Fairy tale

A Dream collaboration at Trinity Rep

by Bill Rodriguez

At a rehearsal for Trinity Rep's season-opening production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Fred Sullivan is saying how his instructions to Puck, as fairy lord Oberon, have been sounding as boring as a laundry list. Over the next few minutes, he and director Alan MacVey, along with Stephen Berenson, who is playing Puck, work on the problem. Sullivan comes up with the business of Puck starting to leave too soon. Berenson suggests that Oberon put a hand on the impatient sprite to stop him. The director now and then points out where stressing a word or not pausing a beat makes the meaning behind the Elizabethan diction hard to follow.

More than 15 minutes is spent on what will be a mere two minutes of stage time at Trinity Repertory Company. But by the end, the exchange flies along. An attentive viewer now can absorb a surprising amount about the characters' personalities and their relationship.

And it was accomplished without MacVey issuing commands like some general marshaling forces -- though that would be an understandable approach for such a complex, cast-of-thousands, three-ring circus of a comedy.

Later on, passing through the lobby, company member William Damkoehler will bring up the subject on his own in casual conversation, saying of MacVey: "He's so willing to take suggestions from us."

As well he should. Among the regionals, Trinity has quite a reputation as an actor-oriented theater in the ensemble tradition. Founding director Adrian Hall started the tradition here, and actors have come to expect collaboration. That's part of why the director-oriented interregnum of Anne Bogart eight years ago was so difficult for the company.

MacVey is quite aware of how things are done at Trinity. He has worked with several of these actors as director of the Bread Loaf acting ensemble in Vermont. Yet he was still surprised.

"Brian [McEleney] and Anne [Scurria] are very strong, have a great imagination and bring wonderful ideas to whatever part they're playing," MacVey said. "So I expected that. But what I didn't know to expect was to have 14 people all like that all around you."

His hands aflurry above a tuna sandwich, MacVey is speaking in the Trinity archives room during a rehearsal break, surrounded by posters and photographs from decades of plays.

In the program's director's notes he comments that Midsummer "is the most collaborative work I've ever done." That was out of opportunity rather than obligation. Artistic director Oskar Eustis, who has worked on new plays at Bread Loaf for three summers, never brought up the matter to him.

MacVey explained that the Trinity process corresponded with his own ambitions for this production. "I've directed the play before -- a couple of times -- and I wanted and needed a way to break my own preconceptions of the play, especially in the fairy world. So I wanted this collaborative process," he said, and then smiled at the afterthought: "I got it in spades -- more than I expected."

While in any production it is the actors' job to come up with "the details about how something is to be done," he noted, at Trinity actors also offer to collaborate about everything down to the tone of individual scenes.

"When you have a large group of people doing that, it can be hard to choose what you should do. You have a lot of good ideas. And that's why most directors often decide ahead of time, as opposed to having this sort of chaos of good ideas on the table and having to choose often relatively quickly and instinctively," he said. "As opposed to thoughtfully for a month."

As theatergoers can see in unfocused productions anywhere, one possible response to such an imaginative company is for a director to gulp and back away, to give up on guiding us through a play dense with possibilities. I mentioned how Adrian Hall once compared directing to being a conductor before a lot of brilliant virtuosos, each of whom thought that the passages they played should stand out.

"It's hard to know. You really don't know until you start running it, where it's too much and where it's too little," MacVey replied and described how the first run-through of the entire play a few days before helped solve such a problem. The comedy is about three pairs of lovers on whom the fairies, led by Sullivan's Oberon and Anne Scurria's Titania, play tricks and cast spells before uniting each with the proper mate. MacVey said that the run-through showed that the lovers' concerns and enthusiasms were "out of whack" with the play as a whole. "Their scenes were too high and competing with the fairy world," he said, noting that he needed to lower their volume without losing their energy. "It's not until you hear the whole piece played that you can say, `Well, the oboe's too loud.' "

MacVey said that he came into rehearsal with Shakespeare's fairies, in his mind, "left open to discovery." The results have been pleasantly surprising. "I wouldn't have foreseen that the fairy world would be so aggressive. It's quite aggressive, in a comic way. It's very much combative. That was really the actors who brought it there -- on the basis of my overall idea, but it wasn't the way I expected."

The fairies are played by actors whom you often see in lead roles at Trinity -- Timothy Crowe, Phyllis Kay, Dan Welch, and Janice Duclos. They have been double-cast as the workmen in the play, which provided an enriching opportunity. To the director's delight, the actors began building parallels between the two realms of their characters. The tinker is an electrician in this production, and in the fairy world deals a lot with light. Similarly, the fairy/plumber has an affinity for water.

"It turned out that there is a lot of very specific, idiosyncratic details that each fairy has developed," MacVey said. "I didn't know that that would happen." Costume designer William Lane played along, constantly adjusting their apparel as the actors developed their characters.

MacVey, 50, is chairman of the theater department at the University of Iowa and has been in charge of the Bread Loaf summer theater program for 20 years. As a token of the mutual commitment to ongoing collaboration, he has been appointed associate director at Trinity. In the same spirit, Eustis will go to Iowa for a week this fall to teach.

Sitting at a conference table in the archives room with little more than a week to go before audience previews, MacVey is pleased at how things have gone.

"It will be a very unusual production," he remarked. "Audiences will not have seen a Midsummer quite like this."

And what about the madness of his first Trinity ensemble-style rehearsal? What about what he described as the largest number of strong-willed creative people that he'd ever had to deal with at any one time?

"Chaos often takes more time, but the end product is generally better, more imaginative," he declared. "And it's owned by everybody." n

A Midsummer Night's Dream will be staged at Trinity Reptory Company September 5 through October 19. Call 351-4242.