Dear Friend, Table of Contents STC Board of Trustees Welcome to our production Bottomless Dream of William Shakespeare’s A (or, Palindromes and Palimpsests) Midsummer Night’s Dream. by Drew Lichtenberg 6 One of the Bard’s best-loved Board of Trustees W. Mike House Emeritus Trustees plays, this tale of magic and Michael R. Klein, Chair Jerry J. Jasinowski R. Robert Linowes*, Title Page 9 Robert E. Falb, Vice Chair Norman D. Jemal Founding Chairman wonder fits perfectly into the John Hill, Treasurer Jeffrey M. Kaplan James B. Adler About the Playwright 10 holiday season, and we thank Pauline Schneider, Secretary Scott Kaufmann Heidi L. Berry* you for sharing your time with us. Michael Kahn, Artistic Director Abbe D. Lowell David A. Brody* Synopsis 11 Eleanor Merrill Melvin S. Cohen* Trustees Melissa A. Moss Ralph P. Davidson Cast 13 Director Ethan McSweeny returns to the Nicholas W. Allard Robert S. Osborne James F. Fitzpatrick Shakespeare Theatre Company with a newly Ashley Allen Stephen M. Ryan Dr. Sidney Harman* Cast Biographies 14 Stephen E. Allis George P. Stamas Lady Manning theatrical spin on Dream. Ethan is drawing on Anita M. Antenucci Bill Walton Kathleen Matthews Direction and an idea that theatre and magic are one and the Jeffrey D. Bauman Lady Westmacott William F. McSweeny Afsaneh Beschloss Rob Wilder V. Sue Molina Design Biographies 19 same. After all, when Shakespeare first staged Landon Butler Suzanne S. Youngkin Walter Pincus this play, he did so on an empty stage, asking his Dr. Paul Carter Eden Rafshoon About STC 23 Chelsea Clinton Ex-Officio Emily Malino Scheuer* audience to use their imaginations to conjure up Dr. Mark Epstein Chris Jennings, Lady Sheinwald Support 24 the green world of the forest and its fairies. As Andrew C. Florance Managing Director Mrs. Louis Sullivan you peer into the corners of the darkened stage Miles Gilburne Daniel W. Toohey For STC 38 Barbara Harman Sarah Valente tonight, see if you can’t use your own imagination John R. Hauge Lady Wright STC Staff 42 to spot some ghosts of the theatre. Stephen A. Hopkins Lawrence A. Hough * Deceased Audience Services 43 Our cast includes STC Affiliated Artists Adam Green and Ted van Griethuysen as well as many new faces, including three actors from the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada—the brilliant trio of Tim Campbell, Bruce Dow and Sara Topham. For the rest of our 2012–2013 Season, we will continue to probe classical themes of love and revenge, heroism and betrayal. As we move into Eugene O’Neill’s the new year, please give us your hands, but also your eyes and ears, if we be friends. We look forward to seeing you all in the theatre again soon. Warm regards, directed by Doug Hughes Michael Kahn Artistic Director featuring Richard Schiff Shakespeare Theatre Company On Sale Now Lansburgh Theatre January 31-March 17, 2013 Production Sponsor: Michael R. Klein and Joan I. Fabry Photo of Adam Green by S. Christian Low. 2 3 Located steps away from Shakespeare Theatre Company at 915 E Street NW 202.629.4355 When we all ASIAN FUSION RESTAURANT | LOUNGE focus on the same goal, we can see results. KPMG is proud to The one-stop restaurant for all lovers of Asian food. support the “Tom yum soup, Japanese dumplings, hoisin-glazed ribs—the dozens of choices make sure no Asian appetite goes unmet.” Shakespeare Theatre The Washington Post Company’s A Midsummer Happy Hour: $4 draft beers, $5 wines, $6.50 mixed drinks Monday–Friday: 4:30–8pm, Saturday: 3–6pm, Sunday: All Day Night’s Dream. MONDAY | Half Price Selected Bottle of Wine TUESDAY | Martini Night All house special martini for $6 kpmg.com WEDNESDAY | Intern Night $3 Draft Beer THURSDAY | Ladies Night Second drink 50% off for ladies FRIDAY | Party Time Free shot for party of 6 or more and 15% off bottle of wine/Sake SATURDAY & SUNDAY | $12 pitchers of beer BRUNCH SPECIAL Your choice of 5 brunch menu items, dessert, soft drink: $25 © 2012 KPMG LLP, a Delaware limited liability partnership and the U.S. member firm of the KPMG network of independent member firms affiliated with KPMG International Cooperative Bloody Marys and Mimosas: $1 (“KPMG International”), a Swiss entity. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. The KPMG name, logo and “cutting through complexity” are registered trademarks or trademarks of KPMG International. NDPPS 115156 SHAKESPEARE STARS—show your Bard Card and receive 15% off! Bottomless Dream There’s a famous(or, proverbial Palindromes saying about amend and them.” “ItPalimpsests) must be your imagination music criticism, that it’s like “dancing about then,” Hippolyta replies, “and not theirs.” In architecture.” The same challenge applies other words, the theatre relies always upon to anyone writing about A Midsummer Night’s the imaginations of its creators and spectators, Dream. Trying to describe the effect of the play rather than the finery of its stage dressing, to is like pinning a fluttering butterfly against cast its magic spell. the wall, perhaps because the play’s effect is a Another name for this kind of layered structure musical one, so lyrical is its language and so is the palimpsest. The word comes from the elegant its form. Latin palimpsestus, which means “scraped clean Structurally speaking, Midsummer’s two halves and used again.” The Romans wrote on wax mirror each other. The play is a palindrome. tablets, called palimpsests, which could be We begin in the Athenian court, with erased, or “scraped clean,” and written over. Painting of Bottom and the Fairies by Henry Fuseli, 1793-1794. Theseus preparing his wedding to Hippolyta On Latin lesson books, old meanings, like and dealing with the competing claims of the natural order undergirding society, or their mixture of sources, their conflation of the sublime, evoking with uncanny accuracy the four young lovers. We next meet the the imagination lying beneath the conscious high and low, theatrical and quotidian. the experience of a dream: “The eye of man “rude mechanicals,” Athenian working-men mind, were often visible in ghostly echoes. hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, rehearsing a play for Theseus’ nuptials. In the medieval era, layered structures with man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue Puck is identified with Robin Goodfellow, a Thirdly, we enter the forest, a fairyland which palindromic or palimpsestic forms were often to conceive, nor his heart to report what my mischievous spirit from popular folklore, but comprises the middle of the play and into used for religious dramas depicting spiritual dream was!” which the lovers and mechanicals stumble. journeys, such as the stations of the cross, a he also functions within the play as Cupid, Coming out of the forest, the play proceeds in pilgrim’s progress or a saint’s life. On the one the classical archer who curses mortals with Bottom’s speech is Shakespeare’s gloss on a reverse order: we see a short scene with the hand, it is exceedingly odd that Shakespeare irrational love. In doubling as Philostrate, Puck divine homily, St. Paul’s first epistle to the mechanicals and end back at the Athenian should adapt such a structure for A Midsummer is also the Master of Revels, an Elizabethan Corinthians, in which he describes man’s court with the promised nuptial celebrations, Night’s Dream, a secular play that functions functionary who reviews the mechanicals’ vision of God. “The eye hath not seen, the ear unfathomably transformed (in the shape of primarily as a comedy. But this palindromic play and approves it for Theseus. Titania and heard, neither have entered into the heart the mechanicals’ play, Pyramus and Thisbe) from stripping-away helps to explain the play’s Hippolyta, the Fairy and Amazon Queens, of man the things which God hath prepared their first reference in the play. curiously intense power, and Shakespeare’s alternately evoke both Venus and Diana, for them that love Him.” Paul concludes his palimpsestic method of overwriting his source oxymoronically combining the virginal moon sermon by trying to describe the limits of Shakespeare thus telescopes us into and out of materials provides harmony to the dissonances goddess and the hedonistic goddess of love, the spiritual experience, but he finds only the dreamlike world of the forest, mediating of its world. especially when played by the same actress. depths. “The Spirit searcheth all things, yea, from the most formal level of civilization Bottom, one of the mechanicals, is an Athenian the deep things of God.” This last phrase, “the (Theseus’ court) to the world of the everyday A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written during weaver, yet in the world of the forest he wears deep things of God,” was translated in various (the Mechanicals’ rehearsal room) to the Shakespeare’s so-called “lyric period” between the ass-head of a mummer at a medieval ways during the Elizabethan era. The one natural world (the magical forest). This “green 1592 and 1596, an extraordinarily fecund time festival. After performing the Romeo-like Shakespeare knew, I believe, is in the Tyndale world” is the theatre in its purest form: it in which he also wrote Richard II and Romeo and Pyramus in a play before the Duke, he leads the New Testament of 1526, the most popular hosts a series of magical metamorphoses Juliet, as well as the epic verse poems The Rape of company in a bergomask, a dance associated book in England before the creation of the and is described in such hyperbolic language Lucrece and Venus and Adonis.