1 day Ago By Jed Gottlieb
Romeo and Juliet are star-crossed lovers. Maybe it’s fate, probably it’s teenage hormones, but their destiny seems inevitable. Shakespeare often presents love as inevitable.
Director Maurice Emmanuel Parent aims to flip the script on that in the Actors’ Shakespeare Project production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” “The lovers are traditionally cast as actors in their early 20s, but if we’re thinking of a more modern context the lovers can have a little more life experience and be a little older,” Parent told the Boston Herald. “There is something about older bodies seeking love this way shows that the stakes are higher for them while also being a reminder that age is just a number and that everybody has desires, everybody needs love.
” “These characters can pursue love with agency,” he added ahead of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s” April 11 – May 4 run at the company’s new home in Watertown, the Dorothy and Charles Mosesian Center for the Arts. Because Shakespeare’s characters typically wrestle with agency, Parent’s production is playful in new ways — fate doesn’t have to dictate outcome, expectations can be defied, tragedy can peek out from behind comedy. Parent looks for conflict and nuance in the text as he builds contrast between the real world and the fairy world.
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” follows two Athenian couples as they escape into the forest only to have the fairy Puck meddle in their affairs — and the affairs of a fairy queen and a troupe of actors. (Parent has some experience with Puck’s mischief as he played the character 15 years ago in ASP’s first production of the Shakespeare comedy.) “It’s still a comedy but let’s not forget there is light and dark here,” Parent said.
“The great thing about Shakespeare’s plays is that every tragedy has its comedic elements, every comedy has its tragic elements.” Parent aims to get at both poles in his production proving that interpretations of Shakespeare don’t need to be inevitable. “The fairy world isn’t a safe place,” he said.
“But what I like about it is that you need to go to those unknown places that are a little bit scary and outside your comfort zone to change.” Parent found inspiration for his fairy world in the club culture he reveled in during late ’90s and early 2000s New York City. “These (clubs) were free and inclusive, but there was danger in the unknown in these spaces,” he said.
In our modern world, Shakespeare’s tragedies seem deeply relevant — think of “Julius Caesar,” “Macbeth,” “King Lear.” But, despite the dark edges Parent puts in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he reinforces that it is decidedly a comedy. And that’s something to be treasured in our modern moment.
“In these times that are so challenging for so many of us, times when so many are so despondent and hopeless, joy is an act of resistance,” he said. “This is a time when we need something like ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ ” For tickets and details, visit actorsshakespeareproject.
org.
