A Midsummer Night's Dream: Behind the Laugh

In the cushy balcony seats of the Shakespeare Theatre, I must say I laughed my—I laughed really hard. The presentation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was genuinely funny, and to be honest, that shocked me. Usually, the plays of the Bard are—to use a cheesy metaphor—just a foreign fruit where one’s main priority is simply to digest it, and maybe the aftertaste will be memorable in some way. Today, for the first time, I actually savored the flavors of the exotic fruit from the second I bit into it. Okay, this metaphor ends now.

So, I got to thinking: where in the play was that humor rooted, and what made it so universal? After all, the words were more than 400 years old and were sometimes so formal or strangely shaped as to make them practically incomprehensible. And I can hardly say that I related to the plotlines of the characters, what with all the infatuation flowers, prestigious weddings, and fairies. There had to be something invisible weaved into every scene that made the whole theater double over and tear up laughing.

For me, not having read the actual play, I concluded that this invisible factor came from the way the actors performed their roles… the way they projected Shakespeare’s time-worn lines. None of it was slapstick or overdone. In fact, most of the funny bits were slight and small, slipped-in in such a way that one could have missed it with an ill-timed blink. The mischievous look on Puck’s face as he wagged his head behind the mighty, scornful Oberon. The brief moment when stout Peter Quince’s feet left the floor as he was twirled around by the bumbling Nick Bottom. The “chink” in the “wall”. These were the moments which built up the hilarity of the whole play, and I’m afraid I would have skimmed over and lost them if I had just been reading the play on my couch at home.

In the middle of the second act, I suddenly remembered that Shakespeare wrote plays. It seems like such a simple-minded, ignorant revelation to have in the midst of watching a Shakespeare play… but in a sense, it dawned on me that this is the way that the great Will intended for his works to be experienced: surrounded by the overwhelming life of moving, singing, living actors. Somewhere along the long months of struggling to digest the Bard’s words on paper, I had forgotten that.

So, after watching this outstanding production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I would like to say that I truly respect those actors, and I would like to thank them… for bridging the gap between my 21^st century worldview and William Shakespeare’s 16^th century masterpiece. And for making me laugh harder than I have for a while.