 So, this wonderful Tuesday morning, we're going to talk about sexuality, my favorite topic, women in sexuality, and even better, women in sexuality in Shakespeare. And within that, my favorite, favorite Shakespeare play of all time, A Midsummer Night's Dream. So wow, I can't wait to start this topic with a wonderful, creative, just full of zest-of-life director of HPU Theater. Welcome, my lovely guest, Eden Lee Murray. Thank you so much, Crystal. I'm glad to be here. So, I didn't properly introduce you with the title. It is actually the Paul and V. Lou Theater that you are ahead of, correct? It's actually a two-pronged title. I'm the adjunct professor of theater at HPU, and along with that comes the responsibility of being director of productions at the Paul and V. Lou Theater up there. Ah, okay. But theater people weren't supposed to be responsible. They were supposed to be able to just go out there and... We're just multitask. Oh, well, that's a good thing to know. All right, so wonderful. Given that background, you're going to be doing a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with your youth ensemble. Now, before we get into all that nice details of the upcoming production, let's dive right into Shakespeare. Let's dive right into A Midsummer Night's Dream and its exploration on women and sexuality. Do you have any opening statement on that one? Because it is a very feminine play, don't you think, with the forest? Well, it certainly centers around the battle between the sexes. You've got Oberon Titania, who are quarreling over the possession of this little changeling boy. Right. And Oberon Cheetz to win. Yes. Titania doesn't have a chance. She really doesn't. And once he gets his way, he takes the spell off and brings her back into reality after she's had a fairly extended X-rated date with a monster. A beast. The ass-headed bottom. Or that sounds kind of funny. But bottom, who is enchanted by Puck, who's the minion of Oberon. Right. Who puts a monster's head on Titania and Oberon tricks her to fall in love with the ass to humiliate her and gets the boy away from her, and then he lets her go back to being herself. Right. But the concept of fairy queen making love to a beast is very raw and sexual. It's very raw and sexual, and something that a lot of directors don't touch is the fact that big ears is not the only thing asses have. And there's a moment when you... They don't say that in the play, though, unless there's an underlying... There is an explicit piece in the text where he... Me thought I was... Me thought I had, and then he reaches up to where the ears used to be. Me thought I had, and it totally supports a look in the southern hemisphere, at which point, then he goes, no, man, would be crazy of what I thought I had. But that's explicitly what he's referring to. Shakespeare's so brilliant with the whole underlying messages and everything. Yep, yep, yep. And there's one innuendo after another, right through this play. And the way... When I was teaching, the way to get kids to do a close read of the play is that you find every dirty joke in the play, and they would come back and they would find, there's that, there's that, there's that. Also, give me a few. For people who don't know Mid-Summer Night's Dream, let's talk about the dirty jokes in it. Well, there's one... It's sort of a date joke where Lysander and Hermia have run off into the forest. Should we give a quick nutshell of the story? Oh, gosh. For people who just don't know this play. I mean, you should really see and read. It opens with a battle between the fairies, Oberyn and Titania. And then there are sort of interchangeable lovers, Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius, and Helena. Hermia and Lysander are in love, they want to marry. But Hermia's father, for some reason which is never explained, will not let her marry Lysander. Okay. He wants her to marry Demetrius. Okay. Demetrius and Helena have been a very happy couple until the play begins. Until they swap. Well, and then all of a sudden, Demetrius is supposed to marry Hermia. So two guys. He wants to marry Hermia because the father says he should. And Lysander wants to marry Hermia because they're in love. Meanwhile, Helena is the one that's out in the cold. So we have Hermia and Lysander who decide they're going to run away. They have to go through the enchanted forest, unbeknownst to them. There's the war of the fairies going on and all kinds of enchantments on the loose. And then Helena decides she's going to tell Demetrius that he's intended his run off with the other guy so that he'll go into the forest and maybe something... Maybe he'll have the same kind of change of heart with Hermia that he had with Helena and he'll come back to her. So that's the basic seven. And then the fairies, while Oberon is trying to figure out how to cheat and enchant Titania to get the boy that he wants away, he sees these lovers squabbling in the forest and tells Puck to take a piece of the magic flower that's going to enchant Titania. Anytime when you put the flower in someone's eyes, the next thing they look on is what you fall in love with. Makes no sense at all. That's a good classic kind of a... So he picks up one little stalk of that flower and tells Puck, his henchman, to go and squeeze the juice in the lover's eye that looks like he's dissing one of the girls. Well, it all messes up. And the wrong lover sees the wrong girl, right? And it's a terrible mess. And then they make it... Life is. And then they make it all come out better in the woods. They all fall asleep. Puck puts them to sleep. The angry father comes through with the Duke Theseus. There's another happy couple getting married. Theseus and Hippolyta. Are they happy? Yeah. Well, Theseus is happy. Hippolyta is the Amazon who kind of got... Yeah. Is she the queen of the Amazon? Queen of the Amazon's who got subjugated. You see? She's not that happy. She's not that happy either, you're quite right. But they come hunting through the forest and they see the four lovers enchanted on the ground. And then the lovers wake up and they've been undone. They've been, the antidote has been squeezed into their eyes. The right person sees the right person. They fall in love. And Theseus says, shut up, Egeus. We're all going to get married. At which point, and then there's the last skein of it, which is the rude mechanicals, this adorable band, Bottom is one of them. The guy named Junior Lea. Yes. You mean the play within the play? The play within the play. The rude mechanicals that have decided, and it's the epitome of a really bad community theater. I love it. Oh, it's so true. It's fabulous. They've been rehearsing in the enchanted wood to do a play that's going to be selected to perform in honor of the Duke's wedding. I love it though. And they get picked. It's so tacky, right? Their whole set up. It's hard, and the thing about that play, when I was doing, I've seen this play and I've done this play off Broadway, and the only thing that can really go wrong with it is if the rude mechanicals are too good. I saw it on the London stage, and the rude mechanicals, the play was brilliant up until the end, and then they just knew what they were doing with comedy, and it wasn't funny. That's the key of comedy, though. You don't try too hard. You don't know you're funny, but the funniest, the funniest production of this I ever saw was in a freshman class at Kaimuki High School in the Shakespeare Festival. I ran that for seven years. Brilliant. And this group of kids comes up, and they're terrified, and Thisby, the guy playing, Thisby, balloons, balloons, and the balloons know the life of their own, and the kid was mortified because he couldn't get them to hold still, and his wig fell off, and he tripped, and he was just almost in tears. I said, you kiss the feet of the god of comedy, because that's, and people were weeping, they were laughing so hard, and that's what we're trying to work for. Now that we're on Pyramus and Thisby, this historically is an all-male group, yes? So in the play, within the play, there are men playing, including the one who plays the girl with the fake boobs, but in old Shakespeare, it was always men playing. Yeah, women were not allowed on stage. So how does that reflect on the interpretation of women when it's always been cast by men to play even the women? That's a great question. The ones in Shakespeare's companies that played the women were generally the boys, whose voices hadn't changed yet, and there might've been some men, bivalent sexuality going on there, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. People just take for granted, yeah? They just take for granted, yeah. And in our company, there are more girls than there guys, so some of the girls are flipping over and playing men. In our case, Thisby is being played by a guy, as is Bottom. When you're saying something before we came on air, it's very interesting about the concept of the fairies that they are not gendered in a way. They're not. Well, here's, again, I was telling you at the beginning that I generally evolve the interpretation of a play depending on the company that I inherit from auditions across O'ahu. And in this case, I have a company, a very small company, because I moved it from the Hawaii Theater when I left Hawaii Theater last semester, last summer, to take the job as the adjunct professor up at HPU. And what I did, because the parents of these kids had said wherever you go, we're coming with you, which is really lovely. So I have 20, 25 that were in the company last year, some aged out, some left island, and I wound up with 15, which is a fairly small company. So what we did was we decided we were gonna run with the concept of a band of fairies that descend upon the HPU Theater. They come in during the pre-show in real time, they set the stage, they discover this stuff, they create it, what they're gonna work with, they come in, the fairies tend to pilfer. We've done a lot of research on fairies for this, and they steal from mortals, and they don't have a particularly high regard for mortals. So they've come in, well, because we're just fat, dumb, and slow, and they work at a much higher frequency than we do, so they are superior, at least certainly in their minds. So they come in to play this story that shows how stupid the mortals are, from the rude mechanicals to the lovers, fairies are just so sensual and sexual, and it's not a big deal, right? But with the lovers, for example, Lysander and Hermia, when they run off in the wood, Hermia says, I'm so tired, so she falls down and Lysander tries to spoon and just come right up behind her. She goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, we're not married. You go over there. And this goes back to the traditional, right? The old repressed kind of sexuality that's bound. Well, virginity was at a premium, you know? So she's not gonna sleep with him until she's married. Well, the fairies think that's ridiculous. So the fairies, if we're gonna interpret that today, are very progressive. They're just freeings. They're just for real. They're sensual. If they want it, they do it. So is there something for us to learn, as dumb mortals from fairies? I don't know. I don't know, because in the course of our story, because right about halfway through the play, one of the fairies just howls, Lord, what fools these mortals be, right? That's like the key about the way. Because that's the crux of the mess up in the forest, right? And then after that, each of the fairies playing the mortals has to go through the crisis of the play for each one of those characters. And one of the beauties of theater is that it teaches empathy and what I'm watching the fairies go through is, as they incarnate these characters, as they tell the story, they all of a sudden begin to get a sense of what it feels like to be mortal. So do you think as the teens in this ensemble, in the process of being so involved in the play as the fairies looking down on the mortals that they learn about human nature and sexuality? Are they picking up those? I think they're doing just fine learning about sexuality on the road. Without the play. Right, yeah. But in terms of what I want, this play for me is a box in a box. One of the reasons I love working with students and children in theater is because when you stand in someone else's shoes, when you have to learn how someone else feels, you can no longer judge them. I mean, when I was working in New York and publishing a long time ago, I was also doing theater at night. And somebody was explaining to me the behavior of somebody that they didn't like and I said, oh, well that's probably because blah, blah, blah. And I was trying to look for the, what's underneath the presenting behavior. And this woman looked at me and said, oh, it was spoken like an actress. And at the time, I thought it was a slam. I thought she was putting me down for that. And I asked her about it years later when we were friends and she said, oh, no, no, no. I was amazed because all I had done was to evaluate what I saw and what was hitting me in the face. And you went underneath to see what was behind what that person was presenting and to try and understand that. And she says, I thought that was remarkable. And that's, I see that happen with children over and over and over again when they play in theater. And that's a really interesting way to channel teen issues. I mean, a lot of people don't know with the social media. In fact, we're gonna talk about that next week is the, you know, all the consequences of all that and how lack of communicative we've become. Oh, and the social media and stuff where you can be anonymous. Yes. And the whole, you know, the old-fashioned concept of the pecking party where you've got a bunch of birds together and nobody knows who's gonna be the victim, who's gonna be the boss until somebody pecks and there's one drop of blood drawn. And it turns into a pecking party. And whoever is blooded first, the rest of them jump down and attack. Yeah. Scary human nature in a way. And with social media, it's the anonymity of it. Everybody's disconnected. Yes, yes, no one to blame. Right, and in theater, you're right there. Face to face, you have to deal with it. Yes, yes, and you're touching and feeling so the texture and coming in terms with your body, let's talk about the body and how a youth kind of learns to explore the body through theater and sexuality and sensuality. True, and for our fairies, because each one of the kids in the company has had to create, before they even touched the Shakespeare characters, they had to begin to learn how to move like a fairy. How does a fairy move? Depends on what they're connected with in nature. Like the three fairies have one kind of emotion. We've got one fairy whose name is Zog. Because they all had to come up with their own names. And this is a fairy of mud. And she's just like... A fairy of mud, I love it. So they choose their own connection to whatever aspect of nature. I love it. And then some, for example, the guy who plays, for us in the rude mechanicals, the stupidest, the slowest, well the slowest, the dimmest bulb in the chandelier. And he's just adorable. He's playing, we had to combine two characters. He plays Snaug, who is the lion and the wall. And he's, his fairy is named Helus. And he's a fairy of the sun and he's of superior intelligence. And so his fairy chose to play the dimmest bulb just because he could really laugh at him. And even at the end, as he comes out and he makes his cases the lion for the court, you see the fairy working to make him good. So all of the fairies, again, and one child asked me yesterday at rehearsal, she said, when I win, because I've asked them all to play it a hyper-reality. I said, I don't want soap opera acting. I don't want good, real acting. I wanna see fairies playing and having fun with how they think mortal lovers behave, right? How do mortal lovers behave? On behalf of a perspective of a fairy, well, you know, we're just gonna have to think about this, take a quick breather break, think about your fairy self and how you see your mortal self and how we can improve our sexuality. Come back and talk more about Midsim and its Dream. I'm Kaui Lukas, host of Hawaii is My Mainland every Friday at 3 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. We talk about things of interest to those of us who live here and my past blogs can be found at kauilukas.com. Okay, I didn't listen. You can be the greatest, you can be the best. You can be the king, come playin' on your chest. You can be the world, you can be the war. You can touch a cloud, go bangin' on his door. You can throw your hands up, you can breathe a cloud. I'm Crystal here with Lovely Eden Lee, talking about Midsim and its Dream and how sexuality is played out through the fairies and the mortals. Now, let's talk about the forest, you know, because the metaphor of the forest is very sexual if you want to interpret it, if you want to go down there. You know, it's where people go, you see? She already interpreted it the way she wanted to. No, but really even on the psychoanalysis side of things, if you want to talk about repression and the idea of a man's anxiety and the fear of the woman's sexuality, I mean, there's so many layers we can talk about. But again, and the thing is, because it's an enchanted forest, it's the forest where everyone can do what they want. You know what I mean? So there are no rules. There are no rules. All bets are off, right? So, and that which is constraining you in society, for example, Hermie, L.S., Andrew, Demetrius, and Helen have rules they have to obey in Athens. But they go in the forest, all bets are off. And that which is up goes down, that which is down goes up, that which you thought you understood is completely overthrown. Is that kind of like the gate to everybody's dream and desire where they kind of want a leash but don't dare to speak of in the conscious world? It's also like Joseph Campbell's on a hero's journey. It sort of pulls the hero's journey inside out. Joseph Campbell believes it. And any one of these characters you can imagine as the hero of their own story. But each one has, you start with a point of stasis where the life is grounded, and then the world tilts, and the hero has to go into the underworld, learn a lesson, go on a journey, meet his helpers, et cetera, and then return to his world changed, bettered, understanding something, learning something. Well, in this case, everybody in the play learns something and they come back. The lovers who belong together are together. Egeus, who was the controlling father who all of a sudden has to, and he has a moment of reconciliation in the forest with his daughter and with Lysander, who he's sent some pretty rotten things about. But in our production, everybody goes through their journey and then reconciles, and then we have the wedding and the play within a play, which is just delicious. But while they're in the forest and all this juicy kind of couple swapping and jealousy and what they do to show the partner what they think they will affect them. I mean, all these interpretations, I think Shakespeare really has this concept of the forest as being this sexual energy that's released somehow. I'm sure that's one way to look at it, you know? I mean, there's so many ways you can interpret. That's the beauty of Shakespeare, it's so broad. What about people saying that Shakespeare is gay? Who cares? Well, because there's a lot of gender issues that are interpreted through Shakespeare plays, or maybe that's just because we try to pick out little stupid weeds out of the garden. No, you can run with that. There's also the whole school of thought that don't believe Shakespeare or Shakespeare or Stratford on Avon was the one who wrote the plays. I did a production of Much Ado About Nothing a couple of years ago from an Oxfordian point of view, which is the idea that the 17th Earl of Oxford is the one who wrote the plays. Do you know, are you familiar with that? Okay, so Oxford was this brilliant child, very precocious, Elizabeth met him when she was on one of her progressions through England. When he was about eight, maybe that, he spoke Latin, he spoke Greek, he could do poetry, he was just brilliant, and so she fastened her eyes on him and kept her eyes on him. And when he was about 13, 14, she brought him to her palace to be her minister of the Eewer, which meant he poured her bathwater. And when he was 15 years old, she took his virginity, and they were lovers for a very, throughout her life and his, right? And he wanted very much to be, he wanted to be acknowledged at least as her lover if not made her partner, right? And she refused to do it, and they would have periodically these knock-down drag-out fights. And in a couple of times, it was argued that he went too far and she was gonna either execute him or take his lands or his title or whatever, so he had to quickly write a play to apologize. And our contention was that much to do about nothing was that play. And that she had to come in, and it's about Beatrice and Benedict and the squabbles and the romantic. You see, there's always a backstory to every drama. Right, right, right. And that's the most interesting thing, like a prequel. So what I'm saying is you could go, and we created a whole interpretation of a play around, well, Oxford was actually Shakespeare. So when you say, was Shakespeare actually gay, I'm wondering how that would affect a take on Midsomer because there's nobody, that issue doesn't surface. No, there's not that type of identity. It's very heterosexual play. Right. But anything, I think it's quite patriarchal, if you will, because it's really, they come from this kind of a dominating, the king speaks and, you know. The men win. Right, and then the women have to find some ways to go around and explore their own sexuality on their own terms and then go back to deal with going back to the husband and, you know, it's still, it's very... Well, I'm sure, that's funny too, because while Oberon is thinking he's humiliating Titania by giving her this monster to be in love with or already be in bed with for a 24 hour period, when in fact she's just had a plenty good time. And there's sometimes a traditional interpretation of when Oberon breaks the spell and wakes her up, is she turns around and he goes, you know, there lies her, she goes, he thought I was in the middle of an ass, and he goes, there lies your love. And she goes, ah, all right. In ours, she says, and she just bursts out laughing like, you, you, and then Oberon is like a moment of your mind now, right? Yeah, come back to me, woman, kind of thing. But there's, and there are one of my favorite quotes and there was something about how Titania says, man is but ass if he goes about to expound his dream. That's bottom's line. Bottom's line, ah. Man is but an, he's talking about, when he wakes up in the forest and the head is gone and he's back to being himself and he's talking about what he's seen, and he just, man is but an ass if he thinks, I can't remember the line, the whole line. To go about to expound your dream, so does that mean that we shouldn't be over interpreting our dreams and just let it, let us enjoy that release? Well, no, because the next thing he does is hop up and run over to Peter Quince's house, his director, he said, I'll have, Peter Quince can write a song about it and it'll be called Bottom's Dream because it has no bottom. I mean, he just doesn't think he has the capacity to do it, so he goes off to his boss. It's like the Scarecrow visitor boss who thinks he doesn't have a brain, but he's brilliant. Yeah, well I wouldn't, I might not go as far as to say the bottom is brilliant, but the boy playing bottom is just deliciously funny. Oh good, so let's talk a little bit about that, your play. Oh well, all right, the play, as I said, the concept is these fairies come into the space, they discover the space, they filter costumes from wherever they fight over who's gonna play, what role, and then what's really beautiful is we borrowed the language that Tony Pisculli, he of the Hawaii Shakespeare Festival last year, did a production of Midsummer with invented languages. The Greeks, the mortals spoke one language, it was called Greek-ish, and the fairies spoke the other. Great. To do to taste you, speciesis man, ta ra ta pona spani, be pachos anisip tire, e muda. I've played a G.S., and I mean, I took me forever to learn it, but it was an Iambic pentameter, and it was so much fun. But the fairies had a different language entirely, and I borrowed, with Tony's permission, the fairies come into the theater speaking that language, and they mess with the audience speaking that language. And how do they fairies speak, please? Oh, I don't speak fairies. Oh, but you work with them, you must know a little bit of that language. I gave them the language, and it sounds like Gershblas, right? It's very urrr, it's very earthy, it's very sensual, very sexual, if you want. And then the fairies, they actually, they get everything set, and there's a, the pre-show, I want people to come as close to a half hour before the curtain is possible, because the pre-show happens in real time. And then the show begins. That's when they're exploring the mortals. That's when they're exploring the mortals in the audience, and setting themselves up, and how am I gonna play this part, et cetera, and then the fairies disappear, the music begins, the lights come up, Theseus and Apology come, and they're speaking fairiesh. I love it. And all the fairies come back onto the stage, and they look at the audience, and they realize, so they have to cast a spell. And they, I won't say what they do, but they do cast a spell, and then they disappear, and we replay at the very beginning of the play, Theseus and Apology come in, and the audience can understand them. You know, you were just revealing a little taste of the magic of this production. I mean, the play itself is so magical, but you've just shown us a little inkling of it. Tell us more. So this upcoming production is next week. You've been working on this for quite a long time now. We've been working with the play since January. The kids have completely internalized their fairies. That's fabulous. And the fairies are in the process now of last steps of internalizing the characters. So they live and breathe fairy. They live and breathe fairy, and then the fairy brings the character life. Okay, so it's next week. It's this Friday. This Friday, May 12th at 7.30, May 13th, Saturday at 7.30. Please come about a half an hour early. The door's open a half hour before the curtain time of the show, and on Sunday at four, we close with that night. You should have shook them and wrote instead of 7.30 actual time. You say seven o'clock, because then people will come, you know? It's a fairy trick. It's a male no, because then the people who show up, they see people come in just before the curtain, and the ones in the audience are the ones in the no. So they've seen the goodies. What are some tips to, going back to the fairy mortal world for us to leave with? The takeaway of, you know, what we're missing as earthly creatures in terms of just our outlook on love and life. What can we learn from the fairies? What can we learn from the fairies? What can the fairies learn from us? Okay, let's start with that one then. I would say, because the fairies come in with the prejudice, and I think the fairies, through the process of living what mortals live, leave the theater kinder, gentler, and sorts. And I think if the audience takes anything away from that, it's like, you know, you don't make fun until you understand. And I think... I would have thought the mortals were more judgmental. And that's really interesting that you've put it as the fairies having the preconception. Yep, I wanted to flip the box. Okay, okay. And so, would you say that this is a good production for youths, for old ages? Oh, I would have to go with a ride of fun for young and old. And the thing that I love about working like this with us, it makes me think of what George Bernard Shaw said, and he said, if you use theater to try and teach people things, you will drive people from the theater in hordes. If you use the theater to entertain, to amuse, to delight, you can teach people anything you want. What is your favorite quote or scene or moment in a Midsummer Night's Dream? Give me your hands if we'd be friends. And Robin will restore men's. And that line is, that line, actually the audience doesn't hear that line, because two lines before, well, the line before those two lines, the fairies take their spell back, and the whole company speaks that last line in fairy-ish. Fairy-ish. Again, the language that you're not gonna share with us. I can't, I don't speak. I speak Greek-ish, I don't speak fairy-ish. So, ladies and gentlemen, you're gonna have to reinterpret this yourself in whatever way you want. Again, it is this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at HPU. There's a huge world of fairs out there that people don't really know exist. But to find that fairy world within your world, does that make sense? Sure, absolutely. And to come with an open mind, with the freedom to explore and to touch with the other side. I love it. It's magic everywhere. Yeah, wow. That's what I leave with. There's magic everywhere. Magic everywhere. Okay, but I still say that people have a weird concept that magic is not, it doesn't touch me. This is something, oh, it's play. How do we get them to feel that? How do we transfer that magic? Well, interestingly enough, when people go to see live theater, they are opening their mind to magic. Okay. You know, I tell my kids when... So they need to go. They need to go. When people come to your door to theater, they are five years old. I don't care how old they are criminologically. They come in going, tell me a story, and we give them that. Boy, do we have a story. So please go and see this magical, magical performance. Thank you, Eden Lee, for such a wonderful interpretation of that world. And don't, don't, don't just go see it. All right? Meet someone on the street this weekend. Thank you.