After the Happily Ever After
RIFFS on SHAKESPEARE: Offensive Shadows
Studio 180
The National Post
The Tarragon's Extra Space has been twice blessed this year. At the beginning, it housed Hannah Moscovitch's East of Berlin; now, in a guest production by Joel Greenberg's Studio 180, we have Paul Dunn's Offensive Shadows, two thirds of which amount to the best new writing, and some of the best acting and direction, to have turned up since then.
The remaining third looks like an attempt to transform a piece that at 55 minutes was the deserved hit of last year's Summerworks into some-thing more befitting a full night out. It's ill-advised. Dunn's play is a riff on A Midsummer Night's Dream, and it takes its title from Puck's last speech to the audience: "If we shadows have offended/Think but this and all is mended." Puck himself, though, had no part in Dunn's original which focused on Shakespeare's four lovers -- Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius -- suggesting what they might have been like before their mixed-up night in the wood and speculating on what might have happened to them after it.
That's all still there, but first we get a little bit of Puck. His last lines in Shakespeare -- "Give me your hands if we be friends/And Robin shall restore amends" --are his first lines here, and he follows them up with a more recent but still classic paraphrase: "Clap hands if you believe in fairies." That's an equivalence I'd never noticed before, and it's also fun. He then embarks on a long monologue whose burden is that, in fact, people no longer believe in fairies, and that's bad, and it's all the fairies' fault. Specifically, it's Oberon's fault; Puck doesn't like his boss much, making it clear that he's a tyrannical and unappreciative employer as well as, to Titania, a louse of a spouse. Much of what this "rock-star fairy" tells us amounts to a jaundiced synopsis of the original story; to this Puck adds an account of what humanity has come to in the subsequent millennia, during which time its taken its cue from that tiresome old rationalist Theseus -- he who equated lunatics, lovers and poets. The consequences seem to have included global warming: cf. Titania's "forgeries of jealousy" aria, in which fairy quarrels were held responsible for the terrible weather people were having. That too was a topical speech in its time.
Andrew Kushnir plays Puck with some flair, greater energy, and a progressively diminishing store of rhythmic resource. But then he's stuck with a monotonous text that's increasingly reliant on undermining any lyrical expectations with a string of disgruntled four-letter words. Well, Puck it. It feels like padding.
It also doesn't fit, intellectually or chronologically, with the excellent stuff that follows. Dunn's original picks up from where Shakespeare's left off, not from unnumbered centuries later. It's true that his young quartet look, talk and behave like modern teenagers, but this is the case -- well, maybe not the talking part -- in many modern productions. His achievement is to show how exactly the parts fit. He gives us the back-story in a series of reminiscing monologues. We learn that, crudely put, Helena was the school slut and Hermia the school virgin, Demetrius a nerd and Lysander a jock. That's more differentiation than Shakespeare gave them, the men especially, but it's perfectly consistent with what he did tell us. It seems that Hermia was going with Demetrius, in a bored sort of way and with parental approval, until she set eyes on Lysander; Demetrius, on the rebound, had a one-time fling with Helena who proceeded to stalk him. They recall these things in a bemused sort of way, on the eve of their double wedding.
Flash-forward to five years later: the couples have reunited for an overnight picnic in the same old woods. They have somewhat lost touch. Lysander, still irritatingly successful, has moved with a discontented and frustrated Hermia to the Athenian equivalent of Silicon Valley. Demetrius and Helena, who stayed home, aren't too happily-ever-after either. Hermia, ever the princess, hates camping out; Helena is more than cool with it.
Lysander can still beat Demetrius at everything and eventually achieves the tryst with Helena for which he'd briefly panted five years earlier: a development that, as it turns out, satisfies nobody. The 21st-century text continues to play creatively with the 16th-century one: "is that a bush or a bear?" Hermia asks Demetrius as they glimpse the outline of the other couple coupling. Dunn plays absolutely fair with Shakespeare's creations and with his own; he's closer, in other words, to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead than to Good Night, Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet). He never goes in for pastiche but he turns teenspeak into its own kind of poetry.
He gets a crackerjack production from Michael Shamata, one that goes at warp speed without ever losing clarity and in which every line shifts the balance. Jessica Greenberg, Kimwun Perehinec, Mark McGrinder and Jason Mitchell make a formidable foursome with Greenberg's Helena, which is the most flamboyant role, and Mitchell's Demetrius, which is the least, maybe coming out a fraction ahead. Having just seen the Shaw Festival's Follies, I found surprising similarities between that show and this one. Both depict the aftermath of a theatrical dream; both reassemble two couples with tangled erotic pasts; both show bright things coming inexorably to confusion; both end in reconciliation that's more like resignation. As an actor (three standout performances at Stratford this year) and playwright (with plays for Stratford and Theatre Direct before this one), Dunn is a striking double talent. Be patient with the evening's first part and you'll be richly rewarded by the rest.