Elm Shakespeare Company Photo.
There are fairies out in Edgerton Park this summer. Look for them by the old oak, the twinkling lanterns, the chime of brass bells, emerging out of the purple mist. These sprites come out as the sun sets, bounding across the stage as romantic Bollywood-inspired music trills from somewhere up above.
This year—its 30th—Elm Shakespeare Company leans into the fantastical, swoonworthy fairy world of the Bard’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and layers it with Bollywood tropes and Hindu mythology. The fairies, Peaseblossom (Callum Walz), Cobweb (Fiona Donaghue), Moth (Willow Oliviera), and Mustardseed (Marilyn Robinson) are played by new and returning members of the Elm Apprentice Company, all high school or college students who work alongside an accomplished cast with chemistry for days.
The show, co-directed by Rebecca Goodheart (Elm’s producing artistic director) and Deshik Vansadia (founder of the Shakespeare Company of India) runs Tuesdays through Sundays through August 31. The pre-show starts at 7:30 p.m. and admission is free, with a suggested donation of $30.
For the Company’s 30th anniversary, set designer Jamie Burnett has created a woodsy realm that audiences can disappear into for a few hours. Jewel-tones coat the custom-made Alexander Clark Playhouse, which has been rearranged to wrap around a huge tree in the center of the park. As audience members, all we have to do is find a grassy spot and let the fairy magic sweep us away.
“Our world is so contentious, and there is such stress on everybody,” Goodheart said in an interview with the Arts Paper. “No matter what side of the fence you land on, I really felt what we needed was something where we can come together and laugh and sing and share a meal and have the simple joy of a great comedy under the stars.”
Tying into the need for refuge, the co-directors thought it was past time to pay homage to South Asian culture and community, and more broadly, serve immigrant communities who are increasingly at risk in the United States. What emerges is a celebration of Bollywood film, costumes, music, and dance, married with Shakespeare’s storytelling—a combination that works incredibly well. Both traditions are known for aptly presenting the all-encompassing drama of love.
“You’re still trying to find the arc and you are still trying to do justice to the language,” Amrith Jayan, who plays Demetrius, said about that combination from the actors’ perspective. “But that being met with Midsummer set in a whole different culture, I think was really beautiful, and I feel like the Indian culture sort of lends itself into this world really beautifully.”
A Midsummer Night’s Dream follows three parallel worlds: the wedding preparations of a noble family of Athens, a troupe of players rehearsing the story of star-crossed lovers Pyramus and Thisbe, and the king and queen of the fairy kingdom who infuse the other worlds with their magic.
With the magic of the forest’s flowers, the fairy king Oberon (Nomè SiDone, who also plays his character’s mortal counterpart, Duke Theseus) and his sprite Puck (Midori Nakamura) cast love spells as characters lie sleeping, so that when they awake and see their intended love, a bell trills, music starts, and they can’t tear their eyes away.
Under the flower’s spell, Titania, the fairy queen, (Christina Acosta Robinson, also Duchess Hippolyta) falls in love with one the players, Bottom (Benjamin Curns), dressed as a donkey, while both Demetrius and Lysander (Ameya Narkar), who previously fought over fair Hermia’s (Sarah Lo) hand in marriage, both fall for her best friend, Helena (Angelique Archer), to the women’s utter distress and confusion.
On a recent night, pandemonium ensued in the play’s wildest act as lovers literally frog-jumped over each other to reach the object of their desire. Demetrius and Lysander clung to Helena’s legs, kissed up her arm, and cooed like doves. Hermia shrieked as her engagement ring was plucked off her finger and tried to claw out her best friend’s eyes out of jealousy. Up in the oak, in her nest of a bed, Titania stroked Bottom’s donkey ears, nestled in his lap, humming, “Oh how I love thee!”
When obsession all became too much for words and simple gestures, music took over, and the characters launched into a meticulously choreographed Bollywood dance. The score blends Hindi classics and compositions by Nathan Roberts written especially for this production, and the choreography is by Vansadia with help from Jayan and Narkar.
“We wanted to have the magic be the music and dance in this play, which solves the problems,” Vansadia said.
In that revelry there are earnest questions—one of them, Goodheart said, is “What is love?” Shakespeare’s text offers a blurred line between love and magic, an ambiguity that the co-directors chose to exploit.
“We really talked about the fact that the magical flower is opening up people's true passions,” said Goodheart. Although love is induced by a magical flower, in this production’s understanding, it is that magic that reveals something very true about each characters’ desires.
This extends to queer love: during the dances—which Puck seems to be conducting from the wings—partners are switched and Hermia and Helena, Dememtrius and Lysander dance together seductively. “The story is about love and love in all of its forms. We try to honor that,” Goodheart said, emphasising that queer storylines are ubiquitous in Shakespeare, especially in terms of self-expression and choice. Ultimately, all the characters choose the love that is true, not the one prescribed by their families.
Just before the final wedding festivities, Duke Theseus (SiDone) stood regally, center stage, prefacing the nuptials with a monologue. In the wings, the troupe of players excitedly prepared for their own play’s debut (that play, the Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe, was also an incredible, hilarious highlight of this particular production).
But before we could celebrate, Theseus remained earnest: “Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, such shaping fantasies that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends.”
When we allow ourselves to be swept into this dream, we allow ourselves to be deluded, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. With music and dance, splashy colors and melodrama, Elm’s Midsummer has placed the sensation of love onto the stage. This production argues that lovers (obsessed, delirious, pining, cooing desperately like doves)—whether or not they are under the flower’s spell—comprehend more than logic, and that’s quite magical. The fairies brought us here, but it’s a different kind of magic that allows us to wake from this dream and continue on in the real world.
As the play closed on a recent performance, the lights faded into a sleepy darkness and a purple mist emerged. Music thrummed, and Nakamura, as Puck, cried, “good night unto you all!” The fairies, gathering themselves, took a last look out and disappeared into the mist, to emerge again the next night.
Elm Shakespeare Company's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream runs Tuesdays through Sundays at Edgerton Park, 75 Cliff Street in New Haven, through August 31. Magda Lena Griffel is a graduate of the 2024 Youth Arts Journalism Initiative and a rising sophomore at Columbia University.