A Dream Realized 

“Such stuff as dreams are made on…”

It’s June 29, and the cast and crew of the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company are crammed into Suffolk’s Modern Theater for the inaugural reading of this summer’s free play on the Common, the beloved fantasy-comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The assembly listens, spellbound, as company founder and director Steven Maler introduces the artistic concept for a production that will debut in less than a month.

“Think about being a teenager today and that feeling of needing to escape. Where do you go? Into the forest? Or somewhere else?”

On a big screen, one of the costume designers displays dramatic photos from Burning Man, the annual counterculture festival held in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. First, a model draped in a billowing emerald silk gown, then a female warrior in leather and metal, followed by pyre-like sculptures glittering under a starry firmament. A scan of the room reveals rapt expressions as a hundred minds dream the same dream.

Like Prospero, Shakespeare’s enigmatic sorcerer in “The Tempest”, Maler has dedicated his life to conjuring magic on a grand scale, though that’s where the resemblance ends. Maler is warm and affable, with a smile and a kind word for everyone. Every summer for the past 30 years, he and CSC’s cast and crew have accomplished a feat that borders on the supernatural: staging a Shakespeare play on Boston Common for a crowd of 10,000 spectators, many of whom are encountering the world’s most famous playwright for the first time.

It’s a big responsibility. But when it works, and CSC’s enthusiastic reviews and growing crowds are proof it does, the plays demonstrate not only Shakespeare’s lasting appeal but also a receptiveness on the part of modern audiences to engage with a live performance in English from over 400 years ago.

“There's something profoundly energizing about that audience on the common. They're there for the play. They may be throwing frisbees at 7:55 p.m., but at 8 p.m., they are focused on what's happening on that stage,” says Maler.

CSC’s dynamic modern staging of the Bard’s plays (in “As You Like It”, lead actress Nora Eschenheimer’s Imogen rode around on a scooter) has special appeal for the growing 20- and 30-something audiences, but according to Maler, it’s really the stories they relate to.

“One year we did Hamlet with Jeffrey Donovan as Hamlet and a young scrappy kid named Pedro Pascal as Horatio. It's a long play, and it was late, around 10:45 at night, but the entire audience is really leaning into this performance. And I remember when Hamlet dies and is being cradled by Horatio, there were literally gasps in the audience from people who didn’t know that that's how the play ends.”

“A most auspicious star…”

Maler is a native Southerner, born in Memphis and raised in Tennessee. While most theater kids seem to spring out of the womb dancing and singing, Maler was a relative latecomer to the boards. He tried acting for the first time in his senior year of high school. He says at first, Shakespeare wasn’t a natural fit.

“Culture is a very powerful tool of inclusion. When you share stories together as a community, you have a shared understanding of the world. But it can also be powerfully exclusionary, too. For me, growing up middle class in the South, I didn't really feel connected to these plays.”

That changed in college when Maler double majored in theater and English literature at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. He joined the Playmakers Repertory Company, where director Greg Boyd’s innovative staging and psychological focus awakened Maler to the power Shakespeare’s narratives and language had over audiences.

After a stint at Chicago’s famous Steppenwolf Theatre, Maler moved to Boston, a more manageable city “for a small-town Southern boy,” says Maler.

Securing work as an actor in the late 80s and early 90s in Boston’s tiny theater scene was challenging. Maler took a job at the American Repertory Theater (ART) at Harvard on the running crew, moved on to stage management, and then to production management. He enrolled in ART’s then two-year training program for actors and directors, immersing himself in the craft, and found he was drawn to directing.

“I love actors. I’m enthralled by them. I also don’t think I’m as good as most of them. Great actors fully lose themselves in the moment. I could never stop watching myself,” explains Maler.

Around that time, Maler and Joan Moynagh, a friend and ART colleague, began to talk about Boston’s lack of any outdoor Shakespeare, an odd omission for a city with an intellectual reputation and an abundance of green spaces.

Maler had recently directed “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for ART, a production that landed well. He and Joan felt it was serendipity.

“In 1996, we launched the CSC with that same production. We raised about $75,000 and used it to blow it up to something bigger. We drained the water out of the fountain in Copley Square and built a little stage on top of that. That’s why 30 years later, ‘Midsummer Night’ is the play that we're doing to celebrate the genesis of the company from its earliest days.”

“Our ethos is that these plays are truly common wealth: they should be owned and shared by everyone. These characters and this material are central to our understanding of humanity,” says Maler.

Over time, CSC has grown significantly and expanded to add other programs, including CSC2, a company for emerging professional actors who are able to work with CSC actors to mentor and develop their skills. Another program offers 36 college students the opportunity to study with CSC for six to eight weeks during the summer. Called apprentices, they are involved in many aspects of production from the ground up.

The CSC also has an initiative that brings Shakespeare to young audiences, funded through a partnership with the Rodman for Kids charity. The funding helps CSC bring free performances to 6,000 high school and middle school kids. For many, it’s their first exposure to live theater.

Shakespeare was never elitist, says Maler. His plays were always intended for the masses.

Maler says “the phrase we use is redemocratizing, because this material was wildly democratic when it was created. It was for everyone. And we like to say we're returning Shakespeare to its populist roots.”

“The play’s the thing…”

Putting on any play is an enormous undertaking, requiring coordination of a large group of people, willing to toil at less than glamorous tasks to make a few hours of entertainment possible. To pull it off each summer, Maler’s permanent staff of nine expands to 200. Each production costs “well north of a million dollars,” nearly half of the CSC’s annual operating budget of roughly three and a half million.

Then there’s the added challenge of mounting a production outdoors. Maler describes the Common as “a really inhospitable place to do a play.”

“We have to build a stage from the ground up. You’re trying to create something iconic, like a piece of temporary sculpture in what is essentially an open field.”

For the play to happen, technology, weather, and people must all cooperate, Maler explains.

“Every actor has a wireless microphone on them. All the microphones are individually controlled and programmed on a scene-by-scene basis. And if one mic fails, no one can hear anything that's happening on stage. There’s a lighting rig with a hundred lights in it. We have two spot operators who are following the action of the show as it's happening. We have dressers backstage, plus a front-of-house crew. It’s a massive infrastructure that, you know, comes together for this three-week time and then dissipates. As Shakespeare said, it fades into a dream.”

The scale of the operation is so immense, says Maler, that partnerships, community support, and creative approaches to fundraising are critical.

“It’s a tremendous amount of work to keep pace with climbing costs. There are things you just can’t do without. We have to have security. We have to have dressing rooms for the actors. The professional production of the scale that we're mounting requires serious philanthropy. Since most of the work that we do is free, we're raising that money from zero every year,” explains Maler.

Maler and his crew are determined to keep the show going despite a national political climate that isn’t friendly to the arts.

“A small town in Italy has more funding than the National Endowment for the Arts has in our country. We’re lucky in Massachusetts to have a governor and state legislature that get it. But it’s still a challenge.”

There’s plenty of evidence that the CSC has an impact, especially on young minds. In 1997, Boston native and Emerson graduate Kai Thomani Tshikosi’s parents brought him to a CSC performance of “Romeo and Juliet”. They had a ball and books to distract him, but were impressed by how their toddler snapped to attention once the sword fighting began.

Tshikosi’s mother remembers, “It launched the journey to involve him in as much live theater as could meet his appetite through the rest of his childhood and beyond.”

In 2017, Tshikosi was hired to play Tybalt in CSC’s production of Romeo and Juliet, while his mother watched proudly from the green. Today, he is an actor, director, and multidisciplinary artist best known for playing the dual roles of Hercules Mulligan and James Madison in a national touring production of Hamilton.

“You never know what happy accidents you set into motion when you make art accessible to the world. Getting to share the arc of that journey with my mother 20 years on from that fateful summer evening is one of the proudest moments of my working life,” says Tshikosi.

“A girdle round the Earth…”

“Midsummer” is what directors and academics call “central canon,” meaning it’s a major play from the middle of Shakespeare’s career, a bridge between his early comedies to more mature masterworks such as “Hamlet” and “Othello”.

In the play, four lovers from Athens escape into an enchanted forest where Oberon and Titania, the king and queen of the fairies, are arguing. Spells and romantic chaos ensue, and when a group of amateur actors arrives to rehearse a play, they are drawn into the comedy. The characters lose themselves, then find themselves again, a bit wiser for the experience. Transformation is one of Shakespeare’s favorite themes, and “Midsummer” is rife with it.

“Ultimately, this is a play about people defining themselves, loving the people that they want to love, and choosing the lives they want,” says Maler.

Depicting the fairy world offers actors the opportunity to transcend their mortal coils for a few hours. Chameleonic actor Nora Eschenheimer, who plays the imperious fairy queen Titania, brings a unique set of talents to the role.

Eshenheimer has been nominated twice by the Boston Theater Critics Association for other CSC roles: Rosalind in last year’s “As You Like It” and Imogen in “Cymbeline” (2020). Broadway World called her “a powerhouse,” and Maler thinks of her as the “quintessential actor, bold and daring.”

At the reading, Eschenheimer is already off book and preparing for the challenge of performing.

“CSC productions are very physically demanding. You’re running around the stage, climbing up and down structures, and you’re always using your entire body to communicate. The physicality is important because it helps the audience connect with the language they’re hearing,” she says.

“We don't sort of park and bark, as they say in the opera world, where you just kind of stand down center and recite beautiful phrases. There’s an energy and a heartbeat in this material that I'm trying to surface,” explains Maler.

She and Maler are confident Shakespeare can compete with Netflix and other forms of modern entertainment. As mischief-making fairy Puck brags in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he can “put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes.” Staging a Shakespeare play isn't all that different.

Maler agrees. “The plays have a scale and scope that rivals most writing you see. They’re big and bold, wildly theatrical; they have sword fights; they have dances; they have songs. They’re a total theater kind of experience. They're also like all great literature -- as you journey through life, your understanding of them changes as you grow.”

While Maler is quick to praise other playwrights, he says Shakespeare is in a category by himself.

“One of the things I really love about Shakespeare is that ability to see the personal and the political. You can have this massive sweep of history like that portrayed in the Henry plays, for example. But in the middle of that, you see this really tortured father-son relationship that is so intimate and painful and personal and specific. And that ability to be personal and epic at the same time is what I find so incredibly enthralling about these plays, is that they just continue to show you new things about humanity.”

Maler smiles when asked about the language in the plays and whether it’s ever a barrier.

“Sometimes kids come up to us at intermission and say, 'Hey, was all that really Shakespeare? Because I understood everything.”

The Commonwealth Shakespeare Company will perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream from July 22 to August 9 in Boston Common at the Parkman Bandstand. Visit commshakes.org for times.