Lucy Gellman Photo
Sarah Holdren was in a theatrical pickle. It was midwinter in New Haven, the snow promised to last for at least another four months, and after successfully pitching a program to the Yale Summer Cabaret’s 2015 board, she found herself unsure of how exactly to make one of her old favorites — A Midsummer Night’s Dream — into something new and intrepid.
“For a long time, we hit a wall,” she said, trading off sentences with Associate Artistic Director Rachel Carpman.
“Then, what was it … in a class, one of our actors … just said: What if the lovers are the characters in the play that the mechanicals are doing?” added Carpman. “And that literally was, like, wall comes crumbling down. I think we wrote the first scene that night. It cracked everything open.”
The result, based largely on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and other Shakespearean works, is Holdren and Carpman’s adaptation MIDSUMMER, a work that the two describe as a “Russian doll structure of stories within stories of trying to use text and theater and storytelling to … try to bring things back, to try to restore a sort of order.” For two weeks starting this Thursday night, Elm Citizens will have a chance to see it come alive when MIDSUMMER opens the 2015 Summer Cabaret season.
The play dovetails with the season’s theme of “Rough Magic,” so named after Prospero’s lines in act five of The Tempest. Across five plays, the summer cab company promises to bring audiences “stories that poetically expand our understanding of reality, stories in which the everyday encounters the surreal, the supernatural, the strange.” For Holdren, who was raised on Arthur Rackham, The Brothers Grimm, Alice in Wonderland, and, as even a young theater enthusiast, Shakespeare, the play didn’t just fit naturally into the season: it helped make it magic.
Courtesy Yale Summer Cabaret
“There’s something that is so attractive and juicy in this play for me, and yet, it is by far the play in the Shakespeare canon that I’ve seen produced in uninteresting ways the most times,” Holdren said. “When a theater wants to do something cute and safe, they do Midsummer. And so many things abut it … like why is it that people want to make it pretty? There’s actually something really strange and eerie and a little bit twisted in there. We started looking through the whole Shakespearean canon and getting really interested in how much creepily prescient, ecologically apocalyptic imagery there is in Shakespeare.”
Inside the small rehearsal space off of Park Street, a chunk of that vision had just finished playing out. Half-seated on a window ledge in Fairyland (New Haven had long dissolved into the ether), Puck (Shaunette Renée Wilson) had watched in half-suspense, half-delight as Oberon (Niall Powderly) drew Titania (Melanie Field) into his web of seduction. An outstretched arm, and Puck was in the throes of bliss. A kiss, and the “shrewd and navish sprite” had his hands pulled tight to his hobgoblin heart. And then, crisis: As Titania refused to give up a changeling child that she had stolen and Oberon declared his revenge on her, the magic began to fray at the seams. Holdren cut for the day.
“Awesome awesome awesome,” she said. “Just a few notes.”
MIDSUMMER opens this Thursday. For ticket information, visit the Summer Cabaret’s website or call the box office at 203 – 432-1566.