Confronting the Past, Dreaming the Future: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Modern Performance

Abstract:Puck famously concludes A Midsummer Night’s Dream by suggesting that the players’ utmost goal has been to avoid offending their audience and offering to “mend” any damage the play might have caused (Epilogue 8). While superficially conciliatory, Puck’s final speech reminds the audience, yet again, of Dream’s many offenses and harms, and challenges theater practitioners to navigate the darker, more unsettling aspects of the play-text. Taking its cue from Puck, our introduction to this special issue on Dream in modern performance outlines the key inequities and disharmonies of the play-text that might be taken up in performance, including problems of consent, misogyny, colonialism, inequity, and ecological disaster. In the second half of the introduction, we offer a brief survey of how some of these issues have been addressed—magnified, mitigated, or erased—in the play’s staging history from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Finally, we conclude by briefly summarizing how the essays in this special issue explore the mixed results of theatrical projects around the world that employ the play as a tool for social critique and/or imagining alternative futures.