Theater Director Rita McLary previews next week’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

The drama department is taking the stage for their winter play, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” on Feb. 23 and 24. Bucs’ Blade reporter Sophia Jaeger sat down with the director of theater to discuss what the play has in store.

SJ: How is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” different from things you have done before?

RM: Well it’s Shakespeare and I have only directed one other Shakespeare play here at Grand Haven before,  so it’s unusual in that renown. It’s also unusual in the fact that we have set it outside of its historic period which I don’t think I’ve ever done before.

SJ: What are you looking forward to about the show?

RM: Seeing it all come together right now, two weeks out, we have a lot of good things going on but nothing’s perfected yet, so seeing it all come together and see all the work for the students pay off.

SJ: How has it been working with actors and the dialect?

RM: It’s actually been great. We spent the first week just figuring out what Shakespeare’s words meant using various translations tools, just figuring out what he was trying to say and then all of the sudden the story just came to life and we could see ‘of course that means this’ and we could really understand it as we went through it together. They’ve done a lot of work on their own to make their lines hit the emphasis point that it needs to hit so we’ve studied that pretty thoroughly with an academic bent the first few weeks of rehearsal. We’re working on making it physical, which is of course very important to Shakespeare. Student are great to work with, they are so motivated.

SJ: What’s the show about?

RM: Basically to pair of lovers gets mixed up on who they love and at least one of those is ordered by the nobility to marry the one she doesn’t want to marry. So there’s this confusion and they run away and try and work it out and it gets more complicated through magical events because they are visiting the land of the fairies. It becomes ever more complicated with these two couples before it all works itself out in the end.

SJ: Who are the characters and who is playing what?

RM: We’ve divided the cast into three groups. We have the fairies [with] Miller Rohrs as the king of the fairies Oberon and Madison Smits as the queen of the fairies Titania. Then we have this group of actors who perform a play within the play and they are led by the director, Hadden Gould playing Quince and Bottom who is the over actor, he always wants to play all the parts, say all the lines, he’s that kind of actor. [Bottom] is played by Kilian Jacobs and it’s hysterical. Then we have our nobility and our humans, we call them the mere mortals. They’re led by Theseus and that’s played by Makenzie Hornack and fiance Hippolyta which is Anna Bremmer. And of course Puck is the henchman for Oberon, or the jester as they describe him, and that’s played by Eric Livingston.