Lilac Perfume: A Director’s Memoir of Midsummer Magic

“Follow me.”

He asked, so I trailed behind his gray ponytail as we slowly climbed the side staircase of the creaky old playhouse into a dusty balcony, and then we hiked some more up to the top row. The steps were steep, so we were careful. The two high school boys running the followspots at the railing noticed, but didn’t really mind us. They were focused, brilliantly focused, the way high school boys rarely are, on three fairies 200 feet below clad in orange and blue and purple tulle, giggling on tiptoes as they crooned over a transformed Bottom the Weaver.

“Smell it?” The stage manager (an old hippie, really) asked me, and waited. I sat down on a creaky balcony seat and inhaled. Nothing, just dust.

“Sit here and wait,” he prompted, and I had no reason not to, so I did.

Far below me, choreographed fairies gently wove their magic into the tapestry of our rendition of Shakespeare’s dream of a Midsummer night. We had substituted the cliché flowers with a full moon and snow under lighting glazed with icy blue filters. Real pine trees provided our scene surround. The lovers wore heavy weave and fur and boots, while our fairies glittered the way that moonlight on soft, new snow is wont to do.

We’d taken up this project just six weeks before, when we had gotten word that an aging local playhouse was available for only one week, take it or leave it. Our tiny high school theatre company had been left without a venue, so we took it. Midsummer Night’s Dream was my choice. Insane, we crammed. Costumes, set design, publicity, and dance happened simultaneously with intense line work, blocking, more line work, character intent rehearsals, fundraising, and occasional coordination with the playhouse which was 20 miles north. I, naive at 28, directing only my fifth high production of my teaching career, did what I would go on to do with every production I have directed since: I formed a careful, thorough, elaborate plan, and then stopped thinking while I worked my plan.

Concept came first while the saintly teaching artist who built my set listened to my idea. I wanted the magic of a Nordic wood. Instead of stereotypical Tinkerbell, I wanted powerful, glittering forces for my fairies. Instead of Heidi-looking goatherds and Renaissance royalty, I wanted my humans heavy, thick, and earthy. And the moon: it had to dominate. It had to. She took all of this down on a legal pad, and then ignored me for 5 weeks while she coached this overall vision to a group of student artists with visions of their own who made them physical reality. Their work would go on to be displayed in the local art museum after our show struck set.

That same magic happened with choreography, with lighting design, with community awareness and with ticket sales. What resulted was something I rarely, if ever, in 20 years of directing since, have been able to duplicate: a collaboration of souls, each contributing a thread or two, weaving together in individual patterns, a tapestry. I’d provided the outline, the overview, the structure and the framework, but in order to finish, I had to let go. For magic to happen, I had to let go, and trust.

Of course, the haters showed up. According to them, there wasn’t time to do a play. Our school had never done Shakespeare before. They said I didn’t know anything about Shakespeare. That six weeks would not be enough and I would never be ready on time. That the subject matter was too mature. That the students didn’t understand it. That I should be working with this person, not that one. Or that I should be working with this person’s daughter, not that one. One said (rather publicly) that Midsummer Night’s Dream is not a real play because no one had ever heard of it. That it would be a chaotic, colossal failure. It seems they felt that I was not someone the community knew or trusted, and therefore I was unqualified. I don’t think I heard any of this — although it would all catch up to me when the production was over with. For the six weeks while the magic happened, I could ignore the haters, and I did.

I’d previously studied First Folio technique with the Chicago Shakespeare Repertory (now Chicago Shakespeare Theatre). I had (I thought) a clear sense of line leading, arc, genre, and passage direction. But I only had 6 weeks. So with my actors, ever earnest, trusting me, I focused on character intent. The result was at times offensive to textual purists; lines that should’ve been light as air were heavy and wooden. Emphases occurred in the wrong spots sometimes. Pronunciations were decidedly Northern Michigan. I cringed more than once. But the intent was there. Helena might have turned herself into a cartoon character at times, but her love for Demetrius was without question. Titania might have been lisping through a retainer, but no one doubted her when she expressed ridiculous affection for Bottom, or when, after being reconciled to Oberon she let bygones be bygones and blessed the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta with sincerity and goodwill. The text was hard to listen to for one who knew it, but my actors took risks they needed to take, and the intent came through. These young people, like me, had to trust the plan and not think. Thus my actors — some as young as 12, others who were 18 and had never been in a play before, and a few completely unlikely to take on a project like this — made magic.

“She came to every performance back when this used to be an opera house, back in the 30s, 40s, even 50s I guess, until she died in the early 60s,” he whispered. “She sometimes sat down there,” he indicated, pointing at the middle of the main floor, “but mostly she sat up here in the balcony. That’s when people came to opera. That’s when people dressed for opera. We have pictures of her. She looked like a queen. And she always wore her signature, lilac perfume. There are the diaries, journals of people in the area, people long dead now, who remember her as a fixture at the performances here, opera, theatre, always dressed to the nines, always smelling of lilac perfume.”

On the stage below, Bottom was slowly groomed and catered to by those three attentive fairies, ever mindful of their choreography. One had a sprained ankle, I knew, and when not on stage she had her foot in a bucket of ice, or elevated on the prop table. One, a trained dancer, had wanted more stage time so we created dance numbers just for her. The other, a third generation artist herself who had contributed to many of the original pieces that made up our set, was actually babysitting a little sister who sat backstage. All of that was forgotten. As gentle chimes tinkled in the background and soap bubbles fell from the catwalk above them, three fairies chanted iambic tetrameter and groomed an idiot to bed their queen.

From my perch behind my two followspot operators, I could hear cues being softly whispered over comm headphones. I could hear my tech coordinator — a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker with an accent thick as ozone — as he gently coached them, “Subtle, subtle, hand over hand, and slow.” My smile, unmistakable; even in a whisper, overheard several rows back through headphones cuffed over adolescent ears, his drone was far from the “subtle” he coached. But dutifully, intentionally, the two operators put arms around both sides of those spotlights to move them, subtly as directed, and they watched each other as their targets floated across the stage. The result was a single, gentle beam that followed those fairies with no bumps nor wiggles, none of the abrupt jolts so characteristic when spotlights are used in high school plays. And focus. Magical focus.

“She doesn’t come to all of the plays anymore. I rarely know she’s here. For a couple of years, she never showed at all. I thought she was gone. I’m sure she won’t be here next week. When the group from Whitehall uses this place, we’re lucky if the building is still intact when they’re done. She occasionally comes to Blue Lake performances, or sometimes the professional stuff that tours up the coast here and sits down for a weekend before heading up to the playhouses at Mackinac. She shows up just for a moment, then she disappears. I’ve also sensed her when I’m here by myself, working. I smell her lilac perfume. Whenever I do, I don’t acknowledge her or she will leave as soon as she realizes I sense her. But she has been here all week this week. She was just here. If you wait, she’ll come back.”

Sitting in that dusty balcony gave me the first opportunity in the 6 months since I’d moved to that community to actually just wait. I’d taken on an overwhelming teaching load: the yearbook, with its expensive printing budget and immovable deadlines, now an academic focus but had previously been done by an extracurricular club; the newspaper, which had not existed prior to my arrival and was to be produced weekly (it would be more like monthly); four classes to prepare. Students who knew I had a theatre background had come to me and asked me to direct the plays. They had no director. Because of construction at our school, they had no stage. Most of them had been in musicals directed by a community volunteer, but had no training beyond that. They had begged, and any teacher knows that when motivated kids beg you to work with them, you find a way. So, my day started at 6:45am when I arrived at school to prepare, lasted through my teaching day, and included after school work with publications kids. My supper was a fast food sandwich or lunch leftovers before rehearsal at 6pm, which usually put me home at 10. My dog waited at home, lonely. Weekends were all about unpacking, grading, planning and anything I needed to put in place to maintain my sanity during the week. I’d had no time to just sit quietly, or breathe, or wait.

I’d jumped feet first into the deep end of the contentious hot mess of an upper middle class, bedroom community whose residents took everything extremely seriously and had far too much time on their hands. My induction and initiation included a full-on barrage of their angst, none of which I had caused, but which I was completely ill equipped to disarm. I was way too naive at 28 to see it coming, and way too inexperienced to deal with it any better than a deer in headlights. I would invest some of the best energy of my artistic life into the education of their children, and at the end of three years, I would leave, defeated, first to manage artists in the not-for-profit sector, then to “sell out,” not unsuccessfully putting my skill set on the corporate market to see how I would fare. I would eventually return to education after the bruises and breaks healed. That would be my forest.

But I didn’t know that then. I didn’t try to see forest in that moment as I sat on that creaky balcony seat. The “tree” in front of me, the tree I’d sprouted from a seedling and nursed from a sapling, was able to stand on its own. It had surpassed my hands. It had even succeeded the hands of the many students, artists, and community volunteers who had trusted my vision and trusted me, that it would stand. It stood. It glittered. And it was mesmerizing.

The lights dimmed gently as Titania and Bottom the Weaver glided to the left apron, where Titania’s minions would cover them with a silver blanket (it was the most modest way I could think of to avoid the lovemaking that Shakespeare’s text seems to directly imply) and Oberon and Robin Goodfellow took stage. I heard one of my followspot techs whisper into his mic, “Yeah, she’s up here. She’s just watching,” and he turned to me to see if I was going to call a stop. I didn’t. Not wanting to unravel anyone’s work from the spell of the woven tapestry, I smiled, gently waved my fingers, and heard him whisper again, “No, she said keep going.” I heard the music gently fade and watched the coached, but subtle, lighting transition into the next scene. I relaxed, I trusted, and I inhaled — lilac perfume.