By LISA ROBINSON

Thanks to an unprecedented coincidence of programming, Juilliard's Drama Division and the Juilliard Opera Center will each present Shakespeare's venerated comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream (as the original play and Benjamin Britten's opera, respectively) during the month of November.

A fourth-year drama production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in the 1993-94 school year. Pictured are (standing, left to right) Brian Vincent, C.J. Wilson, and Carrie Preston. (Photo by Jessica Katz)

By turns mischievous, magical, tender, and eloquent, Shakespeare's irresistible comedy is a perennial favorite with audiences and theater professionals. The play's point of departure is encapsulated early on, when one of the characters observes, "The course of true love never did run smooth." In the play, the course of love is complicated even further by the magical creatures who intervene in the affairs of the human characters, to great comic effect.

The play takes place in Athens and the surrounding countryside. In the first of many romantic dilemmas to come, Lysander and Hermia are in love and wish to marry, but Egeus, Hermia's father, wants her to marry Demetrius. Demetrius used to love Hermia's friend Helena, but now loves Hermia, despite Helena's desperate efforts to reclaim his affection. Egeus takes his case to Theseus, the Duke of Athens (whose own wedding to Hippolyta is imminent), and Theseus says that Hermia must obey Athenian law: marry the suitor chosen by her father, enter a convent, or die. Instead, she and Lysander flee into the forest to plan their elopement.

In the forest, Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, argue over who will have custody of an orphaned Indian boy. In a sly effort to steal the boy from Titania, Oberon tells his attendant Puck to retrieve a special flower whose sap, when applied to the eyes of someone sleeping, causes them to fall madly in love with whomever—or whatever—they first see upon waking. Oberon applies the liquid to the sleeping Titania's eyes, then instructs Puck to apply it to the eyes of Demetrius ("Thou shalt know the man by the Athenian garments he has on," he explains) so that he will be reconciled with Helena. But Lysander is also wearing Athenian garments, and Puck places the sap on his eyes instead. When Lysander awakes, he sees Helena and professes his love as she wonders why he's mocking her and Hermia discovers she's been abandoned.

The Juilliard American Opera Center's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by Benjamin Britten in April 1988 featured Salvatore Champagne (left) and Peiwen Chao (now an Evening Division faculty member). The opera was conducted by Raymond Harvey and staged and choreographed by Dorothy Frank Danner. (Photo © Beth Bergman)

Meanwhile, a group of earnest but theatrically inept Athenian craftsmen meets to devise the cast for a play they wish to present in honor of the Duke's upcoming wedding: "The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe." Puck, observing unseen, sets further complications in motion when he casts a spell on Bottom, one of the craftsmen, and turns his head into that of a donkey. The unsuspecting Titania is smitten when she wakes up and lays eyes on him, as Bottom, perplexed, allows her to dote on him.

Oberon finally intervenes to end the confusion, and the happily reunited pairs, Lysander and Hermia, Demetrius and Helena, wonder how much of the previous night was real and how much a dream. The couples return to Athens, where they are married along with Theseus and Hippolyta and the day's festivities conclude with the craftsmen's singular performance of "Pyramus and Thisbe."

The foremost British composer of the 20th century, Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) already had several operas to his credit by the time he began work on A Midsummer Night's Dream in August of 1959, including such notable works as Peter Grimes (1945), Albert Herring (1947), Billy Budd (1951), and The Turn of the Screw (1954), among others. The opera was created for performance at the 1960 Aldeburgh Festival to celebrate the renovation of Jubilee Hall, the festival's only theater at that time. Adapted by Britten and Peter Pears, the libretto is wholly based on Shakespeare's text, and while about half of the original text is cut, only one additional line is inserted.

Gillian Jacobs (left) was Puck and Nelsan Ellis was Oberon in a May 2003 third-year drama production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Drama Theater. (Photo by Jessica Katz)

In an interview with the BBC just prior to the work's first performance, Britten said, "my main feeling in setting this work was an enormous love and reverence and respect for the text. I feel that everyone ought to set Shakespeare to music in order just to get to know the incredible beauty and intensity of these words." He also notes that A Midsummer Night's Dream, in particular, "has such amazingly beautiful poetry already intended for singing." The events of the play also must have resonated with Britten's ongoing interest in relationships between the natural and supernatural, as revealed in his two settings of novellas by Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Owen Wingrave.

Not surprisingly, another aspect of the play that fascinated Britten was the three different levels of creatures, as he characterized them, in the play: the royal humans and the lovers; the rustics—"these lovable peasants, who behave so beautifully and charmingly throughout"; and the "curious fairy creatures." Britten delineates the characters into these three groups by assigning them contrasting styles of music and types of voices; Oberon, for instance, is a countertenor and Titania a coloratura.

Among the large number of existing operas and vocal works based on Shakespeare's plays, Britten's work ranks among the most successful. In his article on Shakespeare in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Christopher R. Wilson notes that, "Of about 270 operas (among over 380 vocal theatre works) based for the most part obliquely on the plays of Shakespeare only a handful have any musical or dramatic worth, and fewer have achieved a place in the repertory of professional companies." Besides Verdi's Macbeth, Falstaff, and Otello, (and two others that continue to receive performances "on the Continent," Nicolai's Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor and Thomas's Hamlet), Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream is the only other work Wilson commends.

The Juilliard Opera Center's production will be directed by Eve Shapiro, a member of the Drama Division faculty from 1976 until 2001, when she joined the School's vocal arts faculty to direct full-time for the Juilliard Opera Center.

Juilliard Opera Center Benjamin Britten: A Midsummer Night's Dream Peter Jay Sharp Theater Wednesday, Nov. 16-Sunday, Nov. 20 Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream Drama Theater Thursday, Nov. 17-Monday, Nov. 21 For time and ticket information, please see the calendar.

The fourth-year actors' presentation of the play will be directed by Joe Dowling, who comes to Juilliard for the first time as part of the centennial year's special programming efforts. A native of Ireland, Dowling has been artistic director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis since 1995. He served as artistic director of the Abbey Theater, Ireland's national theater, from 1978-85, and from 1985-95 as managing and artistic director of the Gaiety, Dublin's oldest commercial theater. He also founded and directed the Gaiety School of Acting, now widely regarded as Ireland's premier drama school.

Dowling's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Guthrie in 1997 was a huge hit with both audiences and critics, and in 2000 the production was toured by the company after enjoying an extended run at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. His productions of the play have been known for their imaginative, highly untraditional staging—one review mentions a scene where "The young lovers and the Spandex-clad fairies get jiggy to a hip-hop tune in the forest," for example—but no liberties are taken with the text. As Dowling told a reviewer in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "I don't believe Shakespeare should be placed in a doublet-and-hose world. His ideas are as contemporary as they were when he wrote them."

The musical score is being adapted by composer Keith Thomas, who wrote the music for Dowling's earlier productions. Conceived to underscore Dowling's unorthodox approach, the existing score draws on various subcategories of pop music and has been described by the composer as "very contemporary, very accessible, very 'rock video.'" For the Juilliard production, the score is being adapted for a live percussionist.

In the first-ever Drama Division tour in Juilliard's history, A Midsummer Night's Dream will tour this spring to Los Angeles (March 7-8) and Chicago (March 21-22).

Lisa Robinson is senior writer for special projects and proposals in the Office of Development and Public Affairs.