A Really Weird DREAM

No, that was a headline from The Onion’s historical archive, something along the lines of:“Martin Luther King: ‘I had a really weird dream last night’, an article in which King rambled on and on about one of those dreams the person feels compelled to tell you about even though it’s all nonsense and you wish they’d shut up. I refer you to my thoughts about Freud, obscurely mentioned in the last blog (somewhere between two parentheses, probably).

No, I must needs write you now a little blog entry “which shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it has no bottom.” I just stepped out of a performance of Ein Sommernachtstraum here at the Deutsches National Theater und Staatskapelle Weimar, which was one of the strangest things ever.

We often tell Americans that every tiny town in Germany has its own opera house, but it’s one thing to repeat that because it’s something you’ve heard the smart set talk about and something else to experience it proper. Weimar is a really small town (a great town, but really small). And this theater is just outrageous! It’s a little Lincoln Center all to itself, with a joint playhouse, opera house, and symphony sharing a couple of performance spaces, every performer and artist a state employee, with a huge bevy of stuff they’re constantly producing. Tonight, this bizarre Traum; tomorrow, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, a fabulous opera but one requiring so many performers and such production value we couldn’t afford to do it in Seattle recently; and the day after, Schiller’s Maria Stuarda. Yesterday they sang Rossini’s Otello. Judging from the booklet for next season, it’s like this year-round in this small little town: just the operas scheduled for next year include a “Musical Farce” by Nino Rota, first performed in 1955, called The Florentine Hat (who knew he wrote operas?); Così, co-produced with the sister theater in Braunschweig; The Rocky Horror Show; Die Walküre, out of a Ring they’re doing here next month; Luisa Miller; and a few others. Imagine if this (plus a full bevy of plays and symphony concerts) were being put on in Mt. Vernon all the time. It’s a good-sized theater, probably seats a few less than the Copenhagen Opera, and it wasn’t full tonight. There were lots of kids (every theater and museum I’ve checked out since coming to Germany has been swarming with kids) and nicely-dressed Weimarians, out for a night on the town; I had dinner afterwards with a local high school teacher and her husband, who aren’t exactly subscribers but seem to come to the theater a handful of times each year (with or without students in tow).

Our dinner conversation was a bit strange, since I make mistakes all over the place in German and she was, how do you say, more interested in communicating with me than he was. (Only when you travel in a foreign country do you realize, it’d be a good thing if Americans learned to speak more slowly and clearly, and use simpler words and less irony, when talking to non-native English speakers who have wound up on our shores!) I was okay at the theater because a) I’ve had a few days now to blow the dust off the language where it’s stored up in the attic of my brain, b) I was in Midsummer Night’s Dream years ago, have seen it a thousand times, and know the play more or less by heart, and was chuckling at August Schlegel’s wondrous old translation as much as I was the acting and c) there was plenty of singing, too.

It’s hard for me to tell if this is a new departure for this theater; but this show was a co-production between the two departments of the theater, plays and operas. The performers included a Baroque orchestra, an opera chorus, and 22 soloists—one saxophonist, four opera singers, and the rest actors. It was the Schlegel text of Shakespeare’s play, with some cuts, and then lots of music by Henry Purcell. I note that they’re planning on doing something of this kind again next year, for a Don Quijote show which, the program promises, will draw “from the rich fund of Baroque music, but also from rock and pop,” and which intends to “let the poetic speech of Cervantes give life to a new, unaccustomed form of art.” That kind of describes what happened this evening, as well. Remember that when Richard Wagner ran a theater just like this one, in Dresden in the 1840s (I was there yesterday, I’ll blog about it soon) he got annoyed that opera and theater were considered separate departments and so invented his own kind of weird art form. Just a reminder—you’re on a slippery slope when you start doing this kind of thing!

The music for this Midsummer was drawn from Henry Purcell, mostly (I don’t know what the saxophonist was playing—maybe his own composition). But it wasn’t Purcell’s Fairy Queen, the masque which (as you know) was obstensibly based on Midsummer but didn’t contain a word of Shakespeare in it. I don’t know Purcell well enough to recognize all the sources raided by tonight’s music director (the extremely charismatic Marco Comin); the ones I spotted were “When I am laid in earth”, sung offstage by the narrator figure as Helena is finishing up her “How happy some or other some can be!” monologue, not played at all for laughs with that music beneath it. And, the bass who sang tonight (a wonderful, huge, woofy Hans Hotter-type sound, I’m sorry I didn’t get his name) was a sort of Bottom/Falstaff/Bacchus figure, who appeared shortly before the first Bottom scene and did a Purcell piece I didn’t recognize, in which he was drunk and stuttering and a bunch of fairies were pinching him; and then he reappeared before Bottom’s dream, wearing only underwear, covered in welts from the fairies’ mistreatment of him, and singing the Frost Monster piece from Purcell’s King Arthur. (Ah, what memories that brings back!) Uh...there was one other piece I recognized, although I didn’t take notes at the time and now I’m blanking on it. I think it may have been from the St. Cecilia Mass.

The set, designed by Dirk Becker, was a huge turntable with large, movable white walls and a green projection at the far back. It reminded me plenty of our Macbeth set, except every time there needed to be a scene change the turntable swiveled and we saw some new, non-descript playing space. Idea for a MSND production—it didn’t really happen here, but why not build a forest floor piece, a sort of big carpet, with blankets of the same material hidden to the eye because they blend in. That way, when everybody goes to sleep on what otherwise always looks like a bare stage floor, they could pull blankets up over them and it would look as if they were wrapping themselves in the forest?

I’ll stop trying to design another production and tell you a little about this one instead. It’s a weird temptation, though, because honestly I adore this play, know it like the back of my hand and adore every word of it, but I don’t feel so strongly about how IT SHOULD BE DONE. I’ve never really thought about what I would do in “my production”, for instance (as I have with, say, the Ring). I think there’s absolutely no one right way to do Midsummer, and love it that it’s so darn ambiguous, that it works so well in so many different approaches. A few specifics about this approach to the characters:

The Narrator. The show opened with a decent Baroque singer (I wouldn’t hire her for my opera house, but she was fine for this production) who seemed to be a narrator of some kind, singing Purcell with a thick German accent. Oberon and Titania entered on either side of her, and Titania started making love to the narrator—clearly in order to make Oberon jealous, but perhaps it was inspired by the fact that they cut Titania’s great speech about the changeling boy’s mother.
Titania. The woman playing Titania, Rosemarie Deibel, had a voice that reminded me incredibly of Judy Dench’s. (She was a bit taller than Dame J.) I’m guessing she was a big German actress who’s been around for decades, and there was a certain school of vocal production in the 70s that must have encouraged that husky, Glynis Johns kind of sound.
Oberon. The very attractive Jürg Wisbach played Oberon, with tight white pants and a big white cape/coat, made (I think) out of leather and fur. He was clearly in love with Titania; we didn’t see hide nor hair of the changeling, and when Puck first appeared with the flower, Puck had obviously tried it out to see if it worked because he/she (Puck was androgynous) immediately began making love to Oberon. Luckily for him, Oberon had a little of the antidote juice ready to go, squeezed it on Puck’s eyes, and Puck let him alone and they continued their scene. (At the top of the second act—located about where Britten starts his third act—Oberon got a moment to caress the narrator respectfully.)
Puck. Claudia Meyer played Puck, with a bald skull-cap and roller-skates, most of his/her lines given through a microphone and distorted. Much of the more sing-songey stuff was in English (with a thick German accent), although when he/she was having conversations it was in German. The roller-skates gave a singing-acting-DANCING quality to the whole production.
Theseus and Hippolyta. Renée Listerdal’s costumes for the court of Athens were black and white and pseudo-Renaissance, often with wild collars. I’d spent much of the afternoon today looking at old Dutch Masters at the Dresden Alte Galerie, and so recognized the style. In this production Theseus and Hippolyta don’t have much to do (Theseus seemed a jolly Bavarian wurst-and-bier kind of guy; Hippolyta, who had two zappy red wigs, a different one in Act 5, was a little busier than normal).
Egeus. Hermia’s father enters dragging her by a rope, which is tied around her hands and a white gag around her mouth. Theseus removes the gag so she can say her first line; but it’s all a good shorthand way of letting us know what goes out at the Egeus household.
Hermia. This Hermia was very into martial arts and physical combat. I think she took her cue from Helena’s line ‘Though she be but little, she is fierce’. It occurs to me that Midsummer Night’s Dream is basically Hermia’s story, the way Lord of the Rings is more or less about Frodo. Maybe that’s why these characters are so hard to approach.
Lysander. This Lysander did a ridiculous strip-tease in the forest as he was going to bed with Hermia for the first time. The defining moment for him is when Hermia won’t have sex with him that night, so he decides he doesn’t love her and loves Helena instead. In fact, you get the sense that of the four of them, Lysander is the biggest turd.
Demetrius. The defining moment for Demetrius comes when he tells Egeus he’s changed and no longer wants his daughter, the morning after the dream. That’s when he stands up and, by switching his desire, resolves the conflict of the whole show. I should point out that this Lysander and Demetrius at one point were so enamoured of Helena they both jumped her; the three of them struggled around for a bit, then Helena crawled away to look back and see Lysander and Demetrius continuing to kiss and roll around passionately. Eventually, they sat up, milked a few double-takes for all the laughs they could possibly scare up, and got on with things.
Helena. To me, Helena is usually the heart of the show—the most grotesque, but most human character in the piece, the only one who actually gets a big monologue about what this lunatic love is all about. And there’s something automatically funny, if a little sad, about her. The Helena tonight wasn’t especially played for laughs.
Quince. I played Peter Quince a thousand years ago in a production of Midsummer, and I kind of love the part—he’s the one who’s so literal-minded and slow he thinks they need to have actors come in to play the Wall and the Moon, or else the spectators might not get it that those things exist in the world of Pyramus and Thisbe. Tonight we had a female Petra Skranz, who seemed a parody of the current German head of state. I also got the sense that she had a thing for bottom.
Bottom. For some reason Schlegel called Bottom “Zettel”. The fellow who did the role tonight, Aleksandar Tesla, was incredible—a dancer’s body, so he was completely expressive (not to mention beautiful) even with a big ass’s head on. The other four mechanicals were a sort-of barbershop quartet, and the six of them had worked the timing and the stylization out in each of their scenes brilliantly and beautifully—I wasn’t sure I was going to laugh at the Pyramus and Thisbe scene without Shakespeare’s silly English text, but they were so funny (and Schlegel did such a good job—where Shakespeare has Bottom say “O night, O night! alack, alack, alack” Schelgel manages to improve on it in German with “O Nacht! O Nacht! O ach! ach! acht!”) I ran out of breath from laughing so hard.

Richard Wagner saw Midsummer Night’s Dream in his apprentice years in the theater, in this same translation, the first time it was ever staged (by Devrient, I think? Somebody want to look this up?) with Mendelssohn’s incidental music. I know it made a big impression on him, because before long he was putting together Meistersinger, which is another great, big, glorious, weird, unfathomable, deliriously wonderful DREAM.