ON STAGE
Welcome to our latest edition of OnStage magazine, the Drama Department’s biannual publication fully produced and created by students in support of our productions each semester. Like everything we do in Drama, from acting in our nationally recognized productions to building costumes and sets or working backstage, this magazine is student-driven in service of our university community.
This fall, our Mainstage production is William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Prof. Stefan Novinski. I remember having a conversation with another director back in 2009 about A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He said, “Well, you know, there are only a few perfect plays, and Midsummer is one of them.” I think he was right. Certainly Shakespeare’s—and perhaps the world’s—most performed play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is universally enjoyed by children and adults. Why might this be? After all, a play containing fairies of the wood from Shakespeare’s imagination seems to have little to do with our everyday life. Perhaps this dissimilarity might be, in part, exactly why. Plays allow us, through the safety of the fiction of storytelling in a group, to engage with the wonder and beauty of the world. Often this wonder can, if I may borrow an image from the play, bloom like a flower when activated by plays like Midsummer, which live beyond our prosaic everyday. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of those magical plays that invites us to see the world with wonder and allows us to dream new possibilities into reality. Together.
This wonder is certainly enhanced by performing in our outdoor Orpheion amphitheater. Shakespeare under the stars? What is more wonder-full than that? Our technical director and designer, Mark E. Kirk, has been working double time to ensure our venue is ready for players and audience alike.
I encourage you to also join us for our Senior Studio productions on the first weekend of December in our Temp Theatre in the Drama Building, which will feature Nora Eulie directing The Man Who Turned Into A Stick and Lucy Gallagher directing Polaroid Stories. You won’t want to miss these new, dynamic directing talents working on plays that promise to challenge and thrill.
Enjoy this issue of OnStage. My thanks to Kate Pioch and Johannes Carrillo for leading the teams to create another fantastic edition full of articles, interviews, and incredible photos of our students’ work this semester.
See you at the theatre!
Kyle Lemieux, Chair of the Drama Department
O N T E N T S
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Metamorphosis and Love
The Magical: What is Shakespearean Comedy?
The Life and Times of William Shakespeare
Three Worlds, Many Loves: An Interview with the Four Lovers of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
A Labor of Love: The Renovations of the Orpheion
Puck: An Interview with Maggie Sonne
From Athens to Monaco: Crafting Shakespearean Costumes for Modern Settings
Conqueror or Conquered: The Politics of Possession in A Midsummer Night’s Dream The
and Crew
Editor In Chief
Katherine Pioch
Contributing Writers
Joseph Sacco
Noah W. Newmann
David Dainko
Johannes R. Carrillo
Assistant Editor
Pia Baxter
Layout Editor Photographer
Juliana Lacy
Katherine Pioch
Beatrice Ellison
Delia Whitehead
Patrick Deavel
Mary Carlin
Stella Nolen
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Metamorphosis and Love
by Joseph Sacco
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare explores the complications of love, passion, and transformation by weaving together three disparate worlds: the upper echelons of Athens, civilized and litigious; the Fairies of the wood, ancient, playful, and mysterious; and the “rude mechanicals,” the handymen and laborers of Athens.
Each of these worlds is in crisis. In the Fairy woods, King Oberon and Queen Titania quarrel over custody of a young boy, causing floods and overturning the seasons. In Athens, on the eve of King Theseus and Queen Hippolyta’s marriage, Hermia faces death at her refusal to marry Demetrius because she loves Lysander. Hermia flees into the woods with her beloved, but Demetrius follows them, pursued by the enamored Helena. Meanwhile, the Mechanicals scramble to put on an ill-conceived tragedy for the Athenian royals’ wedding.
The four Lovers unwittingly encroach upon Oberon’s plan involving the love-in-idleness flower, whose juice causes a mad love in a sleeper upon waking. When Oberon’s servant Puck administers the juice to the wrong Lovers, the four must
wrestle with inexplicable turns of passion that send their world into disarray.
After Puck gives Nick Bottom, “the weaver” (interpreted in this production as “the landscaper”), the head of a donkey, the rest of the Mechanicals flee, and Bottom is left alone in the forest to stumble into the Fairies’ quarrel.
The movement from the urban world of Athens into the natural world of the forest tests the Lovers’ passions and questions the role of passion in a rightly ordered love. The proximity of these worlds allows Shakespeare
to draw out the similarities and differences between the several different forms of love each world contains. For instance, Oberon and Titania are royal lovers, like Theseus and Hippolyta, but the Fairies’ marriage has been long established, while the young Athenians’ has yet to be consummated. Between the forest and Athens sits Bottom, whose physical transformation mirrors the internal transformations occurring with the Lovers. These changes, both of feelings and faces, point toward the larger complication of a cosmic order that needs to be shaken up in order to be saved.
RIGHT: David Dainko, Stella Nolen, and Seamus Malloy.
Photo by Juliana Lacy.
The Magical: What is Shakespearean Comedy?
by Noah W. Newmann
There is a trope that states that, in order to tell the difference between Shakespearean comedy and tragedy, the reader must ask himself the question: Does the play end in a wedding? In an interview, Dr. Scott Crider positively confirmed this trope and, with a smile, added that if the play ends in death, then you can be almost certain that it is a tragedy.
Other elements that make up a Shakespearean comedy were
found to be complexity of plot, thematic juxtaposition, and magical expression.
Shakespearean drama overall tends to maintain a complex narrative structure, with subplots weaving in and out of the main plot. In comedy specifically, the plotlines multiply exponentially. One might only compare the accounts of mistaken identity, misguided love, and prophetic fools in A Comedy of Errors or Twelfth
Night to the simpler narratives of Henry V and Macbeth. Where the tragedies swell a historical and personal drama to evoke pity and fear from audiences, the comedies’ humorous mistakes and eccentricities excel in multiplying the plights of characters.
What for the tragedies is an occasion of seriousness, the ridiculous is an occasion of comedy. Distinct from Classical definitions of comedy and tragedy, which UD students will be familiar with, Shakespeare’s comedies are not purely comical. Dr. Crider remarked that “Shakespeare was critiqued by French literary critics for some time after his death … as actually not being a good poet because he didn’t abide by the strict division between comedy and tragedy” as expressed by Classical dramatists like Aeschylus or Aristophanes. “More than any other [playwright],” said Dr. Crider, Shakespeare was comfortable shifting from one genre to the other. Apropos of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the audience can see this register switching since the first scene, when Duke Theseus adjudicates a dispute over the life of Hermia, who is caught in a love triangle that will soon tumble the entire
LEFT: Clare Kelsch, Jace Petrutsas, and Andrew Sanders. Photo by Juliana Lacy.
“A world of ... fairy-fueled, transmogrifying mischief. ”
cosmos of the play into a world of mistaken love and fairy-fueled, transmogrifying mischief.
These mischievous deeds do not hide the darker aspects of the play. As Dr. Crider pointed out, Hippolyta is “a war bride. She’s not quite a Trojan woman,” but her marriage to Theseus is “certainly not a marriage of love.” Oberon’s tyranny dupes his wife and drives her to an affair. Bottom is drugged. Dr. Crider commented on the darker moments, saying that “what you get is comic chaos. And when [the characters] come out of the woods … they are transformed.”
The transformation occurs through both magical and dramatic means, the characters being themselves reformed by their own experiences. Although the ridiculous triumphs at the end of the play—and this, according to Dr. Crider, is what makes it a comedy—“there’s some other quality of comedy that isn’t about the ridiculous but about the magical, the enchanted.” Instead of the disillusionment of tragedy, where death shatters the enchantment, in comedy, the enchantment endures with the blessings attendant to marriage.
RIGHT (from top): Jude Self. Seamus Malloy. Photos by Juliana Lacy.
The Life and Times of William Shakespeare
by David Dainko
The magic of the playwright lies in his ability to bring stories to life, to frame them in flesh, and to bring them before our wondering eyes. William Shakespeare is an excellent example of such miracle working.
Shakespeare was born around April 23, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon to John Shakespeare, an alderman. His mother was Mary Arden, an heiress with sizable, and profitable, land holdings. Shakespeare received what Dr. Andrew Moran, English Department Chair, called, “an education in the Latin classics that would shame an undergraduate Classics major.”
He married at 18 to Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years his senior, and soon had three children: Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. For the next eight years, Shakespeare lived in obscurity, and scholars speculate about his activity.
From 1594, Shakespeare served as a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, composing plays and poems for the next 20 years. He built a sizable, even noble estate for his family, to whom he entrusted his possessions following his death on April 23, 1616. His colleagues, such as John Heminges and Henry Condell, recognized his preeminence and published his plays in quartos and folios. The First Folio included 36 of his plays, leaving him a legacy worth its weight in gold.
In the span of the year 1595, the “Sweet Swan of Avon” wrote three plays: Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For Midsummer, one of Shakespeare’s most recognizable comedies, the Bard drew from notable inspirations. Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” provided him the May Day time-
Comedy of Pyramus and Thisbe” gives a nod both to the medieval mystery plays, performed by tradesmen, and to Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Such a weaving of incongruous elements led Dr. Moran to conclude that Shakespeare was a man of three worlds: the medi-
frame, and the tale also influenced Shakespeare’s story for Duke Theseus. Meanwhile, the Fairies, such as Robin Goodfellow, Oberon, and Titania, originate from Celtic folklore.
Shakespeare, like a master arborist, grafts these English elements onto classical roots, utilizing the rich inheritance of Roman comedy and Greek New Comedy to present an original story with allusions to English history, fable, and politics. Even the “Tragical
eval versus the classical versus the modern. Shakespeare becomes a weaver, like Bottom, tying the threads of these worlds into a single mystical masterpiece. As Shakespeare demonstrates, the playwright is but a dreamer, who, after wandering and wondering through the world, peers into his dreams and finds that they hath no bottom.
ABOVE: David Dainko and Andrew Sanders. Photo by Juliana Lacy.
Three Worlds, Many Loves: An Interview with the Four Lovers of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
by Katherine Pioch
KP: Would you please introduce yourself, your character, and what your character wants?
CK: I’m Claire Kelsch, undeclared, and what my character most wants shifts. She’s focused on herself, and then you see that grow into a desire for real connection in this mature relationship.
JF: I’m Joseph Fournier, a senior business major. Demetrius starts out wanting what’s best for himself. The background we thought about is that Demetrius was engaged to Helena. Then he goes for an immature obsession and infatuation.
I’m the only person who doesn’t get the herb taken off my eyes. There’s a good argument over whether [my] love really is just the herb, or whether that herb
simply took away my infatuation. Did it force me to love Helena, or did it take away the impediment to the love that was already there? So I think by the end of the play, I have matured. He wants a good relationship with Helena.
IW: My name is Isabelle Williams. I’m a junior drama major. What Helena wants is to be loved by Demetrius and by Hermia. Some call this Helena’s “super objective,” and that’s what drives her action until the very end.
JP: My name is Jace Petrutsas, a freshman drama major. I play Lysander, and my character wants a relationship with Hermia. He’s kind of bigheaded, real sure of himself. He’s like, why wouldn’t Hermia want to be with me?
That’s what I take from the beginning: superficial love. But at the
“Figure out your character’s objective, and then figure out the opposite. Figure out where that tension is, and that’s where you’ll find a lot of depth. ”
end, he’s grown up. He learns to appreciate Hermia for who she is, a deeper love than before.
KP: How are you approaching getting into the head of your character? Any notable acting techniques you’re using?
CK: Hermia strikes me as a youngest child, and I’m a youngest child. There’s this play into reality which has really helped me understand her character. The youngest nature of her—having her grow and mature into wanting to build real relationships
instead of those self-centered relationships that she was in—was a way that I have grown and matured.
JF: Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure has served an influence. I didn’t know how to get into the dumb-jock style, emotionally out-of-tune and selfish. Stefan has offered an acting technique [called] “find the opposite.” Figure out your character’s objective, and then figure out the opposite. Figure out where that tension is, and that’s where you’ll find a lot of depth.
IW: One rehearsal, we were running the infamous Act III, Scene II. Stefan was trying to drive in the importance of the counter objective. Helena has counter objectives that she doesn’t feel like she deserves being loved. I remember vividly our next run playing both: she wants to be loved, and she doesn’t feel like she’s worthy of being loved. Even before I auditioned, one thing that struck me about Helena’s character was the arc of balancing both her comedy and the immense loss.
CK: Basically all of the characters in the play experience loss.
JP: Something we discussed in rehearsal is the performative male vibe. A man who pretends to have all these interests that he thinks girls find attractive. [Lysander’s] love for Hermia at the beginning is carefully sculpted by him and very, very artificial. He’s putting on a performance for Hermia. It’s very literally the definition of performative. That’s something unique, because the term “performative male” has only been coined very recently.
KP: It seems that, at the beginning, the love of the Lover is really love of oneself. Does it actually become love of the other?
JP: That’s tough because that’s something Shakespeare doesn’t really show. Once [the Lovers] come out of the woods, it’s all about the Mechanicals, and the Lovers sit and watch. But I think
a lot can be delivered just in the physical acting. At the beginning, Hermia would put her arm around me, and I’m like, yeah, she’s hanging onto me. But at the end, I like to take her hand to connect with her.
KP: How are you interpreting your characters where Shakespeare gives less detail?
IW: Our wonderful costume designer Martin is setting the lovers in a Monaco, old-money setting, which influences how I come in at Act I. Nothing’s been denied me, and now you’re taking this [man] from me.
It was also interesting playing around with the idea of images, which Stefan touched on in rehearsals. Maybe I’m in a scene with Lysander, and I have an image of another person whom
LEFT: Joseph Fournier
RIGHT: Maggie Sonne, Isabel Williams, and Jace Petrutsas.
Photos by Juliana Lacy.
PAGE 4 (from top): Liana Cross, Callena Teunissen, Seamus Malloy, Clara Schneider, Lucy Gallagher, and Kit Wooten. Maggie Sonne and Thomas Laher.
Photos by Juliana Lacy.
I know. It’s seeing how I would play Helena, which has been fun.
JF: My costume also helps inform my character. Beautiful blue, double-breasted, and gold buttons. Demetrius likes his style. He likes his fashion, likes to show off.
CK: That was also helpful for me, the costume design, also the costume design of my mother [Egea] and seeing the family that I’m coming from. And this idea that Stefan brought up since one of the very first rehearsals, where the four Lovers are spoiled rich kids who need to grow up. If you approach them from that perspective, that explains some of the situations they’re in with these marriages.
Also, my costume slowly gets torn apart as [Hermia] goes through the woods. It’s the tearing down of that person so that she can build back into something new.
JP: Lysander is a rich kid. And that’s where we get the performative male idea. But then once it’s all taken away in the woods, that’s where the change happens.
KP: What is a major theme that Stefan is bringing out in his director’s approach?
IW: Stefan has different objectives for each of the groups; for the Lovers, how can you represent how hard it is for young people to be in love? Being in love is hard. You don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t have much experience, and it’s a lot of emotions.
CK: Yeah, the pains of youth is how we put it. It’s specific to Stefan, but this “reconciliation between people” is interesting. [The Lovers’] relationship has changed, but it’s stronger, and they’ve gone through forgiveness, even though they’re not even sure what happened.
JP: What I see [Stefan] working with the cast the most is self-discovery. Find your character’s story, find your character’s arc. Lysander discovers that he loves superficially, not in actuality. Bottom is officious, but in the end, he’s just rude.
KP: This performance of Midsummer brings Shakespeare to the modern age. What is the most challenging aspect of performing Shakespeare this way?
JP: For me, the hardest part has been taking the poetic language that Shakespeare writes in and
“. . . so the fact that we’re going to be in the forest at night really helps to get the actual magic of reallife nature to feed into the magic of the play. ”
helping the audience understand it. It’s been a class in and of itself.
IW: The biggest challenge I had was my multitude of rhyming couplets. What you’re trying to do is make it sound like normal speech. I would say the words,
and it sounded heightened. I’d get to the couplet and be cringing at myself. It’s been an interesting journey learning to embrace those couplets. I don’t think about my couplets anymore. The couplet is my best way to express how I’m feeling to the audience.
CK: People think Shakespeare is stuffy. But it’s made to be related to. It’s just a language that we’re
not used to hearing. It’s a challenge to tune it to the modern ear. It’s hard, but it’s fruitful.
JP: Also, translating these ideas into modern equivalents. Especially with the Mechanicals, I think this is the hardest part, because there are these different jobs that don’t exist now—the bellows mender or the joiner—so we turn them into electricians or guard members or landscapers.
KP: Would you please speak a word about the outdoor setting?
IW: It’s been magical for some of my entrances to enter through the woods and to have the experience of uniting nature with the set. Outside is really the only way you can do A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s a blessing we’re able to do that, and I guarantee all the students here will never have the opportunity to see Midsummer, the way we’re doing it, ever again in their lives.
JF: So much of the play actually takes place outside in the forest, so the fact that we’re going to be in the forest at night really helps to get the actual magic of real-life nature to feed into the magic of the play.
JP: It’ll really be just like taking the top off a theater.
LEFT: Clare Kelsch. RIGHT (from top): Jace Petrutsas, John Kelly, and Heidi Burke. Seamus Malloy, Joseph Fournier, and Isabel Williams.
Photos by Juliana Lacy.
A Labor of Love: The Renovations of the Orpheion
by Beatrice Ellison
Perhaps one of the most distinct features of this semester’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the atypical performance space the Drama Department is using. Most of the Mainstage productions of the last few years have been in the Temp Theatre by Anselm Hall. To harken back to the original feel of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London, director Stephan Novinski decided to stage this production outside, in the Orpheion theater, down by SB Hall.
Designer and technical director Mark E. Kirk led the renovations of the Orpheion beginning over the summer. Construction officially began in August before classes began and continued into the semester as a project for the students of Kirk’s Theater Arts Workshop, available both as a class and as a work-study position for UD students.
Kirk said, “We’re creating an artificial world, and the arbiter of what that world is is always the director. And then, as designers, our responsibility is to then interpret his desires into visual imagery.”
This fall, Shakespeare’s Athens is Novinski’s Monaco. Much of the creative influence for this production of Midsummer comes from the country of Monaco, a municipality on the French Riviera, which is home to the Monaco Grand Prix. Some of the imagery Kirk used as inspiration included retro poster art from those Monaco automotive races.
Kirk has been working closely with Prof. Novinski and Martin Sanchez, the costume designer and costume shop manager, since the very beginning. Mainstage productions are planned months in advance of the projected semester, but with such an ambitious project as rebuilding large parts of the stage, they have used the amount of time as efficiently as possible to ensure timely project completion.
During construction, these efforts included maximizing daylight before midday to avoid the hottest hours of the Texas sun. Kirk said, “We started working in August, and it was so hot out [there]... We’re talking about 104-degree days… so we started working at dawn. As soon as it was light enough to work, we’d start working.” Kirk and his team
modified their schedule to the 9–5 workday, as classes began and as he acquired more students to work on the project.
Since the production is entirely outside, large, construction-grade extension cords provide the power. Despite its natural setting, this production of Midsummer uses plenty of electricity, including lights and sound. The crew utilizes more than just artificial light, however. An evening showtime is key to the production’s visual aspect, as the performance starts while the sun is setting and concludes by the time the moon is out. Thankfully, in late October, the weather is much nicer than in the summer, which makes an outdoor performance in Texas a pleasant and enjoyable experience.
With all the outdoor elements unique to this production, viewers are in for a real treat this semester in seeing Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream outside at the newly renovated Orpheion.
LEFT: Stefan Novinki. Photo by Juliana Lacy. RIGHT (from top): Concept art by Mark E. Kirk. The Orpheion. Photo by Katherine Pioch.
Puck: An Interview with Maggie Sonne
by Katherine Pioch
Who is Puck to you, and how do you interpret him in this performance?
When I was character building for Puck, I was thinking about cousins or little boys whom I’d worked with at camp. Puck has a very youthful energy, and I think that’s his most distinguishing characteristic.
Puck is very old, but he’s eternally young. He’s the moving force of this play. He’s definitely not Cupid, but he’s a Cupid figure. And if you want to get really symbolic, I think that, because he is young and because he makes mistakes, he stands in for the mistakes of being young.
Does Puck change over the course of the play?
It’s hard to say because the metatheatrical monologue at the end throws everything off kilter. Does it mean the whole play was put on?
Metatheatricality aside, he’s still bothered he doesn’t understand why Oberon is so mad at him for a simple mistake.
I think Puck learns a lesson, but I don’t think Puck changes. [To be] just a little careful next time. I also think that, watching the Lovers, he does feel bad for them.
What are some theatrical or acting techniques that you’re using to play this character?
I have to get really into my body, which is so fun. Defining my objectives.
See Page 17 for continued interview.
LEFT (from top): Maggie Sonne. Photo by Juliana Lacy. Concept art by Martin Sanchez.
BELOW: Heidi Burke, John Kelly, David Dainko, Jude Self, Andrew Sanders, Stella Nolen, and Jace Petrutsas.
Photo by Juliana Lacy.
ABOVE (left to right): Heidi Burke. David Dainko and Stella Nolen. Allison Peterman.
RIGHT: Clare Kelsch and Joseph Fournier.
Photos by Juliana Lacy.
From Athens to Monaco: Crafting Shakespearean Costumes for Modern Settings
by Delia Whitehead
The costumes for this Midsummer production are divided into three main groups: the Lovers, the Fairies, and the Mechanicals. In Shakespeare’s original setting, the Lovers and Mechanicals hail from Athens, while the Fairies populate the magical forest.
This semester, the Costume Shop is bringing Shakespeare into a modern setting, interpreting Athens as a Monacan resort. The Lovers come from a luxe, old-money background. Their costumes’ color palettes are cool and restrained, befitting wealthy vacationers at a Monacan resort. Also inspired by a Great Gatsby style, their outfits are summery and will show up beautifully in the evening sun on the outdoor stage.
The Mechanicals—whom costume designer Martin Sanchez describes as “a collection of misfits”—are modeled after resort groundskeepers: an exterminator, a receptionist, an engineer, a security officer, and a manager. Nick Bottom, “the weaver,” is a landscapist. Despite sharing the same locale, their world could not be more different from that of the affluent Lovers. This contrast is emphasized in how the
Mechanical’s, no-nonsense costumes blur the line between real life and the stage.
These everyday costumes also contrast with the Fairies’ costumes, which are modeled after creative festival outfits often seen at Burning Man. The designs also incorporate elements from Romani and Indian cultures (a connection to Shakespeare’s inclusion of an Indian boy as the source of discord between Titania and Oberon). The Fairies embody counterculture outside the mainstream, with anachronisms and
fantastical personalities. Their costumes are brightly colored and will shimmer in the stage lights after sunset.
The Costume Shop has been hard at work creating garments. Projects include wedding attire for the Lovers and Royals and Puck’s outfit, all sewn from scratch. Shop employees are experimenting with beading, embroidery, and cloth distressing techniques.
The Costume Shop is ensuring that the costumes are cohesive, beautiful, and durable.
Interview continued from Page 14.
Thinking about the persona of a little brother epitomizes Puck me. I think his relationship with Oberon is not father-son, but it’s not two equals. It’s like two brothers. I want to impress my older brother.
A technique that I’ve been able to use is looking at my life and picking out people I know who are like Puck in some way. That, combined with getting really physical, is very exciting.
It’s uniquely exciting to get to do somersaults and jump around. But there’s also a genuineness. Puck is free-flowing. The fact that Puck is a little kid playing has directly informed the objectives I give to my lines.
So there’s a circular relationship, right? You learn about the character from reading the words on the page, but then you form this understanding in your mind. Then that recolors the way that you speak and the way that you think when you’re him.
What was a challenge that you overcame while working on your role as Puck?
When I’m reading a script that I know is supposed to be funny, I try too hard. I’m too anxious about making people laugh, and then it doesn’t work.
And my friend said, “Well, that’s not the point.” Puck’s just Puck, running around doing Puck stuff. It was particularly helpful for me to get out of my head about that.
A lot of this comes from the skill of my fellow actors. I wouldn’t be able to do this if they weren’t so amazing at what they’re doing. It’s just been really cool to work with those people. They’re just awesome.
LEFT: Allison Peterman. BELOW: Andrew Sanders.
Photos by Juliana Lacy.
Conqueror or Conquered: The Politics of Possession in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
by Patrick Deavel
Whimsy and passionate chaos paint the landscape of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Young lovers, fairies, and charmingly dimwitted thespians abound, but underneath the colorful surface, a lust for empire and conquest drives the narrative. Theseus’ acquisition of Hippolyta through warfare and Egeus’ invocation of state-sanctioned violence
against his own daughter feed the audience with the austere and harrowing attributes of imperial state apparatuses. The sympathy we feel for Hermia and Hippolyta is rooted in a terror at the lack of autonomy as spoils of conquest or prisoners of patriarchal social reproduction But once we enter the forest and escape the confines of Athe-
nian authoritarianism, Shakespeare begins to show the more laughable aspects of political conquest and domination, and he revels in its moral weakness.
The farcical power plays reveal the folly that lies at the heart of possessiveness and conquest: the animalistic blindness that underpins the desire. The love potions reduce the young Athenians to no more than animals in heat, or “spaniels,” as Helena characterizes herself. It is comical when the lovers pursue one another, driven by artificial forces, but it does not strike us as funny when Theseus forces Hippolyta into a life of domesticity following his war with her people. Nevertheless, at its heart, Theseus’ conquest of Hippolyta is just as adolescent and puerile as the lovers’ attraction and attempted acquisition of their peers.
The spat over the Indian changeling boy illustrates the volatile motive of conquest, where often the object is not as important to the conqueror as the power to enforce. Oberon wants Titania’s attendant to be his own page boy, not on the boy’s merits, but instead because the changeling was left in the possession of his
wife. Oberon could have found a way to procure the boy’s tutelage in a way that did not entail the dehumanizing embarrassment that the love spell with Bottom inflicted on Titania.
Here, conquest is primarily about means and only secondarily about ends. Shakespeare invites us to ridicule conquest as a futile and ultimately self-serving force that reduces the conqueror to a foppish fairy who must trick his wife into sleeping with an ass in an attempt to validate his own superiority. In this way the conquered are given more agency, as they are acting out of real conviction, rather than out of a crisis of legitimacy.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a critique of conquest and possession, but instead of focusing on the horrors and human cost of empire, it exposes its vulnerable underbelly for the audience to laugh at. Selfish realpolitik becomes an absurd series of fairy escapades and pranks, and even the depictions of realistic state violence magically evaporate into a non-issue at the end of the play. Perhaps the greatest comedy is the exposition of foolishness that lies behind all evil.
“Shakespeare invites us to ridicule conquest as a futile and ultimately self-serving force that reduces the conqueror to a foppish fairy who must trick his wife into sleeping with an ass in an attempt to validate his own superiority. ”
LEFT: Thomas Laher and Lucy Gallagher.
RIGHT: Kit Wooten, Lucy Gallagher, Callena Teunissen, and Thomas Laher.
Photos by Juliana Lacy.
The Cast and Crew of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Heidi Burke Hippolyta Sophomore Drama
John Kelly Theseus Sophomore Business
Jace Petrutsas Lysander Freshman Drama
Isabel Williams Helena Junior Drama
Mary Carlin Peter Quince Senior English
Clare Kelsch Hermia Freshman Undeclared
Andrew Sanders Snug Senior Drama/Politics
Kit Wooten Mote Freshman Classics
Liana Cross Cobweb Freshman English
Thomas Laher Oberon Freshman Classics
Clara Schneider Peaseblossom Freshman Undeclared
Penelope Pulsone Production Stage Manager Junior Drama/Classics
David Dainko Francis Flute Freshman Undeclared
Seamus Malloy Nick Bottom Sophomore Politics/ Theology
Jude Self Robin Starveling Sophomore Drama/Business
Esther Dean Assistant Stage Manager Sophomore Biology
Joseph Fournier Demetrius Senior Business
Stella Nolen Tom Snout Junior Politics
Maggie Sonne Robin Goodfellow Junior English
Katherine Macdonald Assistant Stage Manager Junior Psychology
Lucy Gallagher Titania Senior Drama/English
Allison Peterman Egea Senior Drama/Philosophy
Callena Teunissen Mustardseed Senior English
Headshots by Juliana Lacy.
Opening December 4–6: Fall 2025 Senior Studios
The Man Who Turned Into a Stick:
Why Purpose and Intention Matter
By Stella Nolen
Kobo Abe’s The Man Who Turned Into a Stick (1957) tells the story of a man who turns into a stick and falls into the hands of two hippie teenagers, whose conversation indicates their intention to break free of societal molds. The teenagers are confronted by a Man and a Woman From Hell, whose job is to document the Stick’s existence and leave him to his eternal punishment as an object. The Man From Hell struggles to recover the Stick from the Hippie Boy, who keeps the Stick just to spite him. The Woman From Hell tries to balance her sympathy for the Stick and his young son (who haunts the play offstage, calling for his father) with her sense of duty.
Director Nora Eulie chose Kobo Abe’s play because of the reasons and intentions behind living. “The purpose is to shake the audience out of [the complacency of] daily tasks,” Eulie states. She aims to challenge the audience to question their own intentions. The clash of worlds among the hippies, the people from hell, and the Stick provides the necessary stillness for reflection. How do we resemble a stick? Do we, like the Stick, think of ourselves as tools, without any purpose? His act of despair happens at the moment the play begins, and his despair only deepens as he witnesses what death really means: a continuation of life’s truths, forced to the forefront of existence. The Man became a Stick in appearance as well as in truth, an object with many uses but no conscious intrinsic purpose. One can imagine his pointless desk job and dull existence. Now he is still pointless, still dull, but forever lacks the chance to change.
Abe encourages audiences to face their lives with honesty. Do they wallow in despair without a chance of change? Can they find the courage to give their life a purpose and meaning intrinsic to themselves? The challenge of The Man Who Turned Into A Stick is to reassess what it means to live, to work, and to do a daily task with intention and purpose. We can demand answers of the universe for our despair, our objectification, our lack of freedom, but those answers come from personal motivation and completion. “To choose death without completing your tasks on earth brings the despair of eternal hell,” says Eulie. Only hope turns that despair around.
Polaroid Stories:
“A Haunting Street Drama”
By Mary Carlin
According to Lucy Gallagher, her Senior Studio Polaroid Stories (1997) is “a haunting street drama,” in which playwright Naomi Iizuka incorporates Ovid’s Metamorphoses, T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” and the stories of street kids into a blend of myth and real experience. Eurydice journeys across the River of Forgetfulness, full of floating trash, and enters into the streets. Her abusive lover, Orpheus, pursues her.
Iizuka’s world is full of magical realism and modern-day sorrow. The incorporation of street kids—prostitutes, drug addicts, pimps, and dumpster divers—challenges audiences to connect with broken yet relatable people. This play explores dark topics and includes shocking language. Gallagher, who lives in a city where homelessness is common, says audiences “should not shy away from [this issue] because it’s relatable and needs to be addressed.” Gallagher also chose this play because of its rhythmic, poetic language that also incorporates street slang. While writing the play, Iizuka drew inspiration from Jim Goldberg’s Raised by Wolves, which documents the lives of street kids on the West Coast. The play draws linguistically not only from the Classical tradition but also from modern-day artistic expressions.
Because Eurydice, Persephone, Narcissus, and other Ovidian characters are presented as common street kids, their mythical sorrows and transformations become relatable to the modern audience. Nihilism seems to be always around the street corner. Gallagher compared the play to “like when you’re trapped in a bad habit, and you know you have to get out, but you don’t want to face doing it the hard way.” Gallagher argues that Iizuka includes references to T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” which itself tackles nihilism, and uses Eurydice’s journey as a reflection of the journey through Eliot’s poem—Gallagher says, “It seems to me that Iizuka is using Ovid and his magical transformative world to combine with Eliot to find a way out of nihilism.”
The characters’ addiction and despair are relatable and allow multiple layers of connection among mythic heroes, street kids, and the viewers themselves.
