To Be...Or...

When I a Fat and Bean-Fed Horse Beguile

During the spring, my 9yo son participated in a fabulous local production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Despite his initial protestations, he loved being a lover. He played Lysander to his best friend's Hermia.



Shakespeare plays around with size quite a bit in this play. During an argument, Hermia betrays her shame about her short stature. Other characters pick up on her discomfort and tease her. At one point Lysander calls her a dwarf, an acorn, and a bead for being so tiny.

In most productions, directors can be counted upon to cast shorter actresses as Hermia and taller ones as Helena, the other (mortal) female love interest. In this production--full of homeschooled children--the director (a homeschooled highschooler) cast as Hermia a young woman who is about six inches taller than my son. She played the part brilliantly--and when Lysander labeled her a dwarf, the audience burst out laughing, realizing that she was only hurt by the comment because of her own feelings of inadequacy.

* * *

In this same production, Oberon (King of the fairy world) was played by an intense and small boy who acted the overbearingly royal qualities brilliantly. Titania, his love and the queen of the fairies, towered over him by nearly a foot. And when she fell in love with Bottom (after his transformation into a donkey), she found a love several inches shorter than Oberon.

Compared to the two of them, Titania looked not like a delicate fairy but like an Amazon. The idea that the character is weak and basically loses in the play always irks me. So I was thrilled with the transformation.

* * *

Now I am considering casting on that beautiful knitted cotton sweater Titania, named for the Queen of the Fairies.

Here's the pic from the knitting designer's website:



The above model is not a little wispy thing of no substance--but she is a combination of slender and curvy that shows off this sweater wonderfully.

You could say I am curvy. In all the right places.

And, well, in most of the wrong places, too. You could never say I am slender.

Am I going to look like an Amazon Fairy in this thing or am I going to look more like Bottom the Weaver in his Ass costume?

"wide enough to wrap a fairy in"

Midsummer

Here we are in South Florida, slogging through steamy wet days, and seeing on the television that the rest of the nation is in a deep-freeze. Here in the land of Eternal Summer, it is hard to believe. Perhaps because I grew up in a relatively warm place, cold weather enchants me--but only up to a point. This has been a lovely respite, but I'm ready to head back to the frozen tundra of DC.

* * *

Son just learned through email that he received the part of Lysander in Midsummer Night's Dream. He is crushed, although many actors would be thrilled. The part is large and the character has a lot of really great lines--perfect for hamming up. But my 8yo is absolutely disgusted with the idea of playing a lover.

As is common in Shakespeare plays, there is a "play within the play." In that one, a young male character is assigned a part and responds, his voice full of hope, something along the lines of "What part is Thisbe? Is that a wandering knight?" The director responds that it is a young female, and the actor is highly disappointed.

I suspect that my own young actor would find the part of a woman vastly preferable to the part of a lover!

Let me not to the marriage of true minds...

...admit impediments.
--William Shakespeare

Isn't it funny that the people we argue with most intensely are also the people we love most deeply?

Shakespeare in the Waffle?

Playing with one's food when one is obsessed with theatre can lead to some rather unusual constructions, like this remarkable recreation of Carter Barron Amphitheatre (where the Shakespeare Free For All is held each year) which Son made during breakfast:



I can't wait to see which play they will do here....

TransShakespeare

We had a wonderful time at the Folger Library production of Shakespeare's As You Like It. It is from this play that we get the famous line, "All the world's a stage."

As is so common in Shakespeare plays (and perhaps especially in his comedies), there is a lot of gender-bending going on. Many modern productions of this play add extra emphasis to this aspect.

Rosalind, after being banished from the court, pretends to be a man (Ganymede) and flees to the forest of Arden in the company of her female cousin. They see the young man, Orlando, with whom Rosalind is in love, and he too is mooning all over the woods, head over heels for the woman he doesn't have. He does not recognize Rosalind in her disguise. She offers to cure him of his love if he will pretend that s/he is Rosalind. He takes her/him up on the offer and they act out love scenes as two men. In the end, Rosalind appears before Orlando as a female and they are married. But before they are, a young woman of the forest (Phoebe) has fallen in love with Rosalind/Ganymede...until she realizes that R/G is a woman.

In Greek myth and poetry, Ganymede is often a symbol of same-sex love.

In Shakespeare's day, female parts were generally played by male actors. So in As You Like It, you have a male playing a female (Rosalind), playing a male (Ganymede), playing a female(mock-Rosalind). (Whew!) And when Phoebe falls in love with Ganymede, it was actually a male actor showing love to a male actor, even though on stage it was a female character showing love to a female character.

We think of our own century as so much more aware of the fluidity of gender roles than any other--but while we may have different underlying ideas, we certainly aren't the first to imagine a world (for Shakespeare, the forest of Arden) that allowed increased freedom and openness, where you can have it "as you like it."