Director's Statement

The cast-off, abandoned, and forgotten things can be magic when you find them and engage.

After a summer of working with Cornerstone Theater Company, and learning of their methods for re-imagining classic plays through the frame of local community, I was inspired to imagine Midsummer through the lens of cities like Detroit and Flint. The “melancholy” world of Athens was transposed to “melancholy” once-prosperous city of industrial power. Cornerstone’s Theater’s signature method, “Six F’s of Design in a Community-based Context: Found Object, Facsimile, Folk Culture, Forum, Fabrication + Find a Way” was directly employed in my choice for the production concept. Duke Theseus’ palace was a facsimile of the grand corridor of the Fischer Building in Detroit. The Mechanicals were transposed to factory workers seen in Diego Rivera’s murals in the Detroit Institute of the Arts. Folk Culture was evident in the choice for Peter’s Quince’s place to be 24-hour coffee and donut shop where the laid-off factory workers gather for conversation. Fabrication was evident in the forest, damaged by the cast off industrial remnants of human greed, as seen in Flint around the torn-down factories, were claimed by the faerie spirits as places to thrive. Found objects were a theme for props in the production, including the choice to have an old Eeyore stuffed animal be the source for Bottom’s transformation into a man with a donkey head.

STUDENT AWARD: Keely A. Brown earned a NATIONAL FINALIST prop design award for her Bottom’s Donkey Head mask, at the Kennedy Center’s American College Theatre Festival Region III conference, January 2012.