'A Midsummer Night's Dream': A Spectacular Flower in Shakespeare's Garden

 

            "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is classic entertainment for a warm summer night. Conditions were optimal when we saw the Bay Colony Shakespeare Company perform it Friday night at Plymouth Center for the Arts -- the town packed, the moon full, a young audience primed for laughter. Every line and gesture in the 'rude mechanicals' concluding play-within-a-play drew shrieks of merriment from the lasses with flowers in their hair and kept even older sensibilities happily entertained. 

            One of (if not) the best of Shakespeare's comedies, 'Dream' is well suited to a contemporary performance milieu in which comic invention, physical comedy, topical allusions,  gestural language, and stark social class contrasts provide an opportunity for actors to stretch their skills and draw audiences into a collaboration on free-floating laugh-in momentum such as Friday's show generated.

            This is the play that gives us Bottom the weaver (played with outrageous and effective hammy-ness by Dev Luthra) plus a number of other local products with inspired names such as Snug the Joiner and Starveling the tailor, a crew more likely to be found in Shakesperae's Southwark neighborhood than ancient Athens. (Were tailors that badly paid in Elizabethan London?) And it's hard to come up with a better name for a mischievous, heavy-handed trickster sprite than 'Puck,' who enjoys pulling stools from underneath tired goodwives, leading mortals astray, and scaring them out of their wits when midnight rendezvouses in the woods turn nasty. It's Puck (played wittily by the company's Ross Magnant) who gives us the oft-repeated apostrophe, "O what fools these mortals be!"

            The play also gives us a feuding fairy king and queen, played by the same actors who take the roles of Theseus and Hippolyta (Neil McGarry and Poornima Kirby), representing the courtly upper strata, though again more like the nobles in the poet's London than figures from Greek myth. The queen is served by a retinue of fairies called by names such as Peaseblossom and Cobweb, gathered from the English countryside. 

            Meanwhile the play's young lovers, straight from Elizabethan central casting, play their own comedy of errors, victimized by a fairy plot gone awry. It's the two ladies -- it's always the ladies in Shakespeare's comedies -- who give us the passionate, eloquent liveliness that turns confusion and circumstance into something special. Has any writer in English given us more consistently appealing women characters drawn from ordinary life in his world yet recognizable in our own? MND's s Hermia and Helena -- played with verve and commitment by (respectively) Raisa Hoffman and Meredith Stypinski -- are indistinguishable 'gentle' maids except that for some reason two even less distinguishable upper-class swains have both fallen for the same girl.

            The girls' names are similar enough that its hard to keep them straight no matter how many times you've seen this play. Shakespeare makes no attempt to provide an explanation for the young people's love choices. His young-lover characters are not 'motivated.' They are as, Romeo says in a related play "fortune's fools." Midsummer Night Dream's deeper critique of human behavior is that there is no essential difference between young lovers. They behave the way they do not because they are 'authentic' free individuals, but because of societal roles, circumstances of birth, and other, even more powerful forces. Love is 'madness' (as the ancient Greek philosophers taught); reason or deeper motivation need not apply. Shakespeare's comic characters are also a comment on youth itself. His young 'fools' lack a truly individualized or 'motivated' character because they are not yet fully realized or complete people.

            When, during the dreamlike night that names the play, Puck's mistakes (compounded by his evil glee) reverse the charge on one of the men's magnets form Hermia to Helena, and then the other's, all the youngsters are completely confused about how to answer the age-old question 'who do you love?'

            The women's response, in one of comedy-of-manner's more inspired bits of dialogue is to dig up some pseudo-reason to explain the irrational changes and then run it into the ground. This must all have something to do, Hermia complains to her erstwhile BFF Helena, with the fact that you're taller than me. When things get comically nasty, Helena is reduced to warning her men (I'm paraphrasing), "though she be small, yet she is vicious..."

            The fairies are no less, or more, human. They play the role of the metaphysical forces that cause people to behave as they do. We're the playthings of fate, chance, bad luck, social conditions, genes, hormones, and tricks of appearance. Puck's misapplication of a love drug -- stands for both accident and compulsion. Though it's s hard to see their behavior as any more absurd or arbitrary than Athens's 'patriarchal' laws that make a daughter her father's property. He may dispose of a disobedient daughter by sending her to a nunnery (a la Hamlet's advice to Ophelia) or by execution. 

            The best medicine for this 'contingent' state of affairs turns out to be laughter.

           A cruel joke played by fairy king Oberon on his queen Titania, when they are quarreling, places the love spell on her to make her fall in love with the 'vulgar' Bottom; Puck adds 'ass's ears' to make Bottom's appearance monstrous. But Bottom takes the adoration of the queen in stride. For all his absurd vanity his character has a solidity that withstands Puck's (and life's) humiliations the way the younger characters have not yet learned to do.

            The "brief, tedious" folk-theater piece ('Pyramus and Thisbe') Bottom and company perform for Theseus and Hippolyta is inspired slapstick. We've seen many bravura takes of this set-piece (at Shakespeare & Company one year the rude mechanicals arrived in a pickup truck with their hammers hanging from their belts), but I don't think we we've seen a better one. The acting suite of Luthra, Erica Simpson as the play's put-upon director, Ben Gutman, Peter Trenouth and Andrew Child wring more personality from roles titled "Wall," "The Moon," and "The Lion" than can be imagined without witnessing the production. Luthra's inspired take on the uncontainably-spastic rock-star stylings of the sublimely narcissistic Bottom -- a superhero in his own world -- kept the 'groundlings' in stitches.   

            [The Bay Colony Shakespeare Company will complete its summer season with alternating performances of "The Winter's Tale" and "A Misummer Night's Dream" from Thursday, Aug. 6, to the Aug. 16 at the Jane Carr Amphitheater at South Shore Conservatory, 1 Conservatory Drive, Hingham at 7 pm. Tickets are $20 -$25. See www.baycolonyshakespeare.org or call (917) 670-1184.]

Lake of the Lingering Summer Night: the Garden of the Loons

Once more to the Lake of the Loons:

[photo by Dave Eichorn]

 

After the long woodsy walk to some other lake

(their number legion here)

where we drove past campsites, late July full house in the Adirondacks,

the nation's largest national park

chocked full of old hunting lodges called 'camps'

where people with a taste for stylish roughing,

where when you get away from 'it all,' we still take a lot with us

power, computers, land lines, facilities

the roughest part is dealing with the regs

when you want to dig a new well, or replace a dock

or add on to your camp,

but the loons are not complaining,

laughing screaming crying communicating,

hard to say what they're doing,

but not complaining

Nor are the people, really,

Not only the loons coming back, 

the 'Daks are chock full of creatures, deer

crop even your pine trees in winter

daylilies never get to the lily part

if the deer get there first

One night (Dave told us) a bobcat chased a deer

in full career past his house

neither beast taking note of the householder

frozen at his kitchen door,

the dogs sleeping heavily within

The deer splashed away in Seventh Lake

Walking the dog 'round midnight,

in the deep dark like every other night,

Gwen and two friends from the 'burbs interrupted a growl

in the dark from a ledge where, presumably, a predatory cat

prepared to leap down upon a victim, a rumble in the brush

The friends no longer take the midnight walk

Gwen plays word games with her son instead,

each leashing a (fittingly for the Adirondacks) mountain dog

But cats are rare, bear seen more often in the region's

prevalent wood carvings, the local totem, symbol of the wilderness,

land of fowl and fish, salmon and trout in the old days,

ice fishers still busy in the region's long winter months

ducks, geese, mergansers, other water fowl patrolling the surface

after the ice breaks, as the water rushes up, released from the long sleep

of dormancy, the grass comes back

drinking in all that snow-stored water

The rains continue all summer long,

mountain-climate, some rain event possibility seemingly in every forecast,

the fronts rise over the peaks, a brief shower

or a deep monsoon-like statement,

or maybe just some high-cloud ingress ensues, passes, fades,

ushers in a new day's excitement

But the spirit of the place is the loon,

the madmen of the deep nights, the cool summer nights,

the nights when a fire is needed to stay outdoors

and hope someone can see a star to steer by

the loon calls, a racket ricochets across the sheets of water,

bent back by the forest wall, shared with the sky,

with the camps that ring the lake, with hard-won stars in their

own screaming silence, white distant forever beyond our hearing,

the loons however answer one another,

speaking the ancient language, strident, maniacal, enduring,

celebratory, beseeching, who knows what else,

the language of cold water, the cold flesh of a fishy diet,

of wind, and waves, and daylong progresses over Seventh Lake,

and then beyond, in coves, and islands, in quiet bays,

chicks riding on a parent's back,

older chicks the color of winter slippers,

growing into the beauty of some star-lit avatar

sent from another constellation, the fierce silver light

whitening the breaks in the black of the loon's broad back,

dressed in some stylish evening wear from an artist's ball

in another century,

going to the formal, the prince's ball, Cinderella hopping through the woods,

and screaming out the news

the biggest, longest, loudest, craziest laugh in the pure mountain night.

Lush Moments, Changing Times: Metaphysics in the Garden

Lush moments versus spring coaxings.

The same place, looking a lot different now.

Everything boiling over,

the last days of July.

Those blue balloon flowers puffing out a pure cerulean blossom

a few more this year, each year, but who's counting

who else even notices.

I offer my presentation to the neighbors who live over the fence

Who look down now upon our creations

(the first person plural pronoun standing for nature plus us),

from the raised deck added to the two-story addition

it took a year, a whole growing season, plus an autumn, winter,

closing time, to build.

I give each of my neighbors a task: count the balloon flowers,

track the population of those native daylilies, declining? aging?

growing too crowded like the old neighborhoods

in old cities,

the places we track in our guidebooks while we count the mosques, the minarets, the park benches,

the quality (and quantity) of views of the Bosporus.

The thing about traveling, it's not where you go,

it's who you are

and the coefficient of likelihood

for being the same person when you return

So it is with the seasons, the summers.

I am sure the roses never shined so brightly,

endured so long disease-free without human interventions,

the Coreopsis Helios spreads by an annual 15 percent (maybe 16? 17?)

and those tiny yellow buttons, like flowers stitched in a woven rug

by fingers too minutely particular to ever see,

and all such trends escape my eye

At what point did the creamy white Echinacea emerge,

lined up like paint chips for discerning householders,

how many ways does the paint store know how to say white?

We painted ours in "sandy beaches"

but still bring my eyes no closer to the instant of emergence

The yellows are in retreat

red daylilies pick up the count.

We raise our flags in July

The high tide, not at Gettysburg, or Philadelphia, nor the Place de la Revolution

(renamed de la Concorde when the natives

grew tired of cutting off heads)

as my fingers weary and grow stiff from the endless

task of dead-heading faded blossoms struck from the rollcall of time

Each growing year we travel from the frozen shores

of first life, first sightings,

the retreat of the glaciers still fresh in our memories

Till little white flowers give way to little purple ones,

the purples grow bigger, spread farther,

the green earth rises to join in the dance

of the freshly ritualized spring, windows thrown open to life,

jackets off, hearts ablaze

The little purples, the modest blues, give way to

the vast, enheartening operatic invasion of golden life, expressive oranges, blazes of red

truer than blood,

hot colors for the hot season

!Summer! is proclaimed

I am overwhelmed,

swept overboard in a sea of life, I ply the tools of my trade,

left and right like some chivalrous hero surrounded by a sea of barbarians,

at times embracing the role of the commander pleased by the battle's progress,

crowds of rudbeckia cheer him from the public squares,

heads bobbing like Black-Eyed-Susans

swimming in a sea of love,

Till changing coats to observe the fallen like a trained physician,

and record the moment when inevitable decline has taken hold.

The patient will not recover

Neither will we.

Let no one say the struggle is in vain,

the game not worth the candle

We burn in beauty, knowing the winter sleep

is long, and always soon.

Royalty in the Midsummer Garden: Daylily Days

           Among the things I like about daylilies: there are a lot of them. I quote Wikipedia here: "There are over 60,000 registered cultivars." Apparently that's a number that grows every year.

           Daylilies grow in colonies, or clumps, happily making more of themselves.

            They are hardy and reliable.

            They've been with us from the start.

           Our perennial garden began with the variety that every garden in New England begins with: orange native daylilies technically known as "orange daylilies." They're also commonly called "ditch lilies" because they will grow wild at the side of the world. In rural, small town Massachusetts, any kind of road that's allowed to do its own thing because nobody is cultivating a lawn right up to the edge of pavement is likely to attract them somewhere along its length.That's what we must mean by calling the plant (technically hemerocallis) 'native' because the reference sites say they're "native to Eurasia." They've been here long enough to feel like they belong.

            We had them growing at our house in Plymouth. I don't  believe we stole some from the Berkshires, but I may have forgotten. I wouldn't put it past me.

            Some orange natives (third photo down) were found in the backyard (to use the term loosely) here in Quincy, growing against the wire fence. I divided them and they began to multiply, producing more flowers every year.

            I also bought some Stella d'oro daylilies (fourth photo down) for variety; they're smaller, the blooms are a buttery yellow. That was the only other variety of daylily I knew existed.

             Then I visited Stephen and Janet Tooker's registered American Hemerocallis Society Display Garden, called Collamore Garden, in the shoreline town Scituate, a town about 20 miles away along the coast, but somehow occupying another geographical/metaphysical time zone: beaches, marshes, woods. Quincy has some of these features too (its 'woods' though are part of the Blue Hills state park), but the difference is Quincy has a population of 90,000. Scituate population as of the last national census is 5,245.

            The Tookers' garden pretty much evens the score in daylilies alone. They grow about 700 varieties.

          They also belong to a regional organization for daylily growers, the Southeastern Massachusetts Daylily Society, that meets in Wareham. The organization held a plant sale in early May. (Spring is the best time for planting daylilies.) Somehow I missed it.

            I'm sorry now. Various kinds of daylilies bloom throughout the growing season. But for me this mid to late July period is the high point. I've bought some different varieties in the last couple of years, but almost most immediately lost track of their names.

            I think of them as the reddish one, the pure yellow one, the light orange one, and the really big yellow ones with the brown markings, throwing up so many scapes their blossoms last for a month.

            I have taken photos of various blooms this year, but can offer no names to match up to them. It would help me keep track of how the plants were doing, if I knew by name what I was growing.

            I've got to get better at this. Daylilies are the queens of mid-summer.