By ALANA SHILLING.

ONE RARELY ENCOUNTERS a theatrical production so exceptionally dreadful that a gifted cast, innovative staging and pitch-perfect costume design cannot manage to bestow even partial redemption. A rarity, but not an impossibility.

In April 2013, the venerable Classic Stage Company, a New York Off-Broadway institution for over forty-five years, resurrected Passion, a 1994 musical by noted composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Adapted from the 1981 film La Passione d’Amore by director Ettore Scola (itself inspired by a nineteenth-century novel by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti), Passion charts a painful love triangle been Giorgio, an idealistic young soldier, his conventionally beautiful mistress Clara, and Fosca, a colonel’s homely, sickly cousin who becomes obsessed with Giorgio. Aggressively bad, this musical’s slumber should have remained unbroken. Incidentally, though Passion enjoyed critical approbation, inexplicably carrying both the Tony and Drama Desk Awards for Best Musical in 1994, it was also the shortest running musical to have done so.

One wonders how Sondheim, former lyricist for the luminous West Side Story (1957), could have wandered so far astray. Soaring conceits in West Side Story such as the uncluttered exclamation by the enraptured latter day-Romeo, Tony – “Maria! Say it loud and there’s music playing….say it soft and it’s almost like praying” – or the masterful polyharmonic genius of the “Tonight” quintet are absent from Passion, which is a grating, polytonal chimera that trudges artlessly along spouting sophomoric lyrics that are at once mawkish and banal (e.g. “I wanted you to vanish from sight/Now I see you in a different light”). The very first lines of the musical, “I’m so happy, I’m afraid I’ll die,” kindle a yearning to make that sentiment hortative. In the course of one matinee performance on 6 April 2013, an audience member’s seemingly peculiar decision to bolt from her conspicuous front-row center seat during the second number (a feat requiring her to lurch across six people in her brazen dash to the exit) became an act of neither eccentricity nor gaucherie but rather of supreme foresight.

Still, questions of whether a theatrical interpretation is “good” or “bad” can only carry us so far. Among other questions that can be asked are a set of queries that range beyond the borders of a single production, but can nonetheless draw us nearer to it, can outstrip the limits of value-judgment. One of these involves the nature of the dialogue that a particular production establishes with its own history, with source-texts or earlier interpretations (often both). Although Passion was set in the nineteenth century, time was rather irrelevant for understanding Sondheim’s musical. The characters could have thrashed through their maudlin predicaments on a lunar colony or in ancient Sparta or even The Haight in San Francisco, 1967. Passion did not have to countenance the weight of tradition. Nonetheless, responses to their pasts have inspired some of the most noteworthy performances by New York theatre companies in recent seasons.

♦

ON 6 OCTOBER 2010 the Elevator Repair Service—a company that develops theatre pieces, performs them in New York and then presents them on international tours—introduced what is now a famed production, the prodigious, eight-hour Gatz (2010). The play is no mere adaptation of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lustrous Jazz Age masterpiece. Gatz is The Great Gatsby. The play is nothing less than an unabridged experience of the novel.

Every syllable of Fitzgerald’s work is perfectly weighted by actor Scott Shepherd, who serves as narrator, a role that is allotted to character Nick Carraway in the novel. In the performance, Shepherd makes the distinction between narrator and character disappear so effectively that New York Times critic Ben Brantley was moved to declare, “The most compelling love affair being conducted on a New York stage this season isn’t between a man and woman. (Or a man and a man, a woman and a woman or a boy and a horse.) It is between a man and a book.”¹

Careless at first, Shepherd’s narration throws them away in a noncommittal monotone, then catches at them with passionate engagement.

In the course of Gatz, a drab office filled with archaic computers and indifferent employees gradually takes on the sheen of wonderful, unimaginably lavish scenes in the novel: an impromptu, clamorous party filled with music, hooch and brutality; a breezy Long Island mansion tenanted by those perfect ensigns of ‘Old Money’, Tom and Daisy Buchanan; a deadly stretch of highway flinging travellers towards Manhattan – these all seem to coalesce as the narrator speaks Fitzgerald’s words. Careless at first, Shepherd’s narration throws them away in a noncommittal monotone, then catches at them with passionate engagement until finally, book cast aside, our narrator, tremulous, seems overcome by a prose that surges forth unchecked, as if propelled ineluctably forward with a wistful urgency.

Baz Luhrmann may have spent millions of dollars, months of research and manage to enlist Jay-Z to produce the soundtrack for his cinematic interpretation of The Great Gatsby (2013), but that slick adaptation is condemned to a sort of daedal emptiness. It cannot approach the power Gatz’s narrator holds—his transformation to Nick Carraway complete—as he makes a final assessment of his blunted, fallen world where nature’s bowers “had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams.” Yet, as Shepherd stood bravely before the audience head cast aloft sounding those sentences, all the rush of discovery, that grand American narrative still unwritten gave way to a certain awareness, a realization that the audience was not hearing American history, but the epitaph of its mythos. The Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz possessed a grace of interpretation precisely because it veered from the source not a whit. Unrelenting fidelity became the principle of Gatz’s own marvelous originality.

♦

AND THEN THERE are the cases where the opposite obtains, where the impossibility of receiving a source-text in full becomes a method of doing so. It seemed preposterous that a single actor could recite Homer’s Iliad in ninety minutes. In the New York Theatre Workshop’s An Iliad (April 2012), actor Stephen Spinella (or, alternatively, Denis O’Hare) did just that. The performance opens with the narrator, a latter-day rhapsode, bounding from behind the curtains, a copy of Robert Fagles’ translation of the poem handy. He materialized reciting the opening lines of Homer’s poem in stately dactylic hexameter— with all the protracted stresses and short syllables of perfect quantitative verse well enough observed to satisfy the most fastidious classicist. Even before the performance had ended, the virtuosity of the enterprise was, to borrow a Homeric phrase, “a thing accomplished”.

Weaving together Fagles’ translation, lines in ancient Greek and summaries in modern vernacular, An Iliad, written by Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson, managed to make a canonical poem populated by marmoreal heroes and capricious gods into a survey of a contemporary landscape: Meaningless violence unleashed on a plain of Ilium was implicitly grafted onto the meaningless violence spilling across the cities and provinces of Iraq and Afghanistan. As the narrator—who seemed gilded in the dust of unknown roads and times—began his telling, a bounding, puckish energy punctuated with dry chortles carried him to the gates of Troy, to Helen’s weaving, to the grand ekphrasis of that Hephaestus-wrought shield, to Achilles pursuing Hector, to Priam, his pride spent.

Poignancy colors every word of An Iliad, which is haunted by the narrator’s early confession in a momentary flash of weary introspection that “every time I sing this song I hope it’s the last time.” Later, the narrator colonizes the epic catalogue convention to list, not the cities of Phrygians or ranks of Greeks, but rather every war that has been waged in the Western world from antiquity to the present. And when he pauses at last—Hector dead, the light not yet consuming Troy—there grows a longing for a time when the very tale told, the one that affirms continuity in Western civilization, will become archaic and foreign, when unending violence might become another fantasy. As the Iliad’s relevance is affirmed, An Iliad makes that identification tragic, makes one hope that the first line of T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker,” “In my beginning is my end” might betoken more mercy than mortality.

♦

BUT SOME PRODUCTIONS do not have to engage so overtly with the past to inherit it. Indeed, an accidental engagement can turn pleasant if unremarkable theatrical pieces into extraordinary performances. The Classic Stage Company’s 2012 A Midsummer Night’s Dream belongs to this category. Directed by Tony Speciale, the latest CSC version of what is among the most performed of Shakespeare’s plays proved a delightful confection. Yet, it also evoked something beyond the usual range of reactions: It inspired a driving sense of uneasiness.  The unexpected, amorphous sense of disquiet awakened by the CSC Midsummer can be accounted for neither by inventiveness of the interpretation nor particular adherence to popular interpretations past.

Indeed, in Speciale’s Midsummer, many of the most intriguing interpretive choices had been made decades beforehand. For instance, the decision to double the roles of mortal rulers Theseus and Hippolyta with their fairy equivalents, Oberon and Titania, was compelling and led to a suggestive parallelism between worlds fairy and mortal. It also produced an impressive cohesion in plot and expression of themes. But Speciale did not invent the idea; he merely inherited it. That casting choice was first employed in what is perhaps the most famous Midsummer, Peter Brook’s 1970 version for the Royal Shakespeare Company.²

In Speciale’s Midsummer, many of the most intriguing interpretive choices had been made decades beforehand.

It was not salacious content that made the CSC Midsummer particularly memorable, either. To be sure, the content was racy (that is practically a donnée). The seemingly endless round of chases, pursuits and confrontations among the play’s confused, nubile lovers (clad only in their white undergarments), that punctuates Midsummer’s second act and dominates its third was deftly choreographed and channeled an eros grown zaftig—even profligate. Nonetheless, raging, misdirected libidos coordinated to a group striptease was a device pioneered a decade earlier by Richard Jones (2002).

The power of the CSC Midsummer did not reside in celebrity either, though several of its leads were famous enough—diminutive cinema darling Christina Ricci made a winsome Hermia, while leather-clad Bebe Neuwirth took wholesale possession of the roles of both Hippolyta and Titania. Puck was spun into wonderful, queeny fancy by glorious New York City darling, Taylor Mac, of whom the New York Times, often so miserly in its praise, uncharacteristically gushed, “Fabulousness can come in many forms, and Taylor Mac seems intent on assuming every one of them.”³

Rather, the CSC Midsummer that opened on 4 April 2012 in an intimate, two-hundred seat theatre nestled in Manhattan’s SoHo district remains singular because it violates the tenets imposed by a more obscure history, one as influential as it is forgotten. And only in restoring that history can the CSC production’s capacity to instill disquietude be unfolded. Incidentally, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a particularly suitable candidate for an exploration of hidden histories. To even conceive of Midsummer in monadic terms—as a cohesive play to be performed in five acts—is an invention of the twentieth century.⁴ Before 1914, Shakespeare’s play was largely fodder for operatic, dramatic and balletic sequences rather than a dramatic work on its own terms.⁵

But the CSC’s Midsummer transcended its limits in a way neither sex nor celebrity can. It refused the generic conventions that have historically governed the play, making it a mirror for the undercurrent of distrust and uncertainty, the suspicion of authority’s power so dear to the contemporary Zeitgeist. The CSC staging tacitly evaluated the validity of ideal social harmony and faith in conventional structures of power—and implied the first to be impossible, the second an illusion.

♦

TWO OBVIOUS QUESTIONS present themselves: If the CSC Midsummer did not possess innovative theatrical properties,  whence did it derive its power? Moreover, just how great a capacity for subversion can A Midsummer Night’s Dream possess? Fairies and sexual follies seem poor choices for stirring political critique. Nonetheless, a devotion to hegemony is deeply encoded in the play’s structure. If we embrace Marxist critic Fredric Jameson’s imperative to “always historicize,” it becomes clear that Midsummer is not all enchantments and lovers; it is also an appeal to venerate existing political institutions. To understand how, we must look not to a new context but rather a very old one, the forgotten genre of the courtly masque. Traditionally, masques were devoted to the affirmation and celebration of official authority—these “entertainments” served as a mirror in which the court could admire itself.  A Midsummer Night’s Dream has more than an affinity with masque form—it was likely conceived of as one. Many scholars speculate that it was first commissioned as a masque for a royal wedding and performed for that occasion in 1597.

The English masque tradition is a long one. It evolved from simple pantomime performances, “mummings,” in the late fourteenth century to grand spectacles in the seventeenth century—the tradition ended only with the outbreak of the English Civil War. At their height, these courtly entertainments were intricately designed, extravagant affairs. The sets for these “entertainments” were devised by famed stage designer and architect, Inigo Jones (1573-1652). Meanwhile, the texts were composed by luminaries including Sir Philip Sidney and, most extensively, Ben Jonson. Even John Milton penned a masque, Comus (1634).⁶ Most elaborate during the Stuart period, masques conjured wonders through their intricately designed proscenia, performances of complex dance sequences and extravagant costumes bedizened with shining beads. These masques—which often linked occasional subjects to mythological or pastoral themes— were a costly theatrical delicacy, usually demanding thousands of pounds for a few hours of entertainment.

Formally, the masque—part triumph, part allegory—was a centaur of performance types and unfolded in two acts. The latter quality was formalized during the Jonsonian period (c.1604-1634). The first act, governed by disorder, formed the “antimasque.” In the second act—the masque proper—chaos would be conquered. The cast for masques was supplied by the court itself—and occasionally included reigning monarchs. Given the royal pedigree of the actors, the masque’s resolution—order’s triumph over confusion—was both a theatrical performance and a proleptic assertion of royal power. Part of this implicit politicized affirmation came in the traditional conclusion, as masquers strove to elide the distinction between actors and audience. As audience members watched the masque performed, they were gradually gathered into the action: Spectators mingled with spectacle through indiscriminate revelry and dance. In short, the audience was assimilated to—and tacitly complicit with the values of— the fiction they watched.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream fills the most basic requirements for a masque and even presages the dual structure that would become so pronounced in the Jonsonian form—that juxtaposition of an antimasque wrought with confusion, and a masque designed to restore harmony. After all, Shakespeare’s play entails a progression from chaos and misapprehension to the restoration of harmony both private and public, in realms both mortal and fairy. Once Theseus, the temporal ruler, proclaims an end to revelry for the contented mortal couples (V.1.375f.), the newly reconciled fairy monarchs Titania and Oberon appear, pronouncing a blessing upon the mortals: “So shall all the couples three/Ever true in loving be” (V.416-417). Meanwhile, the final lines of the play are nothing less than an invitation to the audience, spoken by Puck—agent of order and disorder alike—to resolve the folly of watching the play by revisiting and replicating the resolution to the characters’ own folly. Puck entreats the audience to surmise, as did the young lovers that they

…have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear
And this weak and idle theme
No more yielding than a dream
(V.435-438)

♦

THAT MIDSUMMER IS, at heart, a masque is more than a minor academic assertion or a footnote to reception history. It transforms the play into something beyond its shimmering surfaces and gossamer speeches. As a masque, Midsummer was inevitably a celebration of state power—Queen Elizabeth herself likely attended that 1597 performance as the guest of honor.⁷ It also means that in modern interpretations, directors are tacitly forced to make a choice, to either accept the play as an affirmation of hegemonic power or a challenge to it, to insist upon the bond between mortal and immortal worlds or to rupture it.

The theme of testing power structures is appealing to contemporary directors: in versions of Midsummer currently underway across the United States in 2013 alone, there is one production set in the Jazz Age under the direction of Geoffrey Kent at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival (through 11 August), a Victorian Midsummer directed by Ian Talbot is being performed at the Old Globe in San Diego, California (though 29 September ), and a 1960’s interpretation at the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival with Charles Fee as director (through 25 August 2013).

Though they locate Midsummer at a moment of revolution and repression for women respectively, Kent and Talbot both interpret the play in terms of societal oppression. Fee does so as well, thought he focuses less on gender-specific issues and instead explores a period of historical transition, juxtaposing the staid Athens of 1960 with the psychedelic, late 1960’s  counter-culture of the fairy-haunted forest. Although each of these directors capitalizes on how Midsummer challenges normative power structures, the implications of rejecting those power structures seem less significant. In short, the features of the antimasque may be altered or intensified, but the masque’s capacity for resolution remains unexamined, unquestioned.

Even the most creative of past productions do not sever ties with the values of the masque. One of the greatest innovations in the definitive 1970 Midsummer, is the aforementioned doubling of roles, which brings Titania/Hippolyta and Oberon/Theseus together. The inevitable emphasis on the parallels of the human and fairy lands that this pairing entails is a gesture not unlike the identification between allegorical fantasy and earthly reality so dear to courtly masques. Moreover, Brook aimed to capture the imagination by eroding the boundary between stage and audience. These are principles dear to the masque, though Brook envisioned them as part of a redefinition of the play for a new era.

Other versions of Midsummer base innovation on a deformation of the fairy world, the translation of the forest into variations of the terrifying Dantean selva. Yet, in doing so, these choices merely make the contrast between order and chaos more marked, thus upholding rather than abandoning the masque structure.⁸ Tim Supple’s celebrated 2006 Midsummer transported the play to India and employed a cast of Indian actors to performed it in English braided with six Indian languages. Supple used the parallels between human and fairy in order to critique distinctions, as imposed by the caste system. Though Supple exploits the ‘antimasque’ elements of the play to address social issues, he tends to honor the resolution of the masque—tellingly, a glowing Guardian review of the Supple production concludes with an observation that would have been a hallmark of the extinct genre: “As in all the great Dreams, we feel we too have participated in an act of ritual communion.’⁹

And so we return to the question of why that 2012 CSC Midsummer proved so unsettling. Its originality lies not in invention so much as tradition. As even the most generous overview suggests, although offerings of the play in previous decades are intuitively structured as responses to the poetics of power embedded so deeply in the play’s substructure, they rarely reject the masque structure that frames them. To encode subversion into the antimasque is expected rather than inspired. It is that which makes the 2012 CSC production so distinctive. The CSC Midsummer fails to accept the closure that masque ultimately uses to ratify existing political forces—or at least maintain the bienséances of theatre. When director Tony Speciale doubled the roles of mortal and fairy rulers, he also paired Puck with the character that arguably introduces civic disorder—and the descent into antimasque—into the human realm, Hermia’s father, Egeus. This pairing is more profound than it might sound, and not simply because the contrast between the roles is so great (Taylor Mac plays a gloriously flamboyant Puck while his Egeus has the demeanor of a mortician).

In the final scene, merry revelers departed, Egeus wanders to center stage alone, wedding cake in hand. Only then do the implications of the pairing start to reveal themselves. He gazes silently at the audience and solemnly performs one the most beloved of all slapstick rituals: he smashes cake into his own face, as if a grim valedictory salute towards his role as Puck.  At the moment that Egeus usurps Puck’s role, the infrastructure of power within the play folds. Marriages have been made or repaired and Oberon has pronounced his blessing over mortals. Still, the play’s greatest agent of closure, Puck, is erased. He cannot return for that final, famous speech—the one that reassures its audience that what they have seen is nothing “but a dream” and promises in the final line of the play to “restore amends.” Though company recites those lines together, all conviction, all authority is lost.

The detail is small, but it effectively denies the masque element its claims to completion. Without that final, decisively bestowed benediction, the integration of audience with performance—a ritual demanded by masque—is left unfinished. Though the genre has long been forgotten, masque structure steals into the very soul of the Classic Stage Company’s Midsummer, injecting a sense of nebulous discomfort into an otherwise merry adaptation. Sometimes, inheritance of the past seems indifferent to memory but it memorializes—and, in theatre, performs it—all the same.

♦

Alana Shilling comments on cultural events and New York theatre for the Fortnightly Review. Shilling has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her special interests are reception history and the afterlife of Latin poetry in the Renaissance.