I totally know Hermia!
And, no, not in the “find yourself in the play” sense. Her name is Sara. We went to church and school together. She’s my friend, although we haven’t really
kept in touch since high school. But the
fact that I knew her changed the whole Shakespeare in the Park experience for me. I started thinking about our own comedies and
tragedies, and wondered how all of that added up to Sara performing Shakespeare
here in front of me on a grassy knoll in Orem.
And then I made a classic rookie mistake. Comedies
are supposed to distance audience members from the characters’ emotions so that
we can poke fun of their agony at leisure.
But things were different now that I knew Hermia. When Hermia’s lover, her best friend, and her
betrothed started to gang up on her, I felt truly sorry. I got all caught up in the tension until I
could remind myself that this was a comedy, that things would end happily, and
that I came here to laugh after taking my midterms.
But if you think about it, even without knowing a single actor,
I bet you each person in that audience had a completely different
experience with the play. That’s why we need classes like Literary
Interpretation. Because there are so
many stinking interpretations. And now, I am talking about “finding yourself in the play.” Not only did I bring my own interpretive lens
to the production, but each production of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream I’ve ever
seen is so completely different that I hardly notice they are using the same
script. The cast does some interpreting of its own. Now add to
that the fact that a play is live characters performing to a live
audience. In the Saturday-night
production at least, that meant that when a little boy ran onstage, the
overconfident Bottom quickly stepped forward (in character) to both handle the
situation and work the stage once more. We now have so many layers of interpretation
that the original play almost gets lost.
This brings up some classic questions about literature. What is the purpose of drama (and art in
general), especially if we are all going to interpret it anyway? I mean why don’t we all just use our own
imaginations in the place of art, if that’s what we are essentially doing? How much does the artwork change us? And how do we change the artwork?
Your questions there really provoked some thoughts! I think that when it comes to drama, for instance, as you mentioned, we do interpret it in different ways. What is fun, though, is what these interpretations can tell us about ourselves, and how comparisons in how we interpret things can tell us about others and how they think alike or differently than us. I think that art in general is as much a portrait of the artist and his or her ideas as a portrait of admirers as they interpret the art.
ReplyDeleteI also think that there is kind of a midway point to describe the extent to which art changes us and how we change art. Art can introduce an idea that can have an effect on us, but simultaneously we pour in our preconceived ideas to make sense of art. Overall, I think it is just a process that nicely depicts human nature.
But of course, these are just my interpretations hehe.