A Midsummer Night's Dream, Weird Sisters Theatre Collective at Center Stage on Real, August 18 - 27

by Michael Meigs

Once a year, a theatre production of the Weird Sisters Collective briefly appears like a friendly comet in the Austin evenings. Like comets, they're "wanderers," at least in recent years -- you need to be alert for news of them each July or August, because the venues for their productions have changed from year to year.

They had planned to do the Jacobean drama The Roaring Girl by Dekker and Middleton, under the guidance of their friend Dr. Lizz Ketterer, but Ketterer's unexpected death in February left them adrift. They turned to comfort theatre -- Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of those reliable pieces that, as Robert Faires of the Austin Chronicle once commented, comes around on Austin stages with the regularity of clockwork.

Faires' observation was accurate. A Midsummer Night's Dream is familiar and beloved for its airy fantasy and good-hearted mockery of the predicaments of love. We all enjoy white magic, whether it involves transformation of brash tradesman Bottom into an ass or transformation of love-besotted young persons into fools. Plus, it's the shortest of Shakespeare's plays.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Sycorax, Weird Sisters Theater Collective, Gemini Theatre, June 17 -24

. . . . Hast thou forgot
The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy
Was grown into a hoop? Hast thou forgot her?

The Tempest opens with brief scene of desperation, with sailors and passengers struggling against an overwhelming storm. Following that vivid moment, in Act I, Scene 2 Shakespeare gives us a full measure of background and exposition.

He paints a huge and vivid canvas. Prospero reviews for his daughter Miranda in great detail the plot that expelled them both from Naples, casts a sleeping spell upon Miranda, interrogates Ariel and recalls the black spell cast by "the foul witch Sycorax." Waking Miranda, the magician calls forth the "poisonous slave" Caliban, son of Sycorax. Master and monster engage in snarling dialogue that tells us how Prospero overcame the "hag-seed" Caliban, taking away his dominion of the island, humiliating him and enslaving him as reprisal for lusting after Miranda.

With all those antecedents in place, the action of The Tempest begins as Ariel with enchantment and song drives Ferndinand, son of the King of Naples, onto the stage.

Susan Gayle Todd, a founding member of the six-year-old Weird Sisters Theater Collective, rolled Shakespeare's canvas back, locating a wide, almost blank panel. It was barely touched with the outline of Sycorax, a hint of Ariel's service to the witch, and an unelaborated event in Algiers that resulted in banishment, since "for one thing she did/ They would not take her life." Todd tells the imagined story of Sycorax as a woman healer, an African woman in Arabic Algiers.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com. . . .