The Emerald Light in the Air Read Free Page A

alone in the world and you despise yourself.”
    â€œThou speak’st aright; I am that”—here he paused for an especially long time, as if thinking about a hard problem—“merry wanderer of the night.”
    â€œListen to me. Puck is not some frolicking clown. He’s Hobgoblin! Beelzebub! Lucifer! Satan, the enemy of love! Puck is a wretched, willfully destructive creature. Let’s do a quick exercise. Repeat after me: I am a wretched, willfully destructive creature.”
    â€œI am a wretched, willfully destructive. Creature.”
    â€œEverything I do creates pain.”
    â€œEverything I. Do creates pain.”
    â€œNo one loves me.”
    â€œNo. One loves me.”
    â€œI’m fucked up.”
    â€œI’m fucked…”
    He was sniffling. His voice cracked. Were there tears? I could not see the young actor’s eyes because they were hidden behind dark lenses. I leaned close to my Puck, in order to growl in his ear, “I wear the number of the beast.”
    â€œHuh?” he whimpered.
    I smacked the blind kid on the shoulder. “Let’s run this play, Martin, I mean Puck. When we get to the section where you chase the young lovers through the forest, go ahead and swat our legs with your cane.”
    And to the cast, the Royals and rude Mechanicals, the devils and imps and lost children, I proclaimed, “This show needs to move , people. It’s a comedy!”
    Or is it? Students of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will undoubtedly be familiar with the trend, in recent years, to emphasize horror in the drama: faeries played as ghouls, Oberon as a molester; Bottom’s transformation depicted as a grotesque, literally asinine mutilation. There is a reactionary aspect to this movement away from traditional fun and games; construing the Dream as a hellish sexual nightmare rather than as an innocuous garden party is a way of making the play interestingly “modern” in the post–world war, post-Holocaust, thermonuclear and psychoanalytic era.
    â€œMake it ugly,” I instructed my cast in the final week before the show. It was a Sunday afternoon, our first—and only, thanks to storms blowing in—outdoor run-through. The day was overcast and unseasonably chilly, with winds from the north smelling like rain. Crows perched on tree branches and the faeries’ wooden platforms, three plywood decks connected by swaying footbridges, everything balanced precariously in the high, heavy oak limbs that reached out to shade Puck’s deep hole, dug “center stage” at the southernmost edge of the Barry College green, our theater.
    â€œUp in the trees, faeries, let’s go,” I called. Girls took turns climbing. A few had trouble getting up. Sarah Goldwasser, the regal Titania, marched over and said, “Reg, will you tell Oberon to stop grabbing my nipples in our fight scene?”
    â€œI think it’s kind of good for the scene, Sarah.”
    â€œHe does it too hard. My nipples don’t like it that hard,” she said, and huffed off toward her bower.
    â€œHere comes the rain,” a boy’s voice beside me exclaimed.
    â€œI’d appreciate it if you would concentrate on your acting and not worry about the weather, Billy.”
    â€œHow are we supposed to do any acting when the entire stage is nothing but a hole in the ground?”
    The boy had a point. And I had an answer. “The circular patterns sketched by our movements around the pit will illustrate mankind’s proximity to the abyss, and this in turn will be a dramaturgical reminder of the themes of revolution and renewal in English morris dancing, which, you’ll recall from the first week of rehearsal, Billy, is an acknowledged folk source for Shakespeare’s May Day comedies.”
    I wish I could say I was pleased with this impromptu oration. Purely technical observations concerning the larger implications of stagecraft are