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A Late Spring Night's Play Reading

May 28, 2008

Sorry for the time lag -- I've been meaning to mention this since Sunday morning, and it's already Wednesday night. When nothing else comes to mind, blame it on the puppy!

My one-act A Midsummer Night's Alternative had a staged reading at the Vineyard Playhouse Saturday night. The Playhouse does an occasional Island Interludes series of new works by island writers; Saturday was the first one of 2008. I feel a little guilty that Midsummer Night's Alternative isn't exactly new work: it had its first and until now only staged reading at WisCon 22 exactly ten years ago. That reading was a major thrill: it was well directed by Donna Simone and well received by an audience that must have been close to 300 people. But it had never been done on the Vineyard before.

The evening came together very quickly. Nicki Galland read it last fall and loved it. (Nicki's a novelist, occasional theater director, and as of a year ago my barnmate's daughter-in-law.) She suggested I give a copy to Playhouse director MJ Bruder Munafo, which I did, thinking something might happen with it over the winter. Didn't hear anything. Thought it had been forgotten. Then on May 9 I saw MJ at a talk/reading Nicki gave at Bunch of Grapes bookstore about her newest novel, Crossed. MJ was thinking about including Midsummer Night's Alternative in a program on Memorial Day weekend; was I up for it? But of course.

I didn't have dates and times till less than a week before the event, but the rush wasn't evident either in the quality of the reading (excellent) or the size of the house (not full but big enough to feel that way). I was thrilled. The original plan had been for minimal staging -- actors sit in chairs and come up to the music stands downstage when they're in a scene -- but Alternative is a very physical play that in places borders on farce. The actors  Miwanted to move, and move they did. The casting was worthy of a full production, never mind MJ's caveat in advance that it was largely a matter of who was around for the holiday weekend. Brian Ditchfield, who played Lysander, was Puck in the 1995 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which inspired my Alternative. That was especially cool.

Here's my note about the genesis of Midsummer Night's Alternative that appeared in the program:

In 1995 I was an extra in a Vineyard Playhouse production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Tisbury Amphitheater. Two extras, in fact: Second Fairy and Moth. So I got to watch the play multiple times, in rehearsal and then in performance, without having to worry much about forgetting lines or missing entrances. Great plays reveal new facets with each production, good productions yield new insights with each performance, and Will Shakespeare might forgive a woolgathering extra for going off on some tangents of her own. Director James Haney had located Oberon, Titania, and friends somewhere in the countercultural 1960s, so imagining them as back-to-the-landers wasn't much of a stretch. Titania was clearly running the show -- what if she didn't have to pretend otherwise? Hermia and Helena were devoted to each other -- what if they didn't have to do the socially acceptable thing and marry guys? What did Egeus really want? I'd written a few sonnets in my time, so how could I resist the challenge of scripting my alternative in iambic pentameter? Collaborating with Shakespeare was a heady experience. With Puck's help everything fell into place.

The evening ended with an audience Q&A with me and Jay Kaufman, whose play Crosswords was the other half of the program. I always expect pithier questions from these things and this one was no exception, but the audience seemed to really like the play and several of the actors went out of their way to tell me how much they enjoyed doing it. That makes me very happy.

P.S. Imagine my surprise when I opened the Martha's Vineyard Times for May 29 and saw Ralph Stewart's wonderful picture of my play on the front page of the Calendar section, along with a review of the evening's performances. Check it out!

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