Setting Inspiration

Set in San Francisco, we use Golden Gate Park as a metaphor for the forest and queer hippie culture to talk about creativity as a means to reach the divine (the fairy world).

The Players

The Mechanicals are inspired by the Cockettes, a queer group of chaotic hippies living communally in San Francisco during this time period. Their collective creativity and drug use gives them access to the fairies, such as Bottom with Titania. They emulate divine symmetry in their imperfect hand made ways through ritual and costuming.

The fairies of the forest are genderless mycelium with Robin Goodfellow (Puck) a hippie, able to move between realms through the use of mushrooms.

Gendered and controlled by society, the lovers are nearly twenty years behind the Mechanicals fashion-wise with 1950’s silhouettes.

ACT ONE

The Fairy World

1.1: Oberon and Titania meet, fighting over the changeling boy. They arrive in the forest, as if bringing a storm at their wake in anger. The environment is chaotic, trees felled, the natural world in disarray.

ACT ONE

Titania’s Nest

1.2: The woods rearrange themselves into proper order. Nature is in peace where Titania reigns. Evocations of divine symmetry to visualize a womb-like space where fairy influence is most powerful, until Oberon disrupts to cast his spell. References: Moon Bridge, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

ACT TWO

Rehearsal in the Woods

2: The Mechanicals meet in the woods to read through the play. The mechanicals, functioning as vehicles for queerness, find themselves in the forest rehearsing a play.

Here the trees move creepily, accompanied by signs and lamps that evoke imagery from the historic Twin Peaks Tavern, and simultaneously a cruising ground somewhere deep iin the woods.

The space is both familiar and foreign: the trees as audience to play as well as lurkers in the dark, much like Puck is while he observes them before he employs a trick at their expense.

ACT THREE

Wedding Procession and Play

3.1: Hippolyta and Theseus welcome the lovers to a celebratory space. The mechanicals arrive, bringing with them a poorly crafter litter that functions as their self contained stage. The lovers are reconciled, the natural world arranging itself in order. References: The Cockettes, SF Chinatown

ACT THREE

Now the hungry lion roars

3.2: The Faeries arrives at night after the lovers retire, overtaking the space with nature and magical light, to bless the lovers. The space arranges itself like a wall of trees, framing video imagery of the liberation movement of the 70’s and 80’s.