Phoenix Theatre presents a dream

UVic faculty member and director Fran Gebhard remembers New York City in 1978—the Ramones were rocking CBGB’s club in the Village and the flower-power generation was on its way out, being pushed to the past by a new punk attitude. New York was changing—and it was one amazing summer.

“Our students in the Department of Theatre were really looking forward to working on A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” says Fran. “My challenge was to find a way to recontextualize Shakespeares’ centuries-old romantic comedy into an environment that would be fun and challenging for everyone involved.”

New York in 1978 fit the bill perfectly. “When I first started thinking about Hermia (Shakespeare’s feisty and defiant female character who is one of the four young lovers), she seemed like a feminist woman right out of the late ‘70s,” says Fran. “We had just passed the Charter of Human Rights in Canada, and everywhere, there was a new wave of “women’s lib." I thought of my own adventurous trip with my sister to NYC in 1978 and it was all a great fit to Shakespeare’s story.”

Gebhard’s version sees the two pairs of lovers—Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius—as preppie socialites from Park Avenue who elope into the woods of Central Park. Here they find themselves at the mercy of powerful forces (and their own ridiculous passions). Where once fairies reigned the forest, Fran’s Titania is a Gypsy Queen with a hippie coven and Oberon, a Rebel King with a punk gang. “In the late ‘70s, the 700-acres of Central Park could be dangerous to some, but enticingly exciting to others. I thought: here was an environment where Titania, Oberon, and the lovers, fleeing the tyranny of conservative parental rules, could all believably coexist—and collide—throughout one bewitching evening.” Theatre design Professor Allan Stichbury captures an abstract version of the park, complete with rolling grass, manhole covers and a graffiti wall which will be tagged with spray paint live during the show.

And then there’s the music. The play takes us through hippie anthems like Happy Together and Fire and Rain, to disco and the Village People’s YMCA and early punk with the Ramones’ I Want to be Sedated. “It’s been great introducing this music to the students,” says Fran. “Many of the songs were previously unknown to this generation, but the rest of us will be singing along!”

UVic’s Phoenix Theatre presents A Midsummer Night’s Dream from Nov. 6-22, 2014.

Tickets: 250-721-8000
phoenixtheatres.ca