What a wonderful opening weekend of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We have had thrilled audience members and had many great reviews (one you can read here). Tickets are still available HERE, the show runs the next two weekends, through Dec. 20th.
Over the course of our rehearsals for this show, I've been thinking a lot about my roles in this story. I play two roles that are traditionally male: Egeus and Peter Quince.
Egeus is Hermia’s angry father, who starts the play threatening to sentence his daughter to death if she does not marry the man he has chosen. When I acted in a previous production of Midsummer, as Snug, I never really challenged this plot point and accepted this typical male character’s behavior.
And now in our current production, here I am playing this overbearing father as a mother. While working on Egeus at PAC, it occurred to me that audiences might share my experience of dismissing the angry father’s demands as a common plot device. Through the course of my character work I found that “surface level asshole” did not provide enough justification for Egeus as the mother. I felt that audience members would need more of an explanation of WHY I was behaving this way towards my daughter. As soon a character is made female, it seems, the audience's perception changes and suddenly she requires additional justification for the very same words spoken by a male character.
I believe this over-simplification was because of the way we have been conditioned to view men, particularly male characters in classic works. Of course, a good and thoughtful male actor will take any role and give them the emotional depth that exists in each person. I know that most men in this role would absolutely develop justification and backstory to drive this horrific and controlling behavior towards his daughter. However, as an audience member watching the role of Egeus, I did not need all of that justification to believe in his behavior. In my mind I completely simplified this role because he was a man.
I am interested in what happens as we continue to cast more women in these leading and more forceful roles. This is happening a lot in modern Shakespeare companies around the world and I think it creates a real opportunity.
It seems to me that casting women in traditionally male roles allows the character to expand in an interesting way. I believe that as we open up roles like Egeus or Henry V or Hamlet to women, we are also allowing the roles of men to shift. I hope that we begin to demand that male characters and male actors present full humans, rather than relying on gender stereotypes. I hope we look for emotional range and intent behind male character's actions that are justified beyond being the archetypical asshole.
My experience playing Egeus has opened up my mind to the gender prejudices that still exist for me in my consumption of theatre. I am so grateful for this experience to bring me that realization and I plan to continue looking for authentic, human storytelling outside of the gender box in all my roles.
I believe that as more companies open up the casting of Shakespeare’s works to women, as well as other classic works, we are actually expanding the definitions of these characters as well, for all genders. We allow all characters to have a huge range of being, just like humans do, and creativity can sky-rocket because we are not trapped in these conventional boxes that limit how/who we can be.
Ahna finds it interesting to finally be on this end of the Blog Posts after months of working behind the scenes editing and designing the class website. Outside of theatre, you can find her doing obnoxious things like collecting vintage hankies and plastic animals, making huge messes, and eating cereal for most of her meals.
Catch her as Marianne in PAC 2016 production of Sense and Sensibility directed by Brenda Hubbard, opening February 12th.