A Midsummer Night's Dream - August 23 - August 31, 2025

Firebird Theatre Co

 Director's Note 

Ever since I began acting ten years ago, Shakespeare has always been in the back of my mind. High-school English class group readthroughs of Julius Caesar were what first got me interested in abandoning marching band for a black-box stage. My first audition involved monologues from Hamlet, which was considered pretty definitively uncool by my peers. However, despite it getting me into theatre, I did not get the opportunity to act in a Shakespeare play until early 2020 during a college production of Midsummer. During that process, I, like countless others, fell under the spell of this misunderstood, quirky comedy and the darkness it contains just under the surface.

 

To me, this is a play of parody and contradictions at its core that is often misrepresented as a simple story about star-crossed love and fairy hijinks. It is, for a lot of us, our first introduction to the Bard, yet it is also Shakespeare at possibly his most crude and cynical. At a time when the definition of a comedy typically just meant it ended with a wedding, some cute dances, and the villains' plans foiled, the final scene of Midsummer skips over the ceremonies in favor of a so-bad-it's-good play within the play that culminates in a hastily choreographed "dance." Very few characters in this story get a happy ending in the traditional sense, though we often still try to see it as such. Counter to how many of us view comedy nowadays, this is a story in which the villain wins with minimal repercussions for his actions. Multiple characters are still trapped in love spells by curtain, a compulsory byproduct of Oberon and Puck's schemes that has manufactured our "happy ending." It forces us to look beyond the romantic idealism of stories like Romeo and Juliet and examine the messy reality that so often lies beneath. As Lysander states, "the course of true love never did run smooth..."

 

This is not to say that everything in this play is secretly all doom and gloom. In particular, I find the progression of Lysander and Hermia's love story from a youthful fling to a devoted bond after facing adversities both natural and supernatural quite compelling. The Mechanicals striving to get their amateur production of Pyramus and Thisbe staged before the Duke is endlessly endearing and a hilarious riff on the process of collaborative theatre-making. The themes of different worlds converging and engaging in conflict with one another are also particularly intriguing to me. To play with these concepts, I have tried to add some Byzantine undertones in the set and costume designs, hopefully evoking a feeling of the ancient world of fairies and gods crossing into the medieval world of humans. There is a lot more packed into this production than meets the eye and I hope you find just as much to love as I have.

 

I want to thank the cast, crew, and the larger Firebird community for making this wild dream of a handful of theatre nerds a reality. And, if we shadows have offended... Eh, you probably know the rest. Enjoy the show, and long live Firebird!

 

-Tristan

 

 

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