Act V: Bringing it All Together

I'm a sucker for theater. At it's best, you're transfixed by something that makes no attempts to mask the artifice of the craft. It's almost like watching a movie, but made all the more exciting, hilarious, or emotional by the very notion that you're looking into a real scenario. There's an immediacy to theater that can't be replicated by technology, and thus, it's not going anywhere.

Now when theater is bad, it's bad. I mean really, really bad. You can typically tell within the first two minutes of a rotten play that you're in for an excruciating experience. And yet, I've always looked back on bad theater with a smile on my face--sure, the acting may have been awful and the blocking awkward as can be, but there's something a bit charming about when something goes horribly wrong on stage in spite of the best efforts of the players to make it good. I don't mean to sound like a sadist. I would much rather see a bad play than a bad film any day.

To expand a bit upon my contribution to my (enormous) group's presentation, Act V addresses an important notion of theater of reality and suspension of disbelief. Shakespeare can't be appreciated fully unless we acknowledge the fact that part of its liveliness and longevity lies in the performance of his plays.

Russ McDonald's preface to A Midsummer Night's Dream illuminates the notion of the play-within-a-play as a means to explore what is real:

Shakespeare's manipulation of perspective takes its most revelatory form in the arrangement of the play-within-the-play. During the performance of "Pyramus and Thisby", we may imagine the stage and the theater and the world as a series of concentric circles. At the very center are Bottom and Flute, playing tragic lovers. They are watched by actors playing the courtly lovers, characters whose experience might have paralleled that of the doomed Pyramus and Thisby but who fail to notice the similarity. They, in turn, are watched by the theater audience...Isn't it possible that we, too, are performing for unseen spectators... that the world we take to be real may be nothing more than a stage set for a divine audience? (pg. 255)

 The characters in the play are in a sense players for the amusement of the fairies. Oberon and Puck have their fun with them and when everybody is with the lover they are meant for, the events that happened before are merely dreams. Any uncertainties that the lovers possess aren't enough to lead them away from their newly found happiness in love. In a way, isn't the artifice of theater not enough to make us reconsider the experience we had with it?

Of course the breaching of the fourth wall at the end of the play is significant in supporting this idea. Puck's monologue tells the audience to merely forget what they have seen if the "shadows" on stage have offended them... wait, is it Puck or the actor playing Puck delivering the lines? Who knows?

In a play with the magic of otherworldly forces and imagination at work, Shakespeare carried the message to the end of the play in an exercise of self-awareness and metatheacricality. The players on stage (and us in the audience) may judge the mechanicals harshly for their amateurish production, but who then will be judging us?

I may come back and edit this when more comes to me... I'll think about it.