Watch out because the Jersey Shore is coming to Madison High School –with a twist. This Jersey Shore cast speaks only in Elizabethan English and has been bewitched by a band of mischievous-fairies-turned-Jersey Shore-goers. What am I talking about, you might ask? This is MHS’s annual fall play, Midsummer Jersey – a new take on an old classic. Midsummer Jersey, by playwright Ken Ludwig, is a combination of William Shakespeare’s famous play A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a contemporary Jersey Shore theme. To get the scoop on this unusual play, Madison Dodger Online (MDO) headed to the English Office to interview one of the play’s directors, Mr. Oswin (Mr. O).
MDO: I’ve heard that Midsummer Jersey is a cross between Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Jersey Shore. How does that work?
Mr. O: Well, we take the setting and we change it from the magical forest outside Athens to the beach just outside Wildwood in the contemporary time period. We have the same cast of characters who have some different names. Instead of Lysander and Demetrius, we’ve got Lyle and Dennis, and instead of Helena and Hermia, we’ve got Helene and Mia.
It’s the same idea, the mismatched lovers who go out into the woods to escape from [in the original play] the oppression of the state and the requirements for the marriage; but in this play, it’s the oppression of the parents who refuse to give them their liberation. Instead of running into the forest, they run off to the beach.
In this play, however, something that stays very much the same is the fairies. You have fairies in Midsummer Night’s Dream, you’ve got Titania and Oberon, and they’re still in Midsummer Jersey. Peaseblossom and Cobweb and Mustardseed and Moonbeam… all of them together, they’re exactly the same. So you just copy and paste the fairies from Athens to the fairies at the Jersey Shore. It’s very fun though.
MDO: So the plot is still the same concept, but modernized?
Mr. O: Yes, it’s modernized. As I mentioned, you don’t have the same requirements legally that are keeping, for example, Lyle and Mia from marrying each other. Instead, you have the idea that Mia is too young; her mother won’t permit her to get married. So she doesn’t have to choose between marriage and death, it’s marriage or not getting what she wants.
MDO: This seems more relevant to our time today with teen marriages and pregnancies. I mean, there’s even a TV show called Teen Mom!
Mr. O: Absolutely… Another element involved here is the magic flower, that central device in the original play, the flower that anoints the eyes of the lovers that makes them fall in love with the wrong person – or fix the love, as the case may be.
Our Puck in this play comes up with the suggestion of transferring the magic from the flower into an iPhone so that the people who want to fall in love simply have to answer their phone and, I think the quote from the play is, “Beep boop beep,” they fall in love with each other. In this scene however, Oberon is not amused; Oberon is not into that so much.
MD: Who are the main characters?
Mr. O: Well, like I’ve said, we’ve got Mia and Lyle, the lovers that love each other but aren’t permitted to be together, and you have Dennis and Helene. Dennis, who is very much in love with Mia – infatuated with Mia – and Helene, who’s been spurned by Dennis for Mia. (laughs) I know, it’s a lot to keep track of. Shakespeare, in the original Midsummer Night’s Dream, keeps things very confusing.
In fact, we tried to preserve some of that confusion among these characters in the blocking that we have on the stage. So you’ll notice as you’re viewing the show, characters might exit left, and then, just a few moments later, enter from the right, in a way that wouldn’t make sense to an audience, necessarily. It’s a lot of work for our cast, to run back and forth backstage, to be able to make those confusing entrances.
MD: I can’t imagine what the costumes are going to look like – can you tell me about them?
Mr. O: Picture the fashion choices on Jersey Shore – a little more conservative for the Madison community, I think, but we’ve got the jeans and the tank tops for the men. Lots of gaudy accessories all around, we’ve got chains and watches and rings. For the ladies, we’ve got lots of high heels and skirts.
The fairies are all dressed in Jersey Shore costumes; we’ve got someone as a food vendor and another person as a lifeguard. The fairies have integrated themselves into the Jersey Shore – they absolutely love it. It’s a nice change of pace from the countryside of Athens.
Titania, our fairy queen, is a little more fairy traditional; she’s got her fairy getup that you might imagine from Midsummer Night’s Dream. You’ve got this very flowy gown, very fairy-esque. Our Oberon though, unfortunately, doesn’t side with her – he has a costume reminiscent of the Boss, he himself is Bruce Springsteen.
MD: So, are people bringing in their own clothing and accessories for the costumes?
Mr. O: Yes, very few of the costumes pieces need to be rented or need to be created because we want to evoke, especially with the characters of the lovers and the parents, maybe something typically New Jersey. But at the same time, [it’s] totally contemporary. It should be easy to relate to those characters up on the stage.
I think that’s one of the ideas that Ken Ludwig, the author of the play, had in mind: to take A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which could be a difficult play, or a play that some people feel bears no relevance in a contemporary age and just say, hey, it’s not that different. We’re dealing with all these issues, love and craziness.
MDO: So it could be, aside from the fairies, something you would just find at the Jersey Shore, any given day.
Mr. O: Absolutely, yes. You’ve got pairs of lovers that are with angry with each other, and they fight and they make up, and then they go and they get some ice cream.
MDO: Interesting, I like that… Now, we’ve been talking a lot about the plot and the themes and the costumes – how far along are you in the process of really bringing this play to life and actually performing it?
Mr. O: We’re about three weeks from performance and we’re running our dress rehearsals now. We have our cast bringing in costumes every night to double check the looks. We’ve got most of our set constructed, so we’re actually working in the space we’ll be working with in the show.
Everybody is off book, everybody is doing a very nice job with their lines. The acting is phenomenal. Our students are doing an excellent job with the humor, I have to say, especially. They’re doing a nice job going to that very funny, very silly place that the original play had in mind.
MDO: What has been your favorite part so far of working with the cast of Midsummer Jersey and directing this play?
Mr. O: I think watching the choices that our cast has made regarding Shakespeare’s language has been so impressive and it’s just blown me away because so much of this play is actually dialogue and lines lifted from Midsummer Nights’ Dream. This is a reinterpretation more than it is a rewrite, so you’ll find, should you come to see the play, that many of the characters up on the stage are giving full monologues from Shakespeare’s original play in the iambic pentameter, with very few lines tweaked or changed – simply for either the sake of context or to suit what Ken Ludwig did regarding the context that he sets up. But our students are reciting Shakespeare, and they’re doing it so professionally.
MDO: Oh, so they’re speaking in the Shakespearean old English?
Mr. O: Yes, they are… the Elizabethan English. They’re right up there, they’re doing it and they’re doing a phenomenal job. It’s so impressive; both myself and Megan Niper, our director, are so impressed.
(Mrs. Niper, Mr. Oswin’s co-director, is a second grade teacher at Torey J. Sabatini School in Madison.)
MDO: To conclude our interview, is there anything else you’d like to add that you’d like the readers to know?
Mr. O: It’s going to be a fantastic play. Come out and have fun with us!
Midsummer Jersey will be performed at 6 pm on Thursday, November 21st and 7 pm on Friday the 22nd and Saturday the 23rd. Tickets are eight dollars for students and seniors and ten dollars for anyone else. Faculty and staff are free on Thursday only.