Theater Reviews
Yosemite’s Dream & Shakesqueer’s Macbeth in California
A Midsummer Yosemite’s Dream
Presented by Shakespeare in Yosemite with Rose Music Studios, Curry Village, Yosemite National Park. 25–28th April 2024. Directed by Katherine Steele Brokaw. Lead Costume and Prop Designers: Grace Garnica and Mahea LaRosa. Set Designer: Adam Washiyama Shulman. Music Director and Associate Director: Tonatiuh Newbold. Sponsored by UC Merced, the National Park Service, Yosemite Hospitality, Visit Yosemite Madera County, Yosemite Mariposa County Tourism Bureau, Misfit Inc., and private donations. With Ranger Marion Roubal (Bottom, the Telecommunications Clerk/Narrator), Ranger Eid Broughton (Peter Quince, the Archeologist), Sofia Andom (Titania), Tonatiuh Newbold (Oberon), German Pariagua (Egeus/Narrator), Madelyn Lara (Hermia), Mia Hinshaw (Lysander), Alyssa McCabe (Helena), Joey Serrano (Demetrius), and others.
The Heterofatalist Tragedy of Macbeth
Presented by Shakesqueer, Porter Meadow, UCSC. April 13th, 14th, & 21st 2024. Directed by January Johnston. Script Supervisor: Tyler Kay. Costume and Set Designers: Charlotte Bruckner & Colette Reed. With Ian M. Chesluk-Staats (Macbeth), Eldritch Tonkovich (Lady Macbeth), Kyle Keller (Banquo/Porter) Rowan Trilling-Hansen (Masculinity/First Witch), Charlotte Bruckner (Femininity/Second Witch), Tyler Kay (Androgyny/Third Witch), and others.
“Who can impress the forest, bid the tree | Unfix his earth-bound root.”[1] Macbeth’s line of rhetorical incredulity after hearing that Birnam Wood will come to Dunsinane hill takes on deeper contextual meaning when performed in outdoor settings of great natural beauty. The questions that foregrounds Macbeth’s pronouncement—who has authority over natural spaces and natural processes, and who has the right to perform on those spaces—underlie two radical outdoor productions I attended in Spring 2024: A Midsummer Yosemite’s Dream and The Heterofatalist Tragedy of Macbeth.
These productions revealed the power of free political, outdoor theater in California’s state parks and universities. Shakespeare in Yosemite’s A Midsummer Yosemite’s Dream, affiliated with UC Merced, took place in the awe-inspiring Yosemite National Park, while Shakesqueer’s Heterofatalist Tragedy of Macbeth was among the majestic redwoods of the UC Santa Cruz campus. Both performances revealed some of the fascinating complexities that can arise from democratized, outdoor public productions of Shakespeare. As Christie Carson has noted, outdoor performances—because of their unpredictability—result in an intensified “audience interaction, creating a new kind of performance specificity.”[2] Such amateur, free, community theater performances draw in different kinds of spectators from those paying audiences attending professional theater, and, as Katherine Steele Brokaw articulates, each of these productions was specifically adapted for “institutional, geographic, and also identity based communities.”[3]
The appearance of public officials—from actual National Park Rangers performing in their uniforms in Yosemite’s Dream, to the unexpected involvement of UC Campus police at Heterofatalist Macbeth—highlighted to me how tenuous and risky it is to perform Shakespeare in an impromptu or unofficial mode in public spaces even in a liberal community like Santa Cruz. Together, they raised the questions, who has authority over these public natural spaces, and who has the right to put them to use, let alone determine their purpose?
A Midsummer Yosemite’s Dream
Shakespeare in Yosemite produces a play every Spring on a stage in Curry Village in the Yosemite Valley—a recreational area where tourists and hikers gather after a day of walking around the park. While many people in the audience come specifically to see the show, a number of people encounter it by chance. This year’s performance was prefaced by speeches from National Park Ranger Scott Gediman, as well as the play’s director, Professor Brokaw. Gediman introduced Shakespeare in Yosemite as one of the collaborative programs that the national park service has with UC Merced, along with others such as the Adventure Risk Challenge and the Yosemite Leadership Program. The production was the collective effort of local musicians from a Rose Music Studios, the concession partner Yosemite Hospitality, faculty from UC Merced’s Science and English Literature departments, and the National Park Rangers.
Gediman asked spectators to think about some environmental themes that were brought to the forefront in this adaptation: “Giant sequoias, wildfires, drought, flood, all of the things we are facing as a society that we have to address—these are presented in a meaningful artistic way showing that we are in a critical time. We are depending on the next generation as we face these challenges.”[4] As Brokaw explains in her collaborative work with EarthShakes Alliance on Shakespeare and community performance, performing Shakespeare in natural spaces is political: “how can we leverage Shakespeare to lend a hand, in some way, to the most urgent issues facing our human—and non-human—planetary community? […] [T]he combination of intentionally adapted theater, an outdoor environment and a gathered crowd […] lends itself well to drawing spectators’ attention to their relationship to the non-human world around them and their role in destroying or protecting precious local ecosystems.”[5] In her prefatory speech, Brokaw also emphasized bringing together Earth Day (April 21) and Shakespeare’s birthday (April 23) in the spectacular space of Yosemite: “We think of Shakespeare as a renewable cultural resource, we can take these plays and make new stories with them, and this is a story about being in Yosemite in 1934 and in 2024.”[6] Posters near the stage drew on archival material to tell the story of the inspiration for this production of a Midsummer Night’s Dream: the famous stage director, Max Reinhardt, an Austrian Jew who was preparing to leave for California as Nazism and anti-Semitism spread across Europe, and who declined an invitation by the Yosemite park rangers to organize a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.[7]
Along with its ecological messages, this adaptation relied upon radical casting decisions. Madelyn Lara’s Hermia, Alyssa McCabe’s Helena, and Mia Hinshaw’s Lysander were all played as women, while Joey Serrano’s Demetrius was played as a man. As a result, Egeus’ accusations that Lysander had “bewitch’d the bosom of my child”,[8] and his plea to “beg the ancient privilege of Athens” and “dispose of her: | Which shall be either to this gentleman | Or to her death, according to our law”[9] landed differently, with overtones of homophobia and misogyny, implying even more tyrannical authority figures than are normally portrayed in productions where Hermia is played as a woman and Lysander as a man.
Meanwhile, in the fairy kingdom, Tonatiuh Newbold’s Oberon and Sofia Andom’s Titania’s parts were switched, so that Titania applied the love potion to Oberon, who then fell in love with Park Ranger Marion Roubal’s “Bottom, the Telecommunications Clerk,” played as a woman. Eid Broughton’s “Peter Quince, the Archeologist” was also a Park Ranger, and both Bottom and Quince played their roles in their park ranger uniforms, which functioned as a kind of promotion and validation of Yosemite as a natural space meant for human performance and interaction. By acting as the starring mechanicals, the Park Rangers were the characters most ridiculed and laughed at, yet their uniforms signaled to the audience that they had the most authority over the space. Casting the Park Rangers as mechanicals underscored the sincerity of the message about ecological sustainability and preservation in the production: the care and effort they put into the play within the play extended to the message about caring for the environment around us. It was notable that the UC Merced professors did not wear clothing that highlighted their job role (such as academic regalia). They were in normal costumes like the rest of the cast, which made the uniformed Park Rangers stand out even more. The Rangers’ costume choice also suggested an unwavering commitment to safeguarding the park and its visitors, no matter the circumstances—even while performing in the play.
Rather than the traditional fairy servants of Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed, this production made the pedagogical move of incorporating names of local flora and fauna—the bat-like Western Pipistrelle, Red Legged Frog, Monkey Flower, Juniper, Parnassian, Pika and Lupine. The setting of the play was moved to Yosemite as well, with Athens becoming Curry Village. This decision to set the entire play in the park at times undermined some of the aesthetics of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which emphasizes a marked difference between the Athenian world of the court and the green world of the wood. However, these changes all worked toward the dual goal to promote Yosemite and to advocate for natural conservation as a wellspring for human joy.
The upbeat tone to the production—punctuated throughout by many well-known pop songs from the opening Eurythmics song “Sweet Dreams,” to Harry Belafonte’s “Turn the World Around,” to which the entire company danced and sang—became central to the way the production presented Pyramus and Thisbe. This production cut much of the derisive comments made by the group of newlywed couples watching the play that other productions have often emphasized, if not reveled in, such as Theseus’ comment that the Prologue’s speech was “like a tangled chain […] all disordered.”[10] Instead, the newlyweds sincerely enjoyed the play-within-the-play. As a result, the royal audience seemed encouraged to embrace Bottom’s overly dramatic death as Pyramus, as if to elevate the Park Ranger from lowly subject of mockery to symbol of authority. The incorporation of the Rangers, and Brokaw’s choice to cast them as the beloved characters Bottom and Quince, underscored the sincerity of the environmental messages this production communicated, particularly when Bottom was cared for by fairies who represented the local species of plants and animals in Yosemite. As a result, the production highlighted the potential reciprocity among humans, flora, and fauna, as well as the importance of natural conservation. This traditionally mocked play-within-a-play was granted renewed urgency because the mechanical actors were performing in the very place they also sought to protect.
The Heterofatalist Tragedy of Macbeth
While attempting to put on The Heterofatalist Tragedy of Macbeth, Director January Johnston and the LGBQT+ Shakesqueer acting troupe encountered a staggering set of obstacles—beginning with finding a performance space they were permitted to use. The outdoor Sinsheimer-Stanley Festival Glen stage on the UCSC campus was built for Shakespeare Santa Cruz, but in 2013 the UC cut funding for the project and declared the stage defunct, although it remains intact. Since August 2023, Shakesqueer had used the Festival Glen stage to rehearse Heterofatalist Macbeth, intending that it would also be performed there. The Shakesqueer ensemble’s rehearsal experience uncovered an entire community of underground collectives, all harmoniously using the abandoned stage: an improv collective, a yoga group, and a band of dirt bikers, who stored their bike equipment there.
As the date for the production approached, Johnston advertised the play, only to arrive on the morning of the performance to find the Festival Glen stage guarded by UC campus police. The presence of police on campus had recently increased in an attempt to prevent large crowds from gathering due to the recent encampment at the base of campus by students protesting the war on Palestine. Johnston realized they would need to find a new space for the performance, and Porter College Meadow quickly became the new venue.
A sizable audience, including professors and local community members gathered together in a glade of the meadow on camp chairs and rugs, where the troupe created a loose impression of a stage and backstage area; casual clothing and pajamas hung from a strung-up washing line behind a small wooden bed and two pillows from a dorm room. The set was simple. As Johnston explained, “we had five dollars between us to make this work,” but they successfully managed to achieve the intimate, domestic impression of a closet or bedroom space.
In their opening introductory speech to the play, Johnston made a land acknowledgement statement for the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe, who have faced historical trauma since the Spanish colonization in Santa Cruz and along the Central Coast. Land acknowledgements, which reflect and draw attention to the disagreements over who has the right to be in a particular place, show how these public natural space productions call renewed attention to questions of who has authority over natural spaces, and why. Johnston then went on to publicly rejected the UC system, because it receives funding tied to the military or foundations that support the oppression of Palestine.
Behind the audience, the remnants of the 04/20 revelries the previous day continued onto this Shakespearean Earth Day. A group of undergraduates had gathered together in a grove of redwood trees below the performance area with a boombox blasting techno music, playing what they called “Hunger Games” with water blasters filled with vodka, screaming, yelling in unison, and dunking each other with huge buckets of water. As the “Hunger Games” group ran to and fro screaming around this impromptu stage, many people in the audience seemed confused. Was this part of the performance?
The actors, however, were unperturbed. The three witches: Rowan Trilling-Hansen as Masculinity/First Witch; Charlotte Bruckner as Femininity/Second Witch; and Tyler Kay as Androgyny/Third Witch performed the opening scene with poise, gesturing in unison, all wearing black clothing and striking black eye makeup. The costuming and makeup choices for the witches were consistent with Eldritch Tonkovich’s Lady Macbeth, who wore a simple black satin slip dress with similar gothic eye makeup and jewelry. Taken together, the costuming especially emphasized the gender identity politics envisioned for this production and evoked by the title, as if central to the play’s tragedy and fatalism is heteronormativity. The tragic angst of gendered dysphoria became most evidence in Tonkovich’s delivery of Lady Macbeth’s monologue in 1.5: “come you spirits | that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here”.[11]
Drunken screaming undermined this pivotal moment. The revelries from the group of teenagers behind the stage got out of hand. It became clear that their “Hunger Games” had nothing to do with Heterofatalist Macbeth, even if there had been an inkling of hope that it stood for that initial Scottish rebellion against Duncan. By intermission, one of the students had broken their leg and passed out just behind the performance space. The campus police arrived. Only a few feet away from the production, and apparently unable to distinguish between the performers and the revelers, the police then attempted to shut down the Shakespeare performance. Luckily, a professor in the audience interjected on behalf of the acting troupe, and the police allowed the play to continue.
Through much of the chaos during the first half of the play, it seemed undergraduate misbehavior was ruining a very conceptual Shakespeare production in this public space. Yet perhaps this was also appropriate to the play itself, which oscillates between serious political commentary and an exploration of what happens when drunken violence prevents any real political dialogue. After all, Macbeth’s “If it were done, when ‘tis done”[12] soliloquy, with its radical politics of assassination, is interrupted by Lady Macbeth’s plan: “His two chamberlains | Will I with wine and wassail so convince | That memory, the warder of the brain, | Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason | A limbeck only.”[13] The plan hinges on alcohol abuse undermining reason. Kyle Keller also engaged with this idea through his portrayal of the Porter as debauched, in an open, ripped dressing gown, a pair of tight fire-patterned boxers, and bunny ears, powerfully engaged the audience in 2.3 as he drank real rye whiskey from a bottle: “Drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things”[14] he joked, to a response of much laughter from the audience.
The appearance of the police also heightened the complex politics of putting on Shakespeare for free. In a play all about the “revolt of the newest state”[15] that attempts to control those who are “point against point rebellious,”[16] authorities policing where and whether the play could be put on, with drunken teenagers on the periphery, somehow worked to become part of the performance. By the end of the play, I saw a mud-strewn undergraduate who had been participating in the “Hunger Games” joining the audience. He donated a crumpled one-dollar bill to Johnston, asking: “What was that? Whatever it was, it was really cool!” This was his first encounter with a Shakespeare performance.
Both Heterofatalist Macbeth and Yosemite’s Dream were productions that increased accessibility for people that might not usually see a Shakespeare play: young children, students, hikers, and other members of the local community. Anyone in the local vicinity could potentially show up, regardless of whether they planned ahead of time or just happened to come across the productions. The unpredictable nature of both adaptations allowed for greater freedom and expression of these plays than professional theater might permit, because they were less tightly controlled and more open to external forces outside of the control of the productions.
The unpredictability of both shows, but in particular Heterofatalist Macbeth, incidentally made the experience of spectating similar to what theater historians have suggested playgoing in early modern London was like. Richard Preiss explains that “playgoing unfolded along a boundary between fiction and reality that was routinely crossed—by the playgoer him or herself—and whose crossing was its basic function: the only norm of playhouse behavior was, ultimately, transgression, be it through deliberately disrupting the play or compulsively inserting oneself into it.”[17] Preiss catalogues fights that broke out between playgoers and players before and during plays. In one of his examples, a courtly gentleman described in a Caroline memoir took something he saw on stage for reality, and began to participate in the play. In another, a tumult occurred at the Gray’s Inn Christmas revel of 1594, and a courtly audience overran a play by crowding the stage.[18] Similarly, in an Apology for Actors (1612), Thomas Heywood recalls a play in Perin in Cornwall that was overrun by the audience. The play featured a “battle on the stage with their drum and trumpets” and received the panicked response of a “few idle shot in a bravado” from a group of unknown invading Spaniards, resulting in the audience surging out from the play and defeating the enemy.[19] Another account of a play inciting the audience is of the Astor Place Riots in 1849 in New York, when two rival productions of Macbeth—one British, one American —stoked up their rivalry, prompting “an American sense of national pride and fostered deep anti-British feeling.”[20] A riot ensued outside the theatre, and militia opened fire on the crowd, with twenty-three people killed. Although of course the Astor Place Macbeth was far more violent than Heterofatalist Macbeth, the comparison shows how public productions of Shakespeare today can offer supercharged occasions that encapsulate political, socio-economic, and cultural undercurrents in our current moment, just as the 1849 Macbeth productions and the ensuing riots represented the local and national class tensions of that moment.
The political nature of these shows demonstrated the need for some kind of authentication by authority figures: from the uniformed park rangers who were integral to Midsummer Yosemite, to the unanticipated the police presence at Heterofatalist Macbeth. Because these productions were both subversive—drawing awareness to current cultural concerns, whether that be a queer-theory inspired adaptation that highlighted land ownership issues, or an ecological one that drew attention to the global warming that we face—they proved to be unpredictable and precarious, yet fun and educational.
University of California, Santa Cruz
Notes
[1] William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015), 4.1.109-10.
[2] Christie Carson “Democratizing the audience?” In Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) p. 118.
[3] Katherine Steele Brokaw, Shakespeare and Community Performance (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) p. 5 & p. 13.
[4] Gediman, opening speech, A Midsummer Yosemite’s Dream (April 27, 2024).
[5] Brokaw, Shakespeare and Community Performance, p. 223-4.
[6] Brokaw, opening speech, A Midsummer Yosemite’s Dream (April 27, 2024).
[7] Poster: “Shakespeare in Yosemite in 1934?” A Midsummer Yosemite’s Dream (April 27, 2024).
[8] William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri. (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017). (1.1.28).
[9] Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.1.43.
[10] Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.132-3.
[11] Macbeth, 1.5.38–41.
[12] Macbeth, 1.7.1.
[13] 1.7.74-7
[14] 2.3.25
[15] 1.2.2-3
[16] 1.2.64
[17] Richard Preiss, Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) p. 43.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Thomas Heywood, Apologie for Actors, sig. G2r. Web. Accessed October 15, 2024.
[20] Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) p.153.