Stuck In The Dark

Shakespeare. It's a name that carries a lot of weight and a lot of preconceived notions built from the many, many pages of the playwright's dense and intense works. From the tragedy of Hamlet to the iconic love story of Romeo and Juliet, readers know to expect a heaping dose of melodrama when walking into one of Shakespeare's plays. But A Midsummer Night's Dream takes a different route for its climax into a more eyebrow-raising place.

By Act 3, as the four main characters of the play — young Athenian lovers Hermia, Demetrius, Helena, and Lysander — finally find each other in the labyrinthine forest, a riveting and high-intensity conflict is expected. Maybe there will be a battle, maybe a few tragic and dramatically extended deaths? Certainly a noble speech or two.

Or how about. . . silly bickering? The height of conflict actually manifests as an absurd and comedic encounter where all four Athenians scramble in confusion, quarreling like children. So what if they were children?

I imagine an adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream where these young lovers are reinterpreted as immature schoolchildren. Instead of venturing into an unknown forest, Hermia and Demetrius have decided to hide away and stay the night in the empty school with their "young love" (actually no more than schoolyard crushes). Like the play, Demetrius and Helena follow, and Oberon and Puck, who toyed with the Athenians' emotions, are reimagined as class pranksters who saw an opportunity to stay behind and mess with some classmates. As they panic, left all alone during the night and provoked by fake love notes written by the "fairies," emotions take over and they bicker over their class crushes.

I'll be centering on a tantrum by Hermia during the climax, when she finally realizes her crush Lysander (along with Demetrius) changed his mind on a whim and now likes Helena. She whines about how they must dislike her since she's short. The outburst is extremely humorous and demonstrates the absurdity and immaturity of the Athenians well.

The genre is horror (kind of). Why not comedy?

Imagine being a tiny child in a comparatively massive school. At first, it just sounded fun to play and have the whole place to yourselves. But dark, echoing, empty halls are one easy way to turn an adventure into a horror.

It's a parallel to the original play, where Hermia and Lysander had no idea that a picturesque elopement would start a wild and bewildering night in the forest. Only, in the reimagination, the poor youths are much younger and much more frightened of the dark.

Take a look at these unsettling after-hours scenes of a school and reconsider the genre:

The adaptation would be, at the surface, presented with a skin that visually illustrates the primal and scarier sides of love. Hermia's outburst is mainly humorous, but in her perspective, it's the culmination of hours running around a frightening environment she found herself in thanks to her love-driven decisions, only to have it backfire as she loses her crush to Helena.

Of course, that's only the top layer. In truth, it's a comedy focusing on the Athenians' juvenile behavior. The horror elements mainly help to highlight the literal "childishness" of the adapted characters and therefore also the immaturity of the characters (including the originals) in the context of love. They mostly serve as a backdrop to the ridiculous schoolyard bickering, emphasizing the absurdity of it all.

Building on the setting's metaphors, the children could begin the story at the library, a symbol of reason, and after all the chasing around, eventually end up on the playground, a place where emotions run freely. And this is where Hermia's dramatically absurd speech takes place.

In this stand-in for a forest, the jungle gym could help Hermia emphasize her point. As she wails about her situation, she climbs onto the playground structure, raising herself higher to compensate for her short stature. And when she squeaks the adapted line, "How tiny am I now, you flagpole?", she is looking down on Helena and the others from atop a platform.

Hermia spouts such irrational and unusual accusations to Helena as, "You made him like you 'cause you're tall, you meanie." As she threatens to attack Helena, Hermia claws wildly at the air while wailing.

Most of the other lines in the play would likewise be altered to better fit the characters as bratty children as well as highlight their irrationality. The vocabulary and grammar of course would be reduced greatly in complexity and brought closer to modern English to reflect the speakers.

In terms of dress, Hermia would wear shirts and shorts to emphasize her small size while Helena would have on overalls to highlight her relative height. Lysander could also be wearing shirts and shorts to stylistically match Hermia, showing their connection. Demetrius would have more expensive and fashionable clothes than Lysander, indicating how he was favored over Lysander as Hermia's betrothed at the beginning of the play.