Rich Greywolf is a founding member of Teatro Serpiente, and the director of this summer’s production:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
I would never describe myself as one who can sit and wait patiently for truth to fall from the sky — hoping to have it spill its contents at my feet. No, I am more of a large grazing buffalo plodding forward from one tuft of grass to another. Sullied, purposeful, imposing, swag-bellied, and earthbound. My immense head looking toward summer: a green pasture of time lying wide and open.
Yet, there it sits, truth; cradled between the months of June and August taking in the glow of the summer sun: our Midsummer. Waiting to unfold and reveal itself, obsidian and obtuse. And as I lumber closer, I acquiesce to this stolid piece of turf, that arbor of green. And in that cradle, while I bask, I find I am at my most vulnerable: naked and supine, eyes open to the sky, standing in my midlife straddling “what is,” one eye peering at “what was” and the other toward “what could be.” It is here where I can breathe in the crushed grass—a moment of quiescence. And before I move on, with my hide imbued with our Midsummer, beneath the Mountain, steeped in Magic, amongst the love of friends, I am transformed.
And there you are, sitting at the base of the Mountain, watching that transformation at arms’ length, stretched out on oasis of soft grass, watching the Mountain watch you: a backdrop of light, awash with orange, then red and violet revealing tight alluvial folds of rock: open and inviting. And though always and forever a trespasser, you watch with abandon this saltarello of light, and a smile radiates across your face. Your bright sun drenched eyes becoming slit pinpoints moving across the ardent landscape, following a river of trees that spill down the Mountain, filling the desert floor with piñon and juniper.
And before you, staged in front of propped-up wood slats, is a dream: fraught with a terrestrial king and queen, a tyrannical father, two pairs of lovers and all beneath the canvas of light, celestial fairies dance before their fairy king and queen. You lie with your head dipping over the horizon and you let yourself surrender over to the dream. You let the fantasy drench you. You become soaked with an effervescent laughter. And you leave, different.
There are no re-takes this summer dip into the fantasy this July. Only four days. Open to everyone.
“Are you sure/That we are awake? It seems to me/That yet we sleep, we dream”
–Demetrius, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV.i