I really love Julie Taymor, and I really love William Shakespeare, so my recent experience seeing her creative interpretation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, one of the Bard’s greatest comedies, had me torn. I wrote about that experience here a few weeks ago, but still it has been nagging at me.
I mean, I found the production at Theater for a New Audience breathtakingly beautiful and visually stunning, but dramatically it felt like a complete failure. Something was rotten in Athens.
This despite a breathtaking performance Kathryn Hunter as Puck, channeling her inner Linda Hunt. As well as very good performances by Max Casella as Bottom, channeling his inner Joe Pesci, and by David Harewood as Oberon, channeling his inner Burt Lancaster.
So I did what any sensible person would do. I went back to the theatre and saw it again. And this time I think I’ve figured it out.
Part of the genius of Shakespeare’s comedies is that they always flirt with tragedy. There is inevitably a moment where the audience is on tenderhooks, where everything can go horribly wrong.
If you watch a truly great production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, such as the film version from 1968 Royal Shakespeare Company directed by Peter Hall, you immediately see that this moment occurs in Act III, Scene II, when all four young lovers come together in the Wood.
There is true heartbreak in this scene, and that heartbreak is expressed in transcendent poetry. By the time Hermia, thinking she has lost everything, says “I am amazed, and know not what to say,” the audience should be overwrought.
In the 1968 film version, with the four young lovers played by Helen Mirren, David Warner, Diana Rigg and Michael Jayston, it all works beautifully. For all the other great wonders in the play, this is the scene that stays most powerfully in my mind.
But Julie Taymor had a little problem. The part of Lysander, one of the young lovers, is played by Jake Horowitz. Jake Horowitz is the son of Jeffrey Horowitz, the founding artistic director of Theater for a New Audience. Horowitz fils is fresh out of high school, and is really really bad at doing Shakespeare.
It is painfully obvious that the kid is only in this role because his dad runs the theatre.
In a way, it’s just one more in a long line of foolish creative decisions by doting dads, like John Huston casting his daughter Anjelika in “A Walk with Love and Death” long before she had the chops for it, or Francis Ford Coppola putting a young Sofia Coppola into a pivotal role in “The Godfather, Part III” that essentially made her a laughingstock.
Maybe this is a kind of tough love. After all, Anjelika and Sofia have done very well for themselves in the intervening years. Perhaps a devastating acting failure in dad’s high profile production is good for the soul. And now it’s poor young Jake’s turn.
Taymor is smart enough to know that with Horowitz in a key role, the scene would never work as written. So she plays it as farce, turning the one crucially serious scene in the play into something out of a Porky’s movie (I’m not exaggerating).
I could go on, but why bother? This is a worthwhile show to see because it is Julie Taymor, and she makes pure visual magic. But with the exception of a few fine actors apparently working on their own initiative, it has little to do with Shakespeare.
Although if it weren’t for that tragedy of casting, I’d like to think Taymor might have at least tried to aim higher.