Notes from Director Edward Hall
Artistic Director of Chicago Shakespeare Theater and Director of Short Shakespeare! A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Reading the Play as a Director…
When I read Shakespeare as a director, I always focus on the play at hand by reading it multiple times and speaking the lines aloud. This helps me get a sense of how I might depict the story on stage. I pay close attention to where scenes occur, the time, how characters describe themselves, and how others speak about them. This process allows me to begin building a picture of the key elements in the play, which I refer to as “following the handbook.”
Typically, the details that would have been significant to Shakespeare are included in the text. If the time of day or the weather is necessary to the story, he makes sure to specify it. He introduces new characters and articulates the main subject of each scene. Early on, we usually get a theme.

For instance, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Egeus’ first line upon greeting Duke Theseus is, “Full of vexation come I with complaint against my child, my daughter Hermia.” With this line, both I and the audience understand that this will be the scene’s focus. After re-reading and gathering all my clues from the text, I then brainstorm how to translate those insights into costume, setting, and staging.
Themes…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, estimated to be written in 1595, is about love, friendship, marriage, dreams, and mischief. Shakespeare cleverly interweaves four distinct groups of characters—the court, the lovers, the mechanicals, and the fairies—to explore various aspects of romantic experiences. In this production, we use a modern setting, costumes, sound, and music, hoping that you relate the characters’ experiences to your own lives and the people around you today. After all, many of us have encountered different types of relationships, experienced family arguments, or thought about the possibility of ghosts and magic, as well as the realities that emerge from our dreams.
Production Concept…
For our production, Puck and their cohort of fairies tell the story of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So, instead of the real world revealing the magical realm, we witness the world of magic emerging within our reality. The entire play is set in a fictional county of Athens, which we imagine to be in Illinois, during the Athens County Music Festival. So, imagine arriving in Athens County for a three-day music festival. Puck and his crew of fairies are the cool people you might encounter at 3:00 AM when the music is blasting, only to find that they’ve all vanished in the morning, leaving you questioning whether they were ever really there.
To create the environment of a festival, a lot of percussion is involved in sound—from thunder sheets and wind chimes to wood blocks. The music featured in our production is all contemporary. The Q Brothers, GQ & JQ, have composed two songs for us, including a reimagined, mash-up hip-hop version of The Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream” which will serve as the theme.
Midsummer Worlds…
In this production, the worlds of the play are expressed through action more than big scenic changes. We have one environment to create the story in, and we use costume, sound, and music to narrate the different communities of characters and underline their differences.
Strict laws govern Athens, and we present Theseus as a symbol of this, using the look of a modern-day ‘Judge’ as a touchpoint. This is important as Egeus corners Theseus into passing judgment on Hermia by enacting an ancient law that Theseus is powerless to overrule.
The magical woods are a place where nature is free and where the rules of a city society don’t apply. In Shakespeare’s plays, characters discover their true natures when they are put into the wilds of nature. The lovers get lost in the woods, become victims to Oberon’s love charm, and certainly, in Demetrius’s case, discover true feelings. They go on a wild adventure, and when they wake up in the morning, they feel at first like it could have been a dream. Oberon and Titania argue as violently as the lovers, and we use percussion, live sound, music, and simple staging to help create their magical world.
We have imagined the world of the mechanicals as the working crew at the Athens Music Festival—a carpenter, a security officer, a foreman, etc. We use work clothes and hard hats to symbolize this. The mechanicals have never put on a play before so the costumes and props they use for their performance for Duke Theseus are all made by them or bought from local stores.