a 75-minute Jason Harrington Education Outreach Manager abridged version of Macbeth will be performed at the Theater on Navy Sara B.T. Thiel Public Humanities Manager Pier and will tour to schools across the region. We hope that you and your Molly Truglia Learning Programs Manager students will enjoy our work—and Shakespeare’s creative genius brought to life on stage. ©2018, Chicago Shakespeare Theater a midsummerWritten by William Shakespeare Directed by Joe Dowling night's dreamWelcome to the woods just beyond the gates of the city, a place of our imagination where one small flower can kindle love—or kill it. As wanderers here, we may feel hopeless and alone one moment and, in the next, surrounded by creatures only our imaginations can conjure. We may forget who we are. We may turn on our best friend. Or, most unimaginable of all, fall head-over-heels in love with, well, an ass… The forest is strange, terrifying—and painful. It is a life-changing place into which we wander between childhood and adulthood. The fairy king and queen who reign here are currently locked in a marital battle—which happens to be disrupting the entire natural world in the process. Shakespeare invites us along, bringing no other luggage than our own imaginative powers. Get ready for a wild ride. introduction Art That Lives How can you help us give you the rama is a living art. It is best performance we can? written to be performed live l Please, no talking during the performance. before a group of people who D It distracts the actors as well as the people form an audience and experience sitting nearby. it together, just as you will here at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. l Respond naturally to our play. Emotions are This tradition of performance and part of drama. We hope that you'll laugh, cry, and observance, of drama as communication, is a historically even gasp—but as a natural response to the story, rich and complex one that reaches far back in time. Textual and not in order to distract attention from the evidence from Egypt and Mesopotamia—even art like cave stage. paintings depicting men disguised as animals—reveals l Please leave all “noisemakers”—food, gum, that since ancient times, impersonation and imitation cell phones, iPods, etc.—back at school or on the have been used not only ritualistically but also as a means bus. In a quiet theater, wrappers, munching—and of expression and communication, a way to impart the even a phone’s vibration—are heard by all, the knowledge of the community. actors included. The beginnings of Western drama further developed in the l No photographs of any kind, please. religious ritual and festivals of the ancient Greeks, while Flashbulbs can make the actors lose their focus their theater also took on new emphasis as a sophisticated and can be dangerous. Digital cameras, along mode of storytelling, especially as a way of communicating with all other kinds of recording devices, are the history of a culture and imagining new heroic tales. The prohibited, as is text-messaging. drama of Europe’s Middle Ages was closely tied to forms of religious observance, but the medievals also used theater When the audience is unengaged, the play they create is to teach biblical stories, present the lives of saints, and less dynamic and compelling. Actors have described the creatively communicate the moral ideals of the community. experience of live performance as a story told by the cast It is this long and varied tradition that Shakespeare and the members and audience together. In this way, you are also a Renaissance playwrights inherited—and from which they storyteller when you experience live theater. We hope you’ll would both borrow and imagine new possibilities. enjoy your role—and will help us to give you a dramatic experience that you’ll always remember. Drama not only depicts human communication, it is human communication. But in the theater, unlike television or film, a two-way communication occurs between the actors [Theatrical performance] is essentially and their audience. When you experience theatrical a sociable, communal affair. This is storytelling, you are not simply on the receiving end of this important. To resist this is, I think, to ruin communicative process: the audience, as a community, is one of the very important parts of the also a participant. We are quite used to thinking about the theatrical experience. Let the play and let actors’ roles in a play, but may find it strange to imagine the fact that temporarily you are not your ourselves, the audience, playing an important role in this private self, but a member of a closely fused living art. Because theater is art that lives, each performance group, make it easy for the performance to is guaranteed to be different, depending in part upon an ’take you out of yourself.’ This, I suggest, is audience’s response. A live performance depends upon its the object of going to a play…to be taken audience. In the theater, the audience hears and sees the out of yourself, out of your ordinary life, actors, just as the actors hear and see the audience.

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