The Place’s the Thing
Saturday, June 28th by scott malia
It is often said in real estate that the key to a good sale is location, location, location. Whether or not that is true of theatre, particularly Shakespearean theatre, is debatable. In the past fifty years in particular, Shakespearean production has been defined by the dispensability of time and place. This is not to say that location is unimportant to twentieth- and twenty-first-century directors; indeed it is often crucial to their conceptualizations of the plays. The location, however, that is most significant to these productions is not the one that was written into the text, but the new one assigned to it by the director’s concept. Perhaps the thought remains that Verona, Padua, Denmark and England are foreign to contemporary audiences (particularly American) ones and their culture/history will not resonate.
This type of thinking in part has fueled the concept behind a Georgia production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In this incarnation, the play’s setting of Athens, Greece is reimagined as Athens, Georgia. The show has even peppered the script with local references to support this switch. This practice is far from new; in fact, several hundred years ago, it was quite common for “local color” (i.e. regional landmarks) to be incorporated into the scenery of a show regardless of the play’s setting. Now, I’m sure this is just intended for a few cute jokes to allow the production to wink at the audience. Still, I wonder how the mythological motifs of this Dream will come off in Georgia as opposed to Greece.
