Foreword to Midsummer/Jersey
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the two or three greatest stage comedies in the English language. Yet there are parts of the play – as there are parts of all of Shakespeare’s plays – that can be confusing to a modern audience. Not surprisingly, the vocabulary and syntax of the Elizabethan era were somewhat different than they are today, and Shakespeare as written, especially without some form of assistance, can sometimes feel like a foreign language. With this in mind, I wrote Midsummer/Jersey, at least in part, to make A Midsummer Night’s Dream more accessible to modern audiences.
My strategy has been a simple one: I’ve tried to retell the story of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a contemporary setting using characters who are not only modern in type (in this case the denizens of New Jersey beach society), but of a kind who shed fresh light on their Shakespearean models. When we get past the difficulties of Elizabethan language, Hermia, Helena, Lysander and Demetrius are the zippiest of teenagers, full of heart and hope, mischief and hormonal longing. Their counterparts in Midsummer/Jersey – Mia, Helene, Lyle and Denis – are meant to remind us that Shakespeare’s characters are not very different from the teenagers we meet today.
As for the play as a whole, I’ve tracked the original act-by-act, scene-by-scene and often speech-by-speech, in the hope that enjoyment of the modern play will take readers back to the original armed with a kind of structural road map. It is easy for students to look on Shakespeare as an uphill battle, and there are plenty of adults who share the view of the great comic playwright George S. Kaufman that Shakespeare is about a lot of kings who never get to sit down. The truth, of course, is vastly different; and it is one of the goals of Midsummer/Jersey to send as many people as possible back to A Midsummer Night’s Dream with tools for understanding its miraculous architecture. The structure of the play is simply breathtaking: In five acts it juggles four separate comic plots, and there isn’t a minute of confusion or boredom from start to finish. If the play were a building, it would be Buckingham Palace and the Taj Mahal rolled into one.
Part of my love for A Midsummer Night’s Dream is Shakespeare’s remarkable idea of pitting the fairy world against the down-to-earth world of the lovers and the tradesmen. The idea is so simple and ingenious that the notion of updating the setting to almost any society with well-defined social classes – including the New Jersey beach culture – became increasingly obvious the more I worked on the play. But updating implies currency, and it is important to the success of Midsummer/Jersey that the cultural references in the play continue to feel modern to every new audience. For this reason, I hope that future directors of Midsummer/Jersey will make an effort to keep the play’s cultural references as up-to-date as possible. The musical choices, for example, should (with copyright permission) be taken from the playlists of the hottest radio stations in town, and the references to clothing, hair styles, slang and gadgets should come straight out of the latest issues of Seventeen, Vanity Fair, People and Cosmopolitan. During the initial production of the play, for example, I was reminded by one of the actors that my hair salon needed a tanning bed. It was an actor’s idea to have Roberta played by a stylish male hairdresser named Robert. And the ending of the first act felt a little flat until someone suggested a 20-second tag where the entire cast danced to a chorus of The Party Rock Anthem (“Every day I’m shufflin’…”).
When all is said and done, my hopes for Midsummer/Jersey are simple but profound: that this play can be added to the hundreds of other tributes in our culture to what many people consider the greatest comedy ever written.