Midsummer Night's Dream

a midsummer night's dream Snug, rendering by Izumi Inaba, 2017 Barbara Gaines Table of Contents Artistic Director Preface . .1 . Carl and Marilynn Art That Lives . .2 . Thoma Endowed Chair Bard’s Bio. 3 The First Folio . .3 . Criss Henderson Shakespeare’s England . 5. Executive Director The English Renaissance Theater . .6 . The Courtyard-style Theater. 7 On the Road: A Brief History of Chicago Shakespeare Theater is Chicago’s professional theater Touring Shakespeare. 9 dedicated to the works of William Shakespeare. Founded as Shakespeare Timelines . 12. .Repertory . in 1986, the company moved to its seven-story home on Navy Pier in 1999. In its Elizabethan-style courtyard theater, 500 seats Shakespeare's on three levels wrap around a deep thrust stage—with only nine rows separating the farthest seat from the stage. Chicago Shakespeare also a Midsummer features a flexible 180-seat black box studio theater, a Teacher Resource night's dream Center, and a Shakespeare specialty bookstall. In 2017, a new, innovative Dramatis Personae . .14 . performance venue, The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare, expands CST's Who's Who: What's in a Name? . .15 . campus to include three theaters. The year-round, flexible venue can be The Story . 16. .configured . in a variety of shapes and sizes with audience capacities Act by Act Synopsis . 16 ranging from 150 to 850, defining the audience–artist relationship to best S omething Borrowed, Something New: serve each production. Shakespeare’s Sources . .18 . The Nature of Comedy . 20. Now in its thirty-first season, the Theater has produced nearly the entire A History of Dreams . 22. Shakespeare canon: All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Cymbeline, Edward III, Hamlet, Henry Scholars Perspectives IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, King John, King Lear, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Macbeth, Measure Spirits of Another Sort . 24. for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A What the Critics Say . 26. Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Pericles, Richard II, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The A Play Comes to Life Tempest, Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, The Two A Midsummer Night's Dream in Performance. 34 Gentlemen of Verona, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and The Winter’s Tale. A Conversation with the Director . 37 Chicago Shakespeare Theater was the 2008 recipient of the Regional Theatre Tony Award. Chicago’s Jeff Awards year after year have honored Classroom Activities the Theater, including repeated awards for Best Production and Best and Resources Director, the two highest honors in Chicago theater. Before You Read the Play . .41 . Since Chicago Shakespeare’s founding, its programming for young As You Read the Play . 50 audiences has been an essential element in the realization of its After You Read the Play . .69 . mission. Team Shakespeare supports education in our schools, where The Performance: Preparing and Reflecting . .73 Shakespeare is part of every required curriculum. As a theater within Classroom Warm-ups and Community Builders . 79 a multicultural city, we are committed to bringing Shakespeare to life To Listen or Not to Listen: for tens of thousands of middle and high school students each year. Audiobooks in Reading Shakespeare . 85 Team Shakespeare’s programming includes free teacher workshops, Strategies for Teaching Shakespeare with Film . 87 student matinees of main stage shows, post-performance discussions, A “Read-and-View” Teaching Strategy . 93 comprehensive teacher handbooks, and an abridged, original production A Midsummer Night’s Dream Film Finder . 97. Techno-Shakespeare . 100 each year of one of the “curriculum plays.” Team Shakespeare offers Suggested Readings . .105 . a region-wide forum for new vision and enthusiasm for teaching Shakespeare in our schools. In 2012, the Folger Shakespeare Library in This Teacher Handbook grew out of a team effort of Washington, DC, honored that vision with the prestigious Shakespeare teachers past and present, Chicago Shakespeare Steward Award. The 2017-18 Season offers a student matinee series Theater artists, interns, educators, and scholars. for three of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s full-length productions: in Chicago Shakespeare Theater gratefully acknowledges the fall, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew directed by Artistic the groundbreaking and indelible work of Dr. Rex Director Barbara Gaines; in the winter, Red Velvet by Lolita Chakrabarti; Gibson and the Cambridge School Shakespeare and in the spring, Mary Stuart, written by Friedrich Schiller and adapted Series, whose contributions to the field of teaching by Peter Oswald, as well as Shakespeare’s Macbeth directed by Aaron have helped shape our own work through the years. Posner and Teller. Also this winter, a 75-minute abridged version of A Marilyn J. Halperin Director of Education Midsummer Night’s Dream will be performed in The Yard at the Chicago Ray and Judy McCaskey Endowed Chair Shakespeare Theater and will tour Chicago schools and theaters across Roxanna Conner Education Associate the region. We hope that you and your students will enjoy our work—and Jason Harrington Education Outreach Manager Shakespeare’s creative genius brought to life on stage. ★ Molly Truglia Learning Programs Manager ©2018, Chicago Shakespeare Theater Written by William Shakespeare Directed by Jess McLeod Welcome to the woods just beyond the gates of the city, where one small flower can kindle love—or just kill it. As wanderers here, we feel hopeless and alone one moment and, in the next, surrounded by creatures only our imagination 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 beautiful. It can be life-changing. 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 l Please, no talking during the performance. Dlive before a group of It distracts the actors as well as the people people who form an audience sitting nearby. and experience it together, just as you will here at the Chicago l Respond naturally to our play. Emotions are Shakespeare Theater. This part of drama. We hope that you'll laugh, cry, and tradition of performance and observance, of drama as even gasp—but as a natural response to the story, communication, is an historically rich and complex one and not in order to distract attention from the that reaches far back in time. Textual evidence from Egypt stage. and Mesopotamia—even art like cave paintings depicting l Please leave all “noisemakers”—food, gum, men disguised as animals—reveals that since ancient cell phones, iPods, etc.—back at school or on the times, impersonation and imitation have been used not bus. In a quiet theater, wrappers, munching—and only ritualistically but also as a means of expression and even a phone’s vibration—are heard by all, the communication, a way to impart the knowledge of the actors included. community. l No photographs of any kind, please. The beginnings of Western drama further developed in the Flashbulbs can make the actors lose their focus religious ritual and festivals of the ancient Greeks, while and can be dangerous. Digital cameras, along their theater also took on new emphasis as a sophisticated with all other kinds of recording devices, are mode of storytelling, especially as a way of communicating prohibited, as is text-messaging. the history of a culture and imagining new heroic tales. The drama of Europe’s Middle Ages was closely tied to forms of their work is at its best—full of animation and energy. When religious observance, but the medievals also used theater the actors sense disinterest, they too are distracted, and the to teach biblical stories, present the lives of saints, and play they create is less interesting. Actors have described creatively communicate the moral ideals of the community. the experience of live performance as a story told by the It is this long and varied tradition that Shakespeare and the cast members and audience together. In this sense, you Renaissance playwrights inherited—and from which they are also a storyteller when you experience live theater. We would both borrow and imagine new possibilities. hope you’ll 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.

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