Elevate Me Later
By Martin Harries
A Midsummer Night's Dream
By William Shakespeare
BAM Harvey Theater
(closed)
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play about
spirits, but it also a play about bodies. The Midsummer recently
brought to BAM by the British company Propeller, Edward Hall's all-male
ensemble, has a thousand virtues, and chief among them is its emphasis
on the body. There is no flying by Foy. There are no blithe Victorian
angels. When bodies fall, they fall hard. Propeller's spirits have bodies.
Even Puck -- especially this Puck, the superb Simon Scardifield -- has
a body.
There is something gross here, something good
and gross. I will explain, and begin with the word.
Late in Midsummer, Theseus (Matthew
Flynn), speaking with the mechanicals' play in mind, declares: "This
palpable gross play hath well beguiled/ The heavy gait of night." Theseus
is of course also speaking of Shakespeare's play. As Midsummer
ends, the line between the play-within-the-play and the play proper
grows increasingly slim. Propeller's audience is particularly likely
to think Theseus is speaking about the Midsummer they have
just witnessed.
"Gross." Propeller made me think about this word.
What does Theseus mean when he calls the mechanicals' "tedious and brief
scene," that slapstick version of the comic story of Pyramus and Thisby,
"gross"? Is it disgusting to him?
The play itself offers a hint about what "gross"
might mean. Titania (Sam Callis) promises Bottom:
I'll give thee fairies to attend on thee,
And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,
And sing while thou on pressèd flowers dost sleep;
And I will purge thy mortal grossness so
That thou shalt like an airy spirit go.
Bottom, of course, never does go like an airy
spirit or any other kind. Indeed, Propeller's excellent Bottom, Tony
Bell, becomes more than usually weighed down by "mortal grossness" once
he is transformed into an ass. His weaver's spindle morphs into a donkey
schlong forever flapping between his legs. The play's joke is that,
while under the influence of the drug love-in-idleness, Titania cannot
see just how bestial, how ridiculous, how mortal -- in short, how "gross"
-- Bottom has become. In Hall's production, this joke is emphasized
as Titania ogles Bottom's member. Which again raises the question: what
does "gross" mean here?
The Oxford English Dictionary is helpful:
"Glaring, flagrant, monstrous"; "Wanting in fineness or delicacy of
texture"; "Lacking in delicacy of perception; dull stupid"; "Rude, uninstructed,
ignorant"; "Extremely coarse in behavior or morals; brutally lacking
in refinement or delicacy." Shades of all these meanings are in play,
but the OED singles one out: Titania's lines are quoted to
exemplify "Thickness, density, materiality, solidity."
Propeller's Midsummer, this "palpable
gross play," folds the grossness of mortality back into the grossness
of the body. It does not aspire, with Titania, to purge mortal grossness,
but celebrates it.
Recall that all the bodies on stage in the Propeller
Midsummer are male. Edward Hall, director of the fine ensemble,
claims that the inspiration for this choice was fidelity to the conditions
of Shakespeare's original productions. There is something faintly old-fashioned
in his reasoning; he writes in the current American Theatre,
for instance, that the male actors in Shakespeare's time made the plays
more about "the idea of love" than about, say, sex--an effect presumably
reproducible today.
There's every reason to believe that Shakespeare's
audiences knew that boys played the women. I don't know of evidence,
however, that these boys were anything but convincing drag artists.
They were sexy. Unlike Hall's actors, they probably had very little
body hair showing, and they weren't balding (like Robert Hands, who
plays Helena for Propeller). Propeller's women do not look like women.
"But ultimately," says Hall of his company's work, "we strive to create
a different creature, to transcend any literal idea of gender." Thus,
when I say there's something old-fashioned in Hall's reasoning, I mean
that in theory he wants to swerve away from the specifically queer energies
that critics from Oscar Wilde to Jonathan Goldberg have seen in the
casting of boys as women.
Practice, however, is a different matter. A production
all about the "idea of love" would be lovely, I suppose, but that's
not what I see in this Midsummer. It is as though Titania speaks
for Hall: he wants his actors to purge their "mortal grossness." This
is a lot to purge, and happily it never happens. Hall's theory may have
been an enabling fiction. His ensemble may indeed have striven to transcend
"any literal idea of gender" (whatever that means), but this Midsummer
stages the human frustrations that very often attend such striving.
Indeed, in this production a hilarious yet bittersweet aura surrounds
this failure of bodily transcendence.
Jonathan McGuinness's memorable performance exemplifies
the production's brew of the melancholic and the slapstick. As Hermia,
McGuinness' body is always leaning towards someone, his hands are always
in motion, his eyes dart. As his voice comes close to breaking, its
yearning returns him to the very body he seems to want to abandon. (That
McGuinness also plays the laconic Snug the Joiner, who leans timorously
away from his artisan companions, and the play-within-the-play's cowardly
lion, makes the physical effect richer.) McGuinness's body has clearly
not purged the "mortal grossness" of gender; it is a man's body. Which
is why his performance can be at once comic and melancholic: the effect
comes from his fine playing of the line between desire and fulfillment.
That mixture of comedy and melancholy is the
strength of this production. Take, for instance, the great short scene
where the two pairs of lovers have come to the end of their wanderings
in the woods. "Methinks I see these things with parted eye,/ When everything
seems double," says Hermia. Everything is double, for characters and
audience alike, and the four actors convey the bewilderment wonderfully
well. They also convey, however, the pleasure they find in the confusion
itself; they are already slightly nostalgic for the night they have
just passed. No more love-in-idleness. Now they must throw away childish
things and love the people they are supposed to love.
As this production ends, Puck is sad about the
process of setting things straight. In his ludicrous tutu and striped
red and white tights, Scardifield knows that we are about to leave and
go off and be ourselves. It's gross.