A Midsummer milestone for Tina Packer and Shakespeare & Company

Courtesy of Shakespeare & Company

An acclaimed director, Tina Packer founded Shakespeare & Company in 1978 in Lenox, Massachusetts. Over a career that spans five decades, Packer has directed or acted in virtually all of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as other classical and contemporary works. Shakespeare in the Theatre: Tina Packer is the first comprehensive analysis of all of her professional Shakespeare productions in their cultural and historical context, drawing on new interviews with the original casts and creative teams as well as Packer herself.

Her work has pursued a ground-breaking approach, including a method for actors described as “dropping in,” which is touched on in the excerpt below. This passage begins an in-depth look at Shakespeare & Company’s 1978 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Mount, where the company performed from 1978 to 2001.

On 21 July 1978, Shakespeare & Company’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream opened to ‘several hundred spectators’ in the natural amphitheatre at The Mount (Merlin and Packer 2020:40). The play was an astute choice. It is perhaps Shakespeare’s most beloved and well-known play while being well-suited for outdoor theatre in midsummer. It introduced the community to Tina Packer’s signature style: the audience-actor relationship was foremost in Packer’s imaginative, site-specific use of the space and the play’s story was told with energy, depth and clarity. Each actor’s natural, unamplified voice resonated with the audience in the evening air: “Tina Packer directed her company to present Shakespeare classically, for the people – nothing high and mighty about it, down to earth and with a strong emphasis on the word’ (Salsbury 1979: 178). Packer transported her audience into the world of her Dream by using the qualities of the estate to immerse them in the action between Athens and the wood.

The audience sat on blankets on the estate’s wide grassy slope leading down from the main house to a flat, open area carpeted with pine needles that was backed by a stand of towering spruce trees. Here, the fairy court held sway. Behind and above the natural amphitheatre where the audience sat was a spacious Italianate terrace on the mansion’s east façade that served as Theseus’s palace. The performance began when Theseus (Dennis Krausnick), donning a long red robe, and Hippolyta (Gillian Barge), draped in purple, appeared on the terrace, inviting the audience to turn around and look up, a physical movement that placed them as subjects to these ancient royal figures as Hippolyta ‘raised her arms to the sky’ (Salsbury 1978: 177). In response to Theseus’s impatience for their nuptial hour, Barge’s Hippolyta invoked the play’s prologue and theme with her resonant voice, further drawing them into the play’s world:

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow,
New bent in heaven, Shall behold the night
Of our solemnities
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.1.7-11)

When the lovers fled to the wood, the audience was surrounded. Actors entered the flat open playing area below from all sides: behind the audience, down the slope, through the woods. At times they seemed to fly, sweeping in on ropes hung from the trees (Salsbury 1979: 177).

A Midsummer Night’s Dream  |  Shakespeare & Company, 1978

The fairies, an integral part of the setting, were wild earthy creatures, scantily clad in short, ragged skirts and ‘leather bodices with acorns or sprigs of pine in their hair’ (Haring 2022). Andrea Haring, who played Titania, explained that during the rehearsal process the actors cast as fairies explored their world through improvisations that clarified what ‘it meant to be elemental and the fact that we’ve existed since the earth began. We were forever young and yet old in spirit’ (2022). Through dropping in Haring found Titania’s empathy for the mother of the ‘changeling boy’ (2.1.120): ‘My connection with my attendant deeply moved me to understand what it meant for the Queen of the fairies to have a friendship with a mortal woman. My promise to her that I would rear her child when she died was a solemn oath to me, and I had to honour it’ (2022). Packer’s dropping in, as explained in the introduction, draws on the actors’ creativity through the process of asking questions, word by word, sequentially through the text, in order to forge an experiential, creative connection between the words and images of the text with the actor’s imagination. Titania articulates in detailed imagery the intimacy shared between the queen of the fairies and her votress:

… she gossiped by my side
And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands …
we have laughed to see the sails conceive
and grow big bellied with the wanton wind;
Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait,
Following, her womb then rich with my young squire,
Would imitate and sail upon the land
To fetch me trifles.
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.1.125-133)

Certainly, an actor can understand the depth of this relationship as expressed in the verse. Dropping in can create a deeper experience of the words because the process requires the actor’s creative and imaginative engagement with each word: Haring experienced the friendship word by word through dropping in, a friendship that was uniquely the result of her personal encounter with the text through the emotions and memories elicited as she said them. In creating a Titania whose honour among women was paramount, Haring’s Titania was more than a comic foil to Oberon’s outlandish trick. She was bound by honour and reciprocity to the mother of the child she agreed to raise as her own. Like her fairy court, Haring’s Titania was of the earth. Her bower was an enormous hammock made from jute webbing strewn with leaves and tied between two pines, slightly upstage left of the playing space. Each fairy individualized her own costume with the guidance of costume designer Kiki Smith. There was little money that first year, so Smith found an innovative way to create the fairies’ benevolent, preternatural sound. The actors playing the fairies ‘hammered old spoons flat and drilled holes in them to make necklaces that created a subtle silvery tinkling as they moved’, lit by spotlights hung high on the pines (Smith 2021). The audience heard this delicate haunting sound as the fairies moved through the woods illuminated by the light filtering down through the trees.

Set designer Bill Ballou created the lighting effects: ‘I got to know those trees intimately because I spent a lot of time climbing them … I would throw a rope over a sturdy limb and climb up, screwing rented stage lights in the trees and running the cables down … We also had lights on the ground illuminating the trees from below’ (Ballou 2022). His bedroom in the main house served as his office and control booth as well: ‘We were shining lights out the windows – doing whatever we could to get the light where it needed to go. It was about learning this whole new environment and having a lot of fun with it’ (Ballou 2022). The lighting was integral to the magic: ‘For “now the hungry lion roars” at the end of Act V, Puck was discovered on The Mount’s highest balcony, pinpointed by a spotlight that made him seem airborne, while the fairies, one by one, lit candles in each window of the house’ (Salsbury 1979: 178).

If the fairies were elemental creatures, Oberon and Puck might have emerged from the primordial soup of New York City’s East Village. Gregory Uel Cole’s tall and agile Black Oberon wore long black pants open on the sides, loosely laced. He completed the look with leather straps around his bare chest and arms. Tony Simotes, white, compact and muscular, donned flowy culottes in mirrored fabric that shimmered as he moved. Simotes was ‘a reluctant Puck’ (Simotes 2021). When Packer asked him to play Puck, as he recalled, ‘I was very unhappy about it because I had just seen an off-Broadway production of the play and Puck was a ballet dancer, and I thought, I don’t want to play a fairy. And that actually became the basis of my character. I was the reluctant fairy, very much of the earth’ (2021). Packer believes that audiences respond when actors don’t try to hide who they are or what they feel, but instead find a way to use these elements in performance. As it turned out, the casting ‘was a match made in heaven’, Simotes continued, because he and Cole knew each other from New York University where they were both in the theatre programme (Simotes 2021). Accordingly, their affect was very New York. Susie Fugle, one of the fairies, described their routine as, ‘a bit cheeky at times’ with the verse (2022). When Oberon ordered Puck, ‘About the wood, go swifter than the wind / And Helena of Athens look thou find’ (3.2.94-95), Puck responded in a stereotypical New York accent, not moving: ‘I go, I go, look how I go‘ (3.2.100). Then ‘he wandered off slowly, with his recalcitrant attitude. It was hysterical. They made that relationship alive and real’ (Fugle 2022). The pair signalled their invisibility with ‘a “musical statues” routine, bodies frozen, eyes darting with comic glee or exasperation’ (Salsbury 1979: 177-8; Figure 2).