CAP Youth Theater AMND

HISTORY

"A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a romantic comedy by William Shakespeare written sometime in the 1590s. It portrays the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of amateur actors, their interactions with the Duke and Duchess of Athens, Theseus and Hippolyta, and with fairies who inhabit a moonlit forest. The play is one of Shakespeare's most popular works for the stage and is widely performed across the world.
The play features three interlocking plots, connected by a celebration of the wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and the Amazonian queen Hippolyta, and set simultaneously in the woodland, and in the realm of Fairyland, under the light of the moon.
Some features of the plot and characters can be traced to elements of earlier mythologically-based literature; for example, the story of "Pyramus and Thisbe" is told in Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and the transformation of Bottom into a donkey is descended from Apuleius' "The Golden Ass." Lysander was also an ancient Greek warlord while Theseus and Hippolyta were respectively the Duke of Athens and Queen of the Amazons. In addition, Shakespeare could have been working on "Romeo and Juliet" at about the same time that he wrote the Dream, and it is possible to see Pyramus and Thisbe as a comic reworking of the tragic play. This version CAP Youth Theater will be performing is a modern language version adapted by the Artistic Director, Ty Jacobs, from the original by Shakespeare.

Henry Fuseli. Titania, Bottom and the Fairies (1793-4)
Kunsthaus, Zurich, Switzerland

THE STORY

"A Midsummer Night's Dream" begins when Egeus, Hermia, Lysander, and Demetrius appear before Theseus, the Duke of Athens, to ask him to settle their differences. Hermia wants to marry Lysander and Lysander wants to marry Hermia, but Demetrius also wants to marry Hermia. Egeus, Hermia's father, wants Hermia to marry Demetrius even though he has already broken one girl's heart, Helena, a friend of Hermia's since childhood. Theseus tells Hermia that she must either marry Demetrius, enter a convent, or be put to death by an ancient Athenian law. Rather than choose one of these options, she decides to escape to the forest with Lysander. Helena thwarts their plan by telling Demetrius what they did. She hopes that by telling him this, she will regain Demetrius's favor. 
Meanwhile, Oberon and Titania, the fairy King and Queen, are having an argument about a small human child who is recently orphaned presently with Titania. To take revenge on Titania, Oberon orders Puck to find Titania while she is sleeping to put a love potion on her eyes so that when she wakes, she will fall in love with some vile creature of the forest.
Also meanwhile, a group of Athenian tradesfolk go to the forest to rehearse a play for the Duke's wedding feast. None of the 'actors' possess a sparkling intelligence or display of talent, especially the hero of the "play" they wish to perform, Bottom. As a slightly mean joke, Puck, Oberon's mischievous jester, gives Bottom a donkey's head and makes him the creature that Titania falls in love with. 
Oberon has seen Helena chasing Demetrius through the woods while he runs away from her, trying to find Hermia and Lysander. Feeling sorry for Helena, Oberon tells Puck to put the love potion in Demetrius' eyes. He tells Puck that he will know the youth by his Athenian clothes. Puck sees Lysander and Hermia sleeping and puts the potion on Lysander's eyes thinking it's the Athenian youth Oberon was referring to. Lysander wakes up and, seeing Helena who has just found him, falls in love with her! Now Lysander is in love with Helena, Helena is still in love with Demetrius of course, and Demetrius is in love with Hermia, and Hermia loves Lysander.
Oberon eventually discovers Puck's mistake and puts the potion on Demetrius' eyes so that both men are in love with Helena. Then, after a series of humorous misadventures, the spells are removed from Titania, and Lysander, but a spell is left on Demetrius because he was just never really a nice guy, and of course the donkey head is removed from Bottom. The play ends with a triple wedding: Theseus and Hippolyta, Lysander and Hermia, and Demetrius and Helena. At the wedding feast, Bottom's group of 'actors' perform the classic Greek tragedy of "Pyramus and Thisbe," to mixed reviews as they are quite horrible actors, but amusing. Puck closes out the play with an apology to the audience, telling them that if they do not care for what has transpired, they can simply remember it as a dream.

EMAIL
May 8 - 9 - 10 : 2008