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Dream Weavers
Puck and The Sandman
By Steven Leigh Morris
Azeem Vecchio, Syanne Green, Malik Bailey in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Photo by Frank Ishman)
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Fowler’s strikingly cogent concept is to endow slaves with cosmic powers (which become comic powers) over their mortal Athenian overseers — not unlike the way in which the slaves outwit their masters in their quest for freedom, in the ancient Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence.
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At the northern edge of LA County, in Santa Clarita, The Sandman (played by adult actor Jackson Caruso) is the title character in Dane Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale, “Ole Lukøje,” (“The Sandman”), presented by Eclipse Theatre and the Santa Clarita Shakespeare Festival. Phil Lantis’s play for kids (and performed with kids), adapted from Andersen’s story and directed by Nancy Lantis, tells of this Sandman’s ability to send children to sleep (sprinkling their eyes with fairy dust) and deliver them dreams — or not. If they’ve been well-behaved, they receive pleasant dreams. If they’ve been less than well-behaved, their punishment is to receive no dreams at all. There are worse punishments, as the German Brothers Grimm had imagined, slightly before Andersen (severed limbs, baked in a witch’s oven, etc.), but perhaps that’s the difference between the Danish temperament and the Teutonic one.
Meanwhile, in the center of LA County, in Atwater Village, Puck (Monazia Smith, sly, impish and, at times, pissed off) sprinkles fairy dust into the eyes of any number of White Athenians (as in Athens, Georgia) in Open Fist Theatre Company’s adaptation (by director James Fowler) of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which Fowler sets in the American antebellum South, circa 1855. Without giving away the plantation, Fowler’s strikingly cogent concept is to endow slaves with cosmic powers (which become comic powers) over their mortal Athenian overseers — not unlike the way in which the slaves outwit their masters in their quest for freedom, in the ancient Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence. Their masters in the fairy kingdom are Oberon and Titania (the regal Phillip C. Curry, and Erica Mae McNeal), who are also Black and comparatively benevolent, not only to each other (yes, they have issues), but also to the fairies under their command.
Both plays convey the influence of dreams — and dream states — on the way we perceive the world around us. It would be nice to imagine that a pleasant dream wasn’t just a reward for good behavior, which in Andersen’s story has the tint of the authoritarianism and conformity found in medieval morality plays. Be good and you’ll get into the heaven of sweet dreams. Be bad, and you’re left in the dark. This may seem like justice, but it’s also a mechanism for social control. Next stop: re-education camps.
In Fowler’s hands, the dream is akin to the kind of African American spirituals which play throughout this production (sound design by Nayla Hull) — at least they serve the same purpose. They too are the fruit of oppression, a reward not for being good, but just for being, for enduring, for living one’s life on the edge of a whip — very different from the purpose of the Sandman’s dreams. Down in Georgia, the song, the dream, the prayer transport one out of this world of endless agony and oppression.
The purpose of the Sandman’s dreams is to keep children in their place. The dreams in Fowler’s Midsummer do quite the opposite. The dream, and the power to bestow dreams, is a setting-free, a reward for suffering. A life beyond. The dreamers themselves can’t differentiate between sleeping and waking. (“Me thought I was enamored of an ass,” reports the reawakened Titania.) The ultimate reward lies in Oberon’s and Puck’s occult power, in their possession of that magical flower, that pollen which renders control over others. To put them to sleep. Though having that power is a kind of dream itself, as we see when Puck is “restored” from a mercurial spirit (captured by Smith with balletic dexterity) to a cowering house slave, whip-scarred and serving the family (Sandra Kate Burck, Dylan Wittrock, Anna-Laurie Rives, and Devon Armstrong play the star-crossed lovers with fervor) she had so gleefully toyed with in her dream.
The mechanicals are also Black — almost. Peter Quince, the figure of frayed authority as stage director of these half-baked thespians lodging within Shakespeare’s play, is White (Debba Rofheart). Quince’s amateur theater company (Malik S. Bailey; Syanne Green; James Fowler, standing in for McNeal, who stepped in as Titania in the performance I attended; Michael A. Shepperd; and Azeem Vecchio) puts on a gleefully dreadful rendition of the Pyramus and Thisbe legend for the royals. It doesn’t matter how bad it is, how vainglorious or meek the actors are in Shakespeare’s parody of local theater everywhere. What matters is that the play, like a dream, like a song, transports them. (For the royal audience, it’s a mere diversion; for the players, it’s a flight to a different world.)
Lennon Koiter and Janice Crowe-Christensen in The Sandman at THE MAIN in Santa Clarita
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A kid can dream though, can’t he? And this is where, sans the overt oppression, The Sandman hews most closely to Fowler’s Midsummer: the cry for freedom.
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In Andersen’s story, the Sandman bestows seven different dreams, night after night, upon a boy here named Henry (child actor Lennon Koiter) This production is something of a talented family affair, with Koiter’s father and sister, respectively Jason Koiter and Everly Koiter. The elder Koiter doubles as both Albert Einstein and the Sandman’s brother (a figure in a black coat representing death), while Everly, as Henry’s kid sister, is particularly adept at portraying pugnacious disregard. Meanwhile, the playwright and director (Phil Lantis and Nancy Lantis) are a husband-and-wife team; their daughter Sally appears in the show.
Adapter Phil Lantis has added at least one new dream to Andersen’s scenario: Henry meets a squabbling Shakespeare (Liam Johnson) and Einstein (Einstein was born after Andersen had died) — representing the forces of poetry and reason, with this bewildered child snagged in the middle of their intellectual duel. Shakespeare is trying to hammer out the best wording for “We are such stuff as dreams are made on”— replacing “of” with “on” — while trying to impart that Einstein’s mathematical equations bear little relation to emotional truths. Amidst this dustup, Henry must find his own way. What the 7-year-olds in the audience must have made of this debate, I have no idea.
In a different dream, Henry protests, almost vehemently, to a Seagull (Jason Koiter) — in Andersen’s story, it’s a stork, but who cares — that he wants to travel the world, to find adventure, as dreams promise. The Seagull, meanwhile, has been everywhere, and insists that all this travelling is not worth the effort. Everything you need to know you can find in your garden (echoes of Candide). A kid can dream though, can’t he? And this is where, sans the overt oppression, The Sandman hews most closely to Fowler’s Midsummer: the cry for freedom.
But freedom from what? Girls flirt with Henry, an attraction Henry find distasteful. As he expresses it: “Eeew.” Young Henry is facing down life’s inexorable drift to domesticity –marriage, finding one’s soulmate, meeting that soulmate in heaven, as Henry’s grandmother (the endearing Janice Crowe-Christensen) lectures him in the throes of romanticism and nostalgia.
This unquestioned value system of the 18th through the mid-20th century marks the show’s biggest disconnect from our times. Even with a Geiger counter, you can’t find a reference to gays, to modern Dickensian cruelties, to ever-growing disparities of wealth and opportunity, the whips of 21st century poverty and oppression, racial inequities, collapsing healthcare, expanding authoritarianism and violence, eroding civil rights, and the seriously threatened end of the planet that the children in this audience are inheriting.
If Henry’s biggest complaint is that he doesn’t want to get married and get bogged down by family, as though he’s in a play by William Inge, he’s a very lucky kid with tiny, antiquated concerns. The Seagull might have taken him to the antebellum South in 1855 to give him some perspective on what his world is actually becoming.
Credit must be given to the production for its innate charm, enhanced by the uncredited design team. Andersen’s story features umbrellas, which the Sandman holds over each child as he woos them to sleep. If the umbrella is blank, the child will see no dream. If it’s ornately decorated, pleasant dreams will follow. Those umbrellas show up, suspended upside down, until the stage is filled with them, in an apt echo of Rene Magritte and that painter’s surrealist impulses. There’s also some excellent video work, wherein a sketch of the woods expands before our eyes before engulfing us in a three-dimensional forest — an Into the Woods motif that Andersen surely borrowed from the Brothers Grimm, though he never gave them credit for the loan.
Midsummer Foreground: Michael A. Shepperd as Nick Bottom; Background: Sandra Kate Burck, Heather Mitchell, Dylan Wittrock and Bryan Bertone (Photo by Frank Ishman)
Similarly, the design elements in Midsummer hoist the play beyond its trappings: Jan Munroe’s set design (in conjunction with Gavan Wyrick’s lighting) serve up an operatic backdrop of cotton fields, in which the slaves toil — with its weird, horrifying blend of genteel beauty (that canopy of white puffs) and the thorns on which characters prick their fingers during harvest.
Faith Knapp’s choreography opens and closes the production with a dance sequence. At the opening, the Black characters, in lockstep, using their open hands as shields, push the White characters, step by step, to the edge of the stage. At the closing, we see the inverse: The White characters pushing back. If that doesn’t distill the essence of our cultural moment, I don’t know what does.
The Sandman, The MAIN, 26244 Main St., Santa Clarita; Sat.-Sun., 2 pm; Wed., July 27, 8 pm; thru July 31. Fifty minutes without intermission. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-sandman-tickets-307858532157
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, presented by Open Fist Theatre Company, Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater. Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 7 pm; thru Aug. 13. Running time: Two hours and 15 minutes, with one intermission www.openfist.org
