beviad

     Perhaps because I spent my first nine years in Calgary, Alberta, far from an ocean or a large lake, I was one of those children who, when the time came to learn to swim, was afraid to put her face into the water. I drew away from the pool or the edge of the sea or pool with cat-like distaste and no desire to put even a toe in. Or, if actually persuaded by swim instructors (in the courses my mother kept signing me up for) to come in and immerse myself, I refused to try to do anything, and just stood there shivering. Since I especially hated the reek of chlorinated water,  I would be afraid even of being splashed.

   By the time I was a teenager and lived in Vancouver, I liked going to the beach, but not to swim. Instead, I would lie in the sun for hours, unwittingly setting myself up for possible skin cancers later in life. When I got hot and bored, I would wade out to waist-deep water and paddle about, disliking the debris of corn cobs and condoms floating around me, then come back in to tan again.

Having children helped later, for one can't show fear to one's child over such a thing. On a vacation on a Greek island, I found the water so clean and wonderful that I not only went into it with my little one year old, but splashed around in it myself, too. Then, later, our babysitter lived in an apartment building with a beautiful penthouse pool that was only mildly chlorinated, in a room with windows from floor to ceiling. She invited us to come over once a week to enjoy it. The baby loved it, and the warm water made me feel confident about being in it up to my armpits, holding a squirming child. But I never got a chance to swim in that pool alone since I was busy with the baby. 

Thus I have never learned to swim. Nor have I ever wanted to learn, really. The most I could ever do is dog-paddle a few yards to the shore if I were to fall overboard from a boat, if the shore were less than the width of a pool away. So until recently,  I have never gone into a pool for pleasure.

   Instead, when vacationing in Maine, Vancouver, Cape Breton Island, and at various little Quebec lakes, I have preferred going out on a row boat or collecting shells or sitting, reading in a deck chair. As I've grow older, the thought of being seen in a swim suit in public kept me even from changing into shoreside clothes, so that invariably I was the most overdressed person on the beach or deck, sometimes even wearing a long skirt and a shawl, strolling on the shore like some demented gypsy. 

   Last summer, after years away from anything resembling swimming or even wearing a swim suit, I heard that Aqua-fitness classes had started at the local Y. I thought that such a class might give me much needed exercise, but my dread of chlorinated water and publicly showing my body in a suit kept me from trying it out. Then this past July, after a week at a lake where I sat in my regular clothes once again while others swam, I decided to change. I knew that if I wanted to be more fit and lose weight, I needed to overcome my swimsuit anxiety and dislike of chlorinated water. 

  So-- I bought a swim suit online, choosing it because it had a skirt that covered the upper part of my legs, but still winced at how I looked in the mirror once it arrived. Still, after finding out all the relevant info about the Aqua-fitness class, I steeled my nerve and turned up one day in August at the Y, clutching a bag full of swim gear and a towel.

There were no private changing rooms and there could have been no better way to get over my own fear of showing my body to others than suddenly being plunged into a room where some twenty women over sixty were trying modestly to get into swim suits. We all kept our eyes averted and down, but I couldn't help seeing other's lumpy legs, webbed with varicose veins, and other's overweight bodies. Most of the women were older than me and seemed to have come from the senior home across the street, which made me feel younger, at least in the face. I also felt a bit less embarrassed about my own body's flaws.

   Inching along the slippery deck tiles towards the end of the pool where people were gathering to await the instructor, I thought the other women and myself were like the pink hippos in tutus from Disney's "Fantasia", clumsily getting ready to dance. (I cringed when we passed the slim, young swim instructors sitting at the side of the pool chatting; the contrast was just too great between them and us.) But once the class began, I was amazed. Like the Disney hippos, we were amazingly agile when we began to do our exercises. And no one could see our bodies anymore; only arms and heads.

  I thought that we'd be instructed to make graceful moves in the water, doing a kind of yoga that was seemly for elderly women. I was wrong. The instructor almost immediately had us kicking like Rockettes to rock and roll and doing dance steps that were tricky. Unbelievably, I found I could do it. It was like moving in outer space might be, weightless and free. Even better, my aches and pains seemed to disappear. I thought I'd be wrecked when the class was over, but surprisingly I wasn't, although my legs were so exhausted that it was hard to lift myself up the ladder from the pool. The next morning I was a bit achy, but not unable to move, as I had feared. I decided that, wonder upon wonders, I could actually do this. So I went back. This time I found another room, almost private, with little compartments, to change in, with a good locker for my gear.  And I had a new suit, a simple black Zeller's tank suit, since my other one had sopped up the water like a sponge, mainly because of that skirt I had hoped would hide the tops of my legs.

These days, I still hate the actual act of going to the pool. I still hate the stink of chlorine, the feel of the slimy tiles surrounding the pool that force me to walk as if on ice, the lukewarm water that always feels cold and unwelcoming as I slip into it. But once the music starts, I forget all these things. One of our instructors has a wonderful tape that includes such old gems as 'Blueberry HIll', 'Mac the Knife', 'Singin' in the Rain', and other Fifties songs. These pieces are so timeless and familiar that my body moves as easily to them as it once did on dance floors in my youth. And when it comes to the end, when we're doing relaxing exercises to wind down, 'Bali Hi' almost makes me tear up with its beauty. 

Half way through the class I look around me. Although some, like me, are wearing a turban-type bathing cap, many women are wearing puffy plastic shower caps to avoid having to use one of those awful skintight rubber ones that squeeze one's ears. That should be comical, but somehow it isn't. Instead, the caps add a colorful note. Almost everyone, (except for that one grim woman who seems to be over-concentrating), is smiling up at the instructor. Their wrinkled faces--our wrinkled faces-- are a testament to the courage and determination of getting ourselves here. We are pleased at what we are doing because it is fun as well as good for us and because we are living in the moment, moving as if we were young again.

Suddenly, someone starts to sing along to an old Bing Crosby version of "Nothing Could be Finer than to Be in Carolina in the Morning", even the French and Asian women who I'd think might not know the lyrics. Feeling elated, I join them in singing. I suddenly think: It is 1:40 on an autumn day; I am happy and singing with others;  and I am feeling very much alive and well and even fit.

How strange, then, when we get out of the pool. Suddenly we are all land-bound again and heavy in our bodies. One woman even has to use her walker when she heads for the changing room. However, the chemicals that flood the body when you exercise for any length of time give me a lift that lasts longer than the class, and that's enough to make me love what I'm doing. Even if it is in a chlorinated pool.

 




 
  

 Ah, the beauty of Mozart's music! Especially the Andante of Piano Concerto # 21,  the "Elvira Madigan" theme music, which is playing now on the radio beside me, as I sit here typing on a gray day near the end of September. Some readers may not know of this music, or of the movie by that name, but to me it is part of the many-tuned theme music of the Sixties, or at least, of the part of the Sixties that I loved, the last few years of that decade, when I was happy, young, beautiful, and in love. 

What I remember of the film "Elvira Madigan" are scenes of a nineteenth century, long-haired, blonde Swedish girl in flowing white dress and straw hat, twirling slowly and dreamily in a field of flowers under warm sunlight, while Mozart's slow movement plays and her lover, a Napoleonic war soldier,  watches fondly from under a nearby tree where they have been picnicking. It is a scene celebrating summer, freedom, youth, beauty and happiness in love, and because I was also in love, I identified with the characters in the film when I saw it in the spring of 1968. My life, which had had many years of unhappiness, now seemed to be blossoming in sunlight, and although I wasn't actually twirling in a field of flowers, my spirit was.

In the fall of 1967, my boyfriend, John, and I had decided to leave Vancouver for Montreal to study for our PhDs at McGill University. He had been given a teaching fellowship that would support him while he studied. I hadn't, but I went with him anyway in a real leap of faith. I had no idea how I would support myself in Montreal while I studied, since I had no money  and my French wasn't good enough for me to do restaurant work, which had financed my studies at the University of B.C. I followed my heart rather than my head, which told me to go to the University of Toronto, where I could work easily.

And, when we arrived in Montreal and went to McGill, it was as if my good fairies had worked some kind of magic, for I was lucky enough to be offered a teaching fellowship someone else had just declined. Yet we still didn't, individually, have enough money to rent apartments; we were only being paid $150 each a month, and apartments were relatively expensive. Again, we had been lucky; my boyfriend and I had found a large, ground floor apartment within walking distance of the university, for $65 a month, heated, and had decided to share it. This was still considered immoral at that time; for example, we had told our landlord we were married, and hadn't told our parents what we were doing. My boyfriend's father had a bad heart and he felt he'd have another heart attack if he found out.

Now, in the spring of 1968,  the temperature was already like summer, even while the snow was still melting. Unlike those of rainy Vancouver, there had been many cold, sunny days in that lovely long winter, days where I had been happy to walk the snowy streets to campus wearing my new, sexy, high, leather boots  (which I had to lie on my back on the bed to pull up),  a long, waist-hugging, khaki Women's Army coat (with buttons showing the head of Athena) which I had bought at the Salvation Army, and a very long scarf. People said I looked like Lara in the movie "Dr. Jivago," and I felt beautiful for the first time since childhood. In Vancouver my hair had always been limp from the heavy moisture that  in the air, and my face had broken out too easily. Here, my hair crackled with electric static when I brushed it, and my face was wondrously clear in the dry air. The winter sun had lifted my spirits, too, out of their usual melancholy.  Best of all, we had had a very good winter together. We now felt triumphant, as if we had run a gauntlet together and survived. All our worries about sharing, trusting, rubbing against each other in close proximity, being able to study and work under the same roof, had been dispelled. Our relationship had never been stronger. 

Having just hosted Expo 67, which had brought tourists from all over the world to its streets, Montreal was an exciting place to live at that time. On the streets downtown, we kept meeting other young people we knew from Vancouver, many of whom had been guides to Expo and were staying on to go to McGill. It was as if everyone had come to Montreal, as if it was the place to be. As the weather warmed, bistros suddenly had tables out on the sidewalk filled with French students drinking coffee and smoking Gallois cigarettes; boutiques we passed had rock music blaring and young people flowing out of them. The pubs, too, when we visited them, were overflowing with students in a way the Vancouver pubs never were, for there, the campus was far away from the downtown area. In fact, Montreal, with its many universities, both French and English, seemed alive with college students, which gave it a lively, 'happening' atmosphere, despite the habited nuns also occasionally encountered on the streets, in twos, or spied in the yards of the many Catholic schools, or the gardens of the many convents.

 In Vancouver, the fashion for the young had been long, hippie skirts and sandals, influenced by California. Here, everywhere, girls were wearing mini-skirts and knee-high boots, influenced by the Carnaby Street look from England. I wore minis and boots, too, even to teach at McGill, and enjoyed a certain attention from the profs there, both young and old, stodgy and 'hip'. They were trying to get used to the Youth Culture, which affected them all quite differently, for this was a time of intellectual change, too. It was all quite different from U.B.C., where the profs had been very old and stodgy and had viewed any pretty female student as a nuisance, an unwelcome distraction in  their classes. (Although in our last years there, we had experienced a transfusion of modernity when American profs in loafers, open-necked shirts and slacks arrived; they had slouched at their desks up front rather than standing at the podium, and had held classes at their homes where beer was served, and had generally brought the beatnik movement to try to shake up all the Scottish and British profs of the Englsh department)

In Montreal, although one of my thesis advisers, when I first arrived at his office to meet him, looked with distaste at me and said, "I always feel I'm wasting my time advising pretty girl students, since they're just going to drop out and get married," most profs treated me well. (Some  openly flirted with me, which was gratifying, but also discouraging at times, for I wanted to be taken seriously.) 
 I was not just a pretty girl in a mini skirt and boots. In fact, I worked hard to prove I wasn't . My teaching was going very well. So were my own doctoral classes, many of which were very stimulating. For a change, I felt unafraid to offer my opinions in seminars, and often felt I was being listened to with respect. I was getting good grades. I also had been asked to chair a student-faculty committee dedicated to changing the PhD reading exam to something students could actually pass. I was proud of that, and felt that it was worth the long hours of arguing with students and faculty members about just how much  power the latter would give to the former, just to have the credibility of being considered something other than frivolous or not political. 

Mostly, however, I remember being with John, and in love. Exchanging raised eyebrows and private grins in classes, waiting to get home to our cozy, apartment, which was furnished with only a bed, a restaurant booth for the kitchen, only one desk, for John  (I studied on the bed), and a stereo set. I, who had never cooked, used a new book called "The I Hate to Cook Book' to make things like baked potatoes filled with hamburger, mushrooms and mushroom soup. I also baked banana or tomato soup bread, following my grandmother's recipes (I often felt like I was auditioning for the role of wife);  John and I both made spaghetti or chili and many, many cups of tea, and we lay in each other's arms when we should have been studying or marking students' papers. John was very considerate (he brought me tea in bed in the mornings, or left it, covered, by my side of the bed if he had to leave early to teach a class); he was very funny and witty and charming, full of puns and Monty Python imitations, and I loved him very much. And, amazingly, he seemed to love me.  He also  had a neat beard and a great head of shoulder-length hair  and was very handsome; we were always being told what a cute couple we were by our friends, or even strangers. 

But our teaching fellowships were coming to an end at the end of the spring term, so we had to give up our apartment and go back to Vancouver.  We couldn't face going back to live with our parents, or in separate apartments. If we got married, we could be together wherever we lived. My only worry was that we would ruin a great relationship by getting married, for marriage was an institution under attack at that time, and almost no one we knew, except those in our parents' generation, were married; people even asked us why we were marrying, and we felt we had to shape an answer: we wanted to share an old-fashioned commitment, we said. Still, we didn't want all the expensive trappings of a traditional wedding. We figured that we could drive across Canada for our honeymoon; a drive-a-car agency was willing to give us a car for free to deliver to Calgary, and we could take a train from there. That would solve the problem of getting home, plus it gave us an excuse to marry in Montreal without our parents, whom we felt would ruin things.

In a Unitarian ceremony we wrote ourselves, at McGill chapel, we were married in June. We had twelve guests, no attendants, and no one to 'give me away': John and I walked hand in hand down the aisle.  I wore a white, off-the rack, $25 dress with a short, belled skirt that  floated about me when I whirled, and a straw hat with shasta daisies woven around the brim. I looked almost like Elvira Madigan. John wore his first suit, a charcoal black one with bell-bottomed cuffs,  a purple shirt and red tie. Our black and white wedding pictures, taken by one of the guests in the back yard of another friend, where we had the reception, resemble out-takes from that film, with us embracing, laughing, under trees and amid grasses. (In reality, there was also a picnic table in that back yard, a BBQ and a lot of weeds, but that's the wonderful thing about photos, they isolate a moment, omitting all other details than those focused upon, so we might as well have been in a meadow, alone.) In the world outside, there were French-English problems in the city; Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was inciting Trudeau Mania in Canada (he was what my girlfriends and I had discussed at a wedding shower we were determined to make different from the usual); in the States, there was resistance to the Vietnam War. For us, these were distant horns blowing. All that mattered was the moment, our moment. 

Forty-one years later, I sit here reminiscing. I am still married, happily, to my wonderful husband, who still has a fairly good head of hair, is still charming, and still leaves me my morning drink-- these days coffee-- at my place at the kitchen table, when he goes off to teach in the mornings. It takes only the sound of Mozart's 'Elvira Madigan' music to make me remember that year, that place, that girl I used to be. It is a beautiful memory, as beautiful as the music itself, and I feel no bitterness at no longer being young and beautiful. I had my day, my time in the sun. I was lucky. I still am.

 

I have just returned from Stratford, Ontario's Shakespeare Festival, where I saw two plays that were excellent, although as different as night and day. The first was "A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum", and was very funny. The second has left me wondering why directors create art that jars unnecessarily, or when the same point could have been made with a minimum of cacophony and ugliness, especially when the playwright has given no such instructions on such a way to have the play interpreted on stage.

I have seen jarring theatre before. Everything from "Marat-Sade", with its mentally ill patients lolling around the stage, drooling on audience members in the front row and throwing carrots at them (I know; it was one of the few times in my life that I had snagged first row seats, and I regretted it) to "King Lear", with a wind howling loudly, old men being beaten and someone's eyes being gouged out. I have understood, in those case, a need to disturb the audience, to wake up its members, and/or to elicit pity and compassion. Such rude awakenings are sometimes necessary for tragedy, or even satire, to be effective.

 "A Midsummer Night's Dream," isn't a tragedy: it ends with a happy ending complete with weddings, as classic comedies do. But it was light years in difference from "Forum,"  with a darkness better suited for a tragedy. As the title suggests, most of the action of the play occurs at night. Yet the production I saw presented us with a darkness that extended into all its corners, even during day scenes. There may have been a method to it, but there was too much madness for me to feel any love for it, for it contains nothing soft or beautiful or magical to lift either spirit or mind.

Upon first taking my seat, I saw that the stage was disappointingly bare--even barren. The stage designs I have seen in the past have always contained at least the suggestion of some kind of garden or forest, even for its early scenes in Athens, if only to indicate that this city is a fruitful place. The Forest of Arden, with its trees and flowers, where most of the action of the play will take place, should be right around the corner, swung into place, perhaps, by stage hands as the Athenian lovers meet there, where the fairies will cause them to spend a night of confusion.

This stage, however, was not just minimalist in style, but actually painted a dark grey, with harsh lighting and not so much as a chair or a tree to signify some sort of location. It could have been the stage set for "Waiting for Godot." Autumn leaves, scattered at its edges, were the only indication that it was going to be used for a play at all. But autumn leaves?? The play is set in summer! Midsummer, to be exact! The buzz around me suggested that the set had the audience puzzled from the start about the director's intentions.

The only other 'prop' was a metallic, modern-looking balcony high and ugly against the wall, jutting out over the stage. Soon after the play began--in a shower of machine gun fire, with soldiers rampelling down the side of the theatre wall as if we were being hijacked by Somalian pirates---- this balcony fell, with a jarring thud, onto the stage, to form an ugly vee-shaped wreck. My heart sank as well. This was not going to be a play about love and poetry and fairy magic; it was going to be modernized into something else. Something ugly.

The balcony remained on the stage throughout the play like the landscape after a terrorist attack. The actors climbed all over it, or perched, nervously, on it, or lurked or hid behind it. It kept the atmosphere edgy and as uncomfortable as they no doubt were, and made me ache just to look at it for two or more hours.

This  was designed, one imagined, to fit in with the fact that at the start of the play, Theseus, King of Athens, has just fought a war against and conquered the Amazons, has stolen their queen, Hippolyta, and has brought her home to Athens with him to marry her. The setting and initial gunfire make the start of their relationship fraught with violence, ugliness and uneasiness, which is reflected in the their dialogue. However, as the lights lift, and Theseus introduces Hippolyta to Athens, there is absolutely nothing on stage in lighting or props to suggest they have left the battle zone.

The actor playing Hippolyta gave her the proper reluctant air. She is understandably skeptical about Theseus' stated intention to woo her and win her heart, despite the fact that he has captured her violently and brought her here against her will. And who can blame her?  Athens doesn't seem any different from a battlefield. And in this productiion, Theseus still acts as if he's leading troups, with a sharp, bullying tone that is far from that of a lover--or even of a man trying to morph into one now that war has ended.

The fact that Theseus was wearing riding boots, jodpers and a hunting jacket and that his Amazon queen is also in modern dress--a 1950s evening gown-- also gave me a sinking feeling. I much prefer plays that keep their costumes to the century in which they are set. Of course, "Dream" is a bit of a muddle already when it comes to its whereabouts and era. The Forest of Arden, for example, is not a Greek wood outside of Athens, full of dryads and nymphs, but is a very English forest full of fairies with names like Cobweb and Mustardseed. It's always as if the two Athenian couples, with their Greek names, have been transported to some area near Shakespeare's own Stratford, perhaps in Shakespeare's own era, for a night of confusion that goes beyond that of mistaken identity and into the realm of  time travel. Given this ambiguity of time and place, either Renaissance clothing or that of ancient Greek works well for the townspeople; the fairies can wear any era's styles; it's just their names and actions that make them weird and out of step with the court of Theseus. However, the suggestion is that they are nature spirits, so colors usually range in forest or garden colors.

Modern clothing, however, is always jarring for this play, for the action on the stage is totally un-modern, at least for Western society. A warrior queen has been captured and brought back to be a wife for King Theseus, her conquerer; a girl, Helena, pleads to that same king to free her from her father's anger and his plan to kill her if she doesn't marry the man of his choice; considering Theseus' attitude to women's choices, it's not surprising that she is told that she must do so, or will be forced to become a devotee of Diana, a perpetual virgin. These are situations that clash when they are presented by actors in modern dress, unless there is some subtext to the play to suggest why this era is comparable to the original one.

On that note, I would have accepted Helena as a girl in a burkha, since that would have been indicative of the fact that we still live in a world where, in some places, women still have no choices in their lives. But please, not while dressed in a 1950s crinoline, styletto heels and long white gloves. Been there, done that. And although I didn't have the freedom I have today, I certainly wasn't in danger of being forced into an unwanted marriage. So what, if anything, is the idea behind the director's choice of costuming here? Why the Fifties? Is it chosen because of its social rigidity, as a contrast to the fairies' more lawless world? Perhaps. But then, wouldn't the fairy world be one of hippies, to show the counter cultural shift?

I'll admit it: I'm a Romantic. I was first attracted to this play when I was in the girlhood stage of wanting to believe in fairies--around nine years old. Somehow, I saw Arthur Rackham's art work depicting scenes of fairies amongst blossoms and trees; of a Puck dressed in green tights and tunic, like Peter Pan; of a Titania and Oberon, Queen and King of the Fairies, dressed in feathery garments of such intense white and black that they could only be symbols of Day and Night, Light and Darkness, even Female and Male powers. I have always loved this symbolism, and the flowery language that described it. Even as a girl, I memorized some of the speeches such as that of Puck, Oberon's mischievous assistant, when he tells Oberon where Titania can be found:

"I know a bank where the wild Thyme blows
Where Oxblood and the pretty Daisy grows....
There sleeps Titania, sometimes of a night..
And there the serpent, sheds its enamel skin
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in."

(Something like that; my memory fails on the rest.) But the general impression the words give is of flowers and Nature's bounty, of fairies that could be small enough to be able to sit on a petal, or tall enough to love a human, as Titania is forced to do. 

The idea of the fairies as Night and Day was expanded on in the black and white Hollywood movie of the thirties. Oberon arrives in full regalia, coming into the bright, flowery meadow where Titania, his queen, is sitting with her tiny attendant fairies, all in white, gauzy garments full of sunlight. He and his attendants are dressed in black, and he trails a black cape behind him that is large enough to swallow the woods with darkness; the star designs on his cape become the night's stars. It is a movingly beautiful moment, especially when accompanied by Mendelsohn's music for this play, which has a long passage of horns to announce this arrival. Such setting, costuming and lighting clues us to the fact that Oberon and Titania are Nature spirits as essential as night and day. The fact that they are quarreling suggests a real rift in the Natural world.

Strangely enough, although Shakespeare's fairies talk of how their quarrel has caused Nature to be unlike its normal self, even in its weather, this rift is seldom shown on stage or in film versions of the play. Yes, the Athenian lovers get a confused night as Puck mixes up magic potions and leads them on through a ridiculous series of romantic mistaken identity crises. But the Forest of Arden and Athens are usually portrayed as whole, unbroken or unchanged, despite this rift the fairies have brought about. I can see how a director might decide to show this rift in the staging. 

I think the director of the production I saw wanted to suggest by the broken, fallen balcony that proper love, of the "Romeo and Juliet"- balcony- scene sort cannot exist in a world where such a cosmic disruption has occurred. As the fairies have stated, even the weather has been disrupted, hence the autumn leaves--and subsequent snow--at midsummer. (Like Global Warming?) And, lo and behold, when the fairy king and queen make up, near the end of the play, the fallen, ugly balcony suddenly lifts itself, magically, and is whole again--quite a wonderfully theatrical moment. Now, if only there had been magic elsewhere in the play!

Instead, the fairies are portrayed as goths and punks, in black leather, torn black lace and torn black net stockings. Clearly the Forest of Arden is a good forty years ahead of Athens in styles. Or maybe the fairies are meant to be as disruptive to human society as bikers and punks sometimes are. Something like that. They are certainly members of a counter culture. But they were also dreary to look at as they sprawled across the steps to the stage, smoking pot pipes, stretching into ugly shapes, making sexually crude gestures, tripping major characters, pinching them and so on. Puck even went around doing such pranks as pouring a watering tin's contents down the front pants of a sleeping Athenian lover. 

Puck! Oh, how far he had come from being like Peter Pan! He looked, instead, like Neil Gaiman's Dream, from his animated series, only without the sense of heroic melancholy Gaiman gives that character. He was very skinny, in tight pants, black ragged clothing and scarf, with wild, black hair and a face to scare children with. A face that was deathly pale, thin, scarred (or tattooed into scar-like defacement), and with eyes looking like dark bullet holes. He was not mischievous so much as vicious and cynical, making his description of the harmless pranks he pulls seem out of place. This Puck wouldn't just spoil the milk, I thought; he'd poison it, then laugh as you drank it and went into spasms.

As it is, he makes the Athenian maids and men frantic, desperate, crawling on hands and knees and clasping each other's legs while enchanted and wrongly pursuing one another. They even tear the clothing off one another, which injects some unscripted laughs as the Athenian men jump around in their jockey shorts, but no sense of cosmic humor at their plight, which is an exaggeration of what Love makes all lovers do. It is all rough and raw and awful to watch. And the music is discordant. If not Mendelsohn, we could at least have had psychedelic rock for the forest.

Oberon was no better than Puck in temperment. Played by a black actor in tight leather pants and lots of black frills, he pranced and posed like Michael Jackson; all he lacked was a sequined glove. He could have come across as elegant, or even glamorous. Instead, he came across as meaner than he should be. Yes, in the original, Oberon tricks his queen by making her fall in love with Bottom, a rustic would-be actor and working class man from Athens who has been magicked into an ass's head. But Oberon usually is shown doing this as a prank, not as a mean-spirited curse laid on his stubborn queen. But this Oberon ranted on, angrily, without a sign of love or tenderness as he tricked her, and showed little gentleness when he later awoke his queen from her spell and supposedly made up with her.

The restoration of the balcony was a nice touch. However, I would love to have seen something on the stage to suggest that the world in general had been made whole again after the fairies have mended their quarrel. Flowers would have been nice. ( I still remember how my heart lifted when, in the movie "Excalibur', the trees burst into bloom as the Knights of King Arthur rode out to defend their kingdom one last time after the spell was broken and the Waste Land was healed.) Mendelsohn's music would have been wonderful, something to lift the spirit. Instead, the Athenian couples appeared in 1950s wedding clothing, as did Theseus and Hippolyta. They still seemed edgy. The stage lights were brighter, but no softer or warmer, and although the leaves had been swept away, I have no memory of there being flowers, or any color, for that matter, on stage.

With the rustics' presenting of their creaky, comical play, instead of there being a mood of gentle mockery by the wedding couples of the lower class men's acting and speaking, there was a real, snarky sniping at the poor players, who were visibly disconcerted by it. It made you dislike the play in general, for this scene should be full of fun, and one should feel that Theseus has been softened somewhat by Hippolyta's presence, and should be showing more of a loving, easy manner towards her. But the vicious mood of nightmare (not dream) when lost in the Forest of Arden has not really dispersed with the daylight or the lovers' move back to Athens. Theseus is no more loving in his manner with Hippolyta than earlier in the play, even though his words might suggest he has changed. The newly-weds bicker unpleasantly over the play they're watching. Are we to believe that their marriage can never be right, since it started with violence and confusion? Or that marriage as a state is no dream? If so, then the play has been turned  to a tragedy.

Later, the fairies' 'blessing' of the house, which has been presented quite beautifully in other productions, was here like the swarming of a motorcycle gang over an elegant dinner party: not pretty or wholesome or healing. And certainly not indicative of a Nature once again whole, ready to enrich and bring about healing and progeny to the couples sleeping there on stage. In short, the director seems to have sacrificed a true mood of resolution, created by staging and accompanying music,  for the sake of edginess and avant garde posing.