"Thou Art Translated"

Peter Sellars's Midsummer Chamber Play

Authors

Carol Mejia LaPerle Wright State University

Abstract

For over sixty seasons, the Stratford Theatre Festival in Canada has annually showcased notable performances in dramatic arts and musical theater. Peter Sellars's chamber-play appropriation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, performed for Stratford's 2014 season, broadens the experience of Shakespeare to invite divergent, and often troubling, interpretive strategies. Appropriating the sprawling comedy to convey instead unsettled intimacies and disconcerting eroticism, the chamber play suspends the mirth a seasoned Shakespeare audience member expects from watching one of the bard's most frequently performed comedies. Closely considering festival audience expectations in the context of the largest classical theater repertory in North America, I furthermore illustrate the ways the performance challenges the principles of privileged access and inviolable universality underwriting the festival experience. By creating internal fissures in the Shakespeare experience, the chamber play underscores the possibilities for reassessing what we mean by the Shakespeare experience.

Author Biography

Carol Mejia LaPerle, Wright State University

Carol Mejia LaPerle is Professor and Honors Advisor for the Department of English at Wright State University. Her research interests include Renaissance/early modern drama, poetry and culture, the history of race, gender theory, material culture, and affective performances of and in Shakespeare. She regularly teaches a survey of early English literature, special topics in early modern drama, and the methods and materials of academic research. While her current book project focuses on early modern depictions of race, she also publishes on contemporary encounters with Shakespeare on stage and in film. Her work has been supported by Wright State University's Research Council, College of Liberal Arts Research Grant, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Humanities Center, Ohio Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.