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Got a few ghosts I'm promising not to love
Things I did not expect from the Boston Lyric Opera's A Midsummer Night's Dream: that it would leave me wanting to write slash. But tell me what else I am supposed to do with this beautiful moment at the end of Act III when Puck is sorting out the four lovers, gesturing them like sleepwalkers to their appointed places, but of course in Britten's opera Hermia enters after all the rest, bedraggled, exhausted, too weary and too in woe to respond to his Hermes-charming; he has to go hands-on, reduced to touch and physics like a mortal man. And at first he is aggravated, comically impatient—Lord, what fools these—but then something changes, perhaps first in the music. It's not only the gentleness with which he arranges her sleeping limbs. It's the awareness that was absent from his deft stage-managing of the other Athenians. He's looking at her. (That moment in the punt when Harriet sees Peter sexually for the first time. I was raised on Sayers.) And when all is set in place and he's shaken the juice into Lysander's eyes, restoring the course of true love to its supernally smooth run, he stands there with the love-charm in his hands, gazing down at Hermia with a strange, contemplative tenderness: you can see him wondering whether to use it and simply stand there until she wakes. And the curtain comes down.
I want to write that.
(I wrote a few lines in the darkness of the next scene, but they may not be the right ones. Prose may be required. TBD.)
I may also forever envision Snug the joiner and Robin Starveling as a couple, but I am not sure I need or really want to write that particular pairing. They were marvelous in their roles. Starveling is fidgety, timorous, easily flustered; always dropping his cues, made even more nervous whenever anyone's attention is on him. (Him clutching his lanthorn, his dog, and his bush of thorn, in his blue workman's coat with his beret resolutely pulled down, was a thing of beauty. Without misplacing a line of the melody, which Britten wrote for a perfectly straight-up baritone, he managed to make his outburst at the audience—"And this dog, my dog!"—sound like the kind of stack-blowing indignation-trumps-stage-fright falsetto crack envied by many a radio actor.) Snug, by contrast, is one of those long, lanky, unworriable fellows; slow of study he may be, but amazingly laid-back. Starveling's jitters calm down around him; after Peter Quince hands out the parts, Snug takes him upstage to rehearse. You found them most often blocked together, even scattering from the translated Bottom. And I know both of the singers, although not closely and not for years: Andrew Garland was two years ahead of me at Lexington High School; Liam Moran was at the Yale School of Music while I was doing Classics. Even were I so inclined, I don't think I could commit rude mechanical slash (now that sounds like a band) without it starting to feel like RPS.
But definitely Puck/Hermia.
I want to write that.
(I wrote a few lines in the darkness of the next scene, but they may not be the right ones. Prose may be required. TBD.)
I may also forever envision Snug the joiner and Robin Starveling as a couple, but I am not sure I need or really want to write that particular pairing. They were marvelous in their roles. Starveling is fidgety, timorous, easily flustered; always dropping his cues, made even more nervous whenever anyone's attention is on him. (Him clutching his lanthorn, his dog, and his bush of thorn, in his blue workman's coat with his beret resolutely pulled down, was a thing of beauty. Without misplacing a line of the melody, which Britten wrote for a perfectly straight-up baritone, he managed to make his outburst at the audience—"And this dog, my dog!"—sound like the kind of stack-blowing indignation-trumps-stage-fright falsetto crack envied by many a radio actor.) Snug, by contrast, is one of those long, lanky, unworriable fellows; slow of study he may be, but amazingly laid-back. Starveling's jitters calm down around him; after Peter Quince hands out the parts, Snug takes him upstage to rehearse. You found them most often blocked together, even scattering from the translated Bottom. And I know both of the singers, although not closely and not for years: Andrew Garland was two years ahead of me at Lexington High School; Liam Moran was at the Yale School of Music while I was doing Classics. Even were I so inclined, I don't think I could commit rude mechanical slash (now that sounds like a band) without it starting to feel like RPS.
But definitely Puck/Hermia.
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I enjoyed the Vane portion of the Sayers opus -- the private transformation of Peter Wimsey to ardent and vulnerable lover is quite riveting, though Harriet's role as a stand-in for the author is obvious (and Harriet's insistence on a traditional marriage ceremony including the word "obey" was mildly nauseating).
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By now I think of it as noncanonical pairings, although Snug/Starveling would qualify by the traditional definition. The director certainly seemed to think so.
I enjoyed the Vane portion of the Sayers opus -- the private transformation of Peter Wimsey to ardent and vulnerable lover is quite riveting, though Harriet's role as a stand-in for the author is obvious (and Harriet's insistence on a traditional marriage ceremony including the word "obey" was mildly nauseating).
I think they're her four best novels. Gaudy Night is the one I re-read most often; it's a book I consistently find new things in.
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P. S. I think "slash" still denotes same-sex pairing; "non-canonical" is the umbrella term for both homo- and hetero- pairings that are not in the original work.
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Yes! I have some of them collected in Striding Folly (1972). I have even read the Wimsey Papers, which Jill Paton Walsh has since used as source material for her own mysteries.
I think "slash" still denotes same-sex pairing; "non-canonical" is the umbrella term for both homo- and hetero- pairings that are not in the original work.
(So noted.)
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Having spent (and continuing to spend spend) far too much time on Planet Fanfic, I agree with you.
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Very welcome! I hope it does well.
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You know where to send it when you're finished.
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I'll have to finish it first!
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I'm fairly sure some people would read that, you know.
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I suspect you of being right.
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This sounds like one of those moments in art when everything comes together in an undefined way, that's felt, and understood somehow, more deeply. I love when that happens, something keenly felt, yet a bit of a mystery.
It made me go back to my notes from the book Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay," by Andrew Horton. He says we need to write in a carnivalesque spirit, where anything is possible. And even if the writer knows their character's core personality and uses this "core" knowledge to drive the plot of a story, there should remain a mystery, "a realm of the unresolved," something neither the writer or reader can fully know or understand. Your description of the play reminded me of this.
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I really had not expected it and it delighted me; it made me wonder. And I thought it was just me, and then
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I have my own ideas about this, but I'm going to see first if I can express them in fiction/poetry.
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I heartily endorse.
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Thank you! I just need to sleep enough and get my work out of the way . . .
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---L.
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I'll keep it in mind.
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What a wonderful production!
Nine
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It wasn't a flawless version. The set designer seemed to have thrown every single idea he had for the production onto the same stage, scene by scene; some of them worked, some of them didn't. I liked how the actors' marks were all visible in colored tape on the floor, asterisks and arcs and boxes that at once reminded the audience of the work of theater and reinforced its illusions, because the whole collage also looked like something a magician might chalk around herself to summon Oberon, cut across with the moon's road. (He always walks down it, coming onstage.) I liked the use of chairs in the second act, moved in full view of the audience around to create abstract trees, seats for Pyramus and Thisbe, the after-hours look of a bar where the lovers and mechanicals are propped up, sleeping off midsummer. The problem was the one-off sets that belonged to other productions entirely—the giant black-and-white labels reading "TREE," "LEAF," "NIGHT," the trees scribbled in crayon against a child's green construction-paper background, the slender, stylized trunks among which the lovers lost themselves, the photographic Man Ray moon that only appeared in two scenes, the vaguely lily-like, viscerally-colored shapes that lowered from the rafters for another; the idea of a shape-changing wood is a great one, but I am not sure this was the way to convey it. (If very closely tied to each individual scene, then I think it would work, but I couldn't find the ties; the resulting effect came off more scattershot than dream-logic.) I have never yet seen a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with the wildness and otherwhere I require of the fairies; I have similarly never seen the lovers as four distinguishable people, although this production at least had a vivid Hermia. And despite that beautiful scene and a few touches I liked elsewhere, the BLO's was not the best Puck I have seen; that's probably the tumbler who performed the role with the Yale Opera in 2005. (Dean Anthony, the internet informs me.) But I really did like it. And it has given me things to think about, which may be the point of going to art in the first place.
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Thank you! I hope so!
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Interesting. If you should write it, I would read it.
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Thank you. I really want to.