Tiffany Jo Werth, UC Davis
A Midsummer Yosemite’s Dream
Directed, adapted, and produced by Katie Brokaw
April 25-28, 2024
Near the time of Earth Day this past April, I escaped Bay Area traffic for the embrace of giant trees, roaring cascades, a towering Dome, and Park Rangers masquerading as players in A Midsummer Yosemite’s Dream. Nestled in a tranquil meadow in Yosemite National Park, beneath the looming face of Half Dome, lies Curry Village, a campground composed of row upon row of canvas tents, and thronged with park visitors. Its hustle and bustle—hikers organizing their gear, families looking for hot meal services, and circling cars seeking a coveted parking spot—recalls the Athens of Duke Theseus and his Queen Hippolyta, complete with signage and enforced order. But amid all the orderly whirl sits a quiet outdoor amphitheater, ringed by towering ponderosa pine and flowering dogwood trees. Its design adheres to the principles of what has become known as “National Park Service rustic,” or, we might say, “a wood near Athens,” the green world just beyond Athens’s gates. It is the perfect location for a lovers’ escape, mischievous fairies, a ranger-led Nature Program, a campfire sing along, or a Shakespeare play (See Figure 1).
For those less familiar with the history behind Shakespeare in Yosemite, its founding in 2017 by Katherine Steele Brokaw and Paul Prescott sprang from the desire to bring accessible and free productions of Shakespeare’s plays to Yosemite National Park for Earth Day. The calendar also so happens to coincide with Shakespeare’s birthday. The co-founders were convinced that the park’s Amphitheater was an ideal venue. A venue where Shakespeare’s wooden O of the Globe might transform, in Katherine Steel Brokaw’s words, into “a wood O where the wood is still alive.”[1] Although the co-founders might have envisioned a living wooden O, as I listened to the rousing opening pop songs led by Lupine (Cathryn Flores), I couldn’t help but draw parallels between what is perhaps Yosemite’s most famous geologic feature and the iconic Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare in the First Folio. The distinctive, massive scale of Half Dome demands viewer’s attention just as Shakespeare’s extraordinary dome-like high forehead remains one of his most distinguishing and iconic features. As the play began, I felt in the presence of a lithic-human assemblage (see Figure 2). The nearly deep time of the intervening 430 years between the first performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and this A Midsummer Yosemite’s Dream receded and warped as the play brought to life the fairy spirits of local animals and plants who spoke to 2024 park tourists in the language of Shakespeare’s lines.
Fittingly, the remit of Shakespeare in Yosemite is to bring human and natural landscape into conversation. Its shows celebrate music and its freestyle adaptations highlight issues relevant to the ecology of the park and sustaining it in the face of radical climate crisis. Its cast and crew draw from the local University of California, Merced faculty and student populations, as well as park rangers and members of nearby communities. Its core messaging is one of environmental awareness and environmental justice brought about through play, festivity, and the rethinking of tradition. Its appeal stems from its deeply entrenched commitment to emplacement and the genuine enthusiasm that infuses its scripts with playful adaptations and foot-stomping pop songs. It joins a worldwide Shakespeare eco-dramaturgy fringe movement that includes Randall Martin’s Cymbeline in the Anthropocene (https://www.cymbeline-anthropocene.com), Gretchen Minton’s Montana Shakespeare in the Parks (https://shakespeareintheparks.org), Australian led troupe “Come you Spirits” (https://www.comeyouspirits.com), as well as the more establishment voice of Elizabeth Freestone’s adaptation of The Tempest for the Royal Shakespeare Company (https://www.rsc.org.uk/the-tempest/past-productions/elizabeth-freestone-2023-production).
To set the stage, the cast warmed up the audience with pop culture songs in what felt like a campfire sing-along, the rousing music drawing in curious passersby. I watched as Hermia, Helena, Lysandra,[2] Demetrius, Egeus, Hippolyta, and Theseus gathered for a wedding in Yosemite. Along for the party were a handful of Park Mechanicals (including Ranger Bottom, the Telecommunications Clerk, Ranger Quince the Archaeologist, Professor Flute the UC Merced scientist and his daughter Astrid, along with Snout the shuttle driver, Ranger Starveling the Campground Ranger, Snug the Mountaineering School Administrator, Ranger Scott, and Ranger Michael). Frolicking about were a small host of animal and plant fairies including a Western Pipistrelle (bat), Red-Legged Frog, Monkeyflower, Parnassian (butterfly), Juniper, Pika and Lupine (see Figure 3). All were accompanied by the Fierce Vexations Band who led a merry troupe of musicians.
Placards informed us that we were in the 1930s in Mariposa Grove. The adaptation’s conceit hangs on a historical what if. What if the fairies from A Midsummer Night’s Dream had come to Yosemite for a production planned but never executed? As explained by Ranger Marion (aka Ranger Bottom), once in 1934 the famed Max Reinhardt was to lead a production of the play in Yosemite. Instead, he ended up staging it at The Hollywood Bowl. But what if the fairies had come to Yosemite to play a role and then never left because they fell in love with the trees nearly as old as the fairy world?
Cue a quartet of fairies, including those three the audience might expect, Titania, Oberon, and Puck, who are joined by an interloping Ariel, who wandered over from The Tempest. Each, the program explains, are elemental fairies: Oberon is King of Fire, Titania of Water, Puck of Earth, and Ariel of Air. Thus begins the play with an untimely warp whereby time, as well as characters and lines, wander freely between dates and plays.
The fairies hide in the fire scar of a giant sequoia, calling to mind Ariel’s being knitted up in a pine where he howls away time. The fairies await the right moment to address mortals and warn them of the disturbing changes to their natural world. The play then toggles nearly a century forward in time to the present moment, to the wedding party of Hippolyta and Theseus, set to take place at the Park’s famous Ahwahnee hotel. The fairies are awoken and learn of nearly another century of environmental degradation and increased threats to their habitat and beloved trees. All are horrified, except for Oberon, who plays the doubting Thomas, climate-change-denier role. In a delightful plot adaptation, Titania and Puck decide to punish Oberon for his skepticism. They give him the magic potion (made from the juice of a native little wildflower, the “sierra shooting star”) that fires up his ardor for the next creature he spies: Ranger Bottom, the Telecommunications Clerk, who has also experienced the mischief of fairies, and been transformed into a donkey.
As in many productions of the play, the mechanicals steal the show and these dancing park rangers proved no exception. Meanwhile the potion-crossed lovers become nearly interchangeable figures darting about the woods. Humans, it appears, have little defense against the greater magic of the forest and fairies. The Park Mechanicals gather in Mariposa grove for a “Yosemite team meeting” to plan their staging of Pyramus and Thisby for the ducal nuptials at the Ahwahnee hotel. When the mechanicals ask, does “the moon shine that night we play our play?” the rangers consult their phones to look for a lunar calendar. But they are foiled by “no reception” on their cell phones—a phenomena anyone visiting a National or State Park might be quite familiar with. Moreover, the terrible and terrifying Lion is transformed into a Mountain Lion, whose roar just might make campers shiver in their canvas-sided tents and reach for their flashlights.
Later, as the play’s mayhem and confusion reach a fever pitch, Puck channels a line from Ariel, and gently rebukes Titania (who has taken over Oberon’s role) to lift the spell of the magic potion, which has made Oberon (superbly played by Tonatiuh Newbold) fall for the transformed Park Ranger Bottom (the inimitable Ranger Marion Roubal), whose long ears Oberon caresses. Their prolonged collapsed embrace just below the stage drew continuous amusement from the audience as well as other players. Until, finally, Puck chides Titania that he would relent and release the spell-charmed lovers “were I human” (The Tempest 5.1.25). This conditional tense serves as a reminder to Titania to practice forgiveness. But it also highlights a range of rebukes to the humans for their habitat negligence and myopic attitudes. As the fairies try to tell Oberon: “It’s too warm, Oberon. Even for a fire king. You must understand, the world has gotten too hot.” To which Oberon rejoins, freely borrowing Miranda’s lines from The Tempest: “Fire is back! I see more automobiles and aeroplanes than ever! O brave new world that has such people in it!” Not only is it too hot, the fairies continue, but almonds are dropping their blossoms too early, bud-killing frosts come out of season, and the sequoia are fire-scarred and dying. Everywhere there is evidence of blatant human disregard for natural habitat.
The warning signs herald catastrophe, but as Shakespeare fans know, this play does not end in tragedy. And so the conditional hypothesis of the adaptation’s “what if” pivots, along with the play’s plot, to a spirit of restitution and even eco-resolution. By the end, the mechanicals and players can enact forgiveness, and the lovers’ pair off, their quarrels resolved. But the adaptation extends the creaturely and human accord within the play one ring further to promote a renewed commitment to preserving the natural world, including a “visitor access plan to protect resources.”[3] Even Oberon has to admit “I have taken too little care of these things.” As Titania puts it “perhaps these younger mortals can help save us all.”
In the epilogue of festive joy and song, Puck promises that we might yet “make amends ere long” (5.1.424). An abiding root of eco-joy takes hold as Puck’s epilogue dissolves into a hearty sing-along of Harry Belafonte’s “Turn the World Around” as all the players join in singing “We are of the spirit/ Truly of the spirit / Only can the spirit / Turn the world around!”
Hearing these lyrics echo off the surrounding whispering pines and famous Dome, one could not help humming along. I was not alone. Imprinted in memory was the sheer delight of both players and spectators as they followed the Director’s lead at the conclusion to the mechanicals play-within-a-play. Brokaw, airborne with arms upflung, belted out an eco-anthem adaptation of the chorus to The Proclaimers’ famous 1980s pop song “I’m gonna be (500-miles).” The players, fairies, humans, and rangers sang out “And I would HIKE 500 miles and I would hike 500 more,” a rousing call to an eco-resolution (see Figure 4) to which the audience couldn’t help but join. I imagined it ricocheting off the rockface of Half Dome and creating untimely loops where past, present, and future might coalesce into a braver world of something new. A Midsummer’s Yosemite Dream sparked a rare moment of eco-joy and delivered a sliver of hope in an otherwise jaded and disillusioned time in 2024. Might we take up that provocative “what if” and rewrite the past to reinvent the future? Might we turn the world around?
Sponsors:
UC Merced Arts
Yosemite Hospitality
Visit Yosemite Mader County
Yosemite Mariposa county Tourism Bureau
Misfit, inc
National Park Service
[1] (https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/theater/shakespeare-yosemite-romeo-juliet-hopeful-17898163).
[2] No, this is not a typo, but a deliberate and delightful queering of roles that were part of the adaptation.
[3] This is a reference to the newly instituted reservation system for Yosemite National Park that seeks to control the numbers of daily visitors by requiring them to reserve in advance to enter the park in order to help meet long term resource management plans.
Oecologies 