In The News: 'A Midsummer Night's' farewell

Shakespeare comedy will be the last for the class of 2015 and longtime theater teacher Drea Ferguson

When Newberg High School produces its annual Shakespeare play, theater teacher Drea Ferguson challenges the students with the “Uncle Fred Principle.”

“Uncle Fred comes because Aunt Susie makes him and you’re in the play, but he really doesn’t want to be there and would much rather be with his buddies,” Ferguson said. “The goal is that he comes back at intermission and leaves having enjoyed himself, that he doesn’t say to Aunt Susie, ‘Hey, I came and now I’m going to spend time with my buddies.’”

The Uncle Fred Principle is one reason why Ferguson always schedules Shakespeare for the spring performance, because it takes that long to prepare and do properly.

Part of that is that the students not only have to learn their lines and understand all of the words in order to bring emotional depth to their characters, but they also have to perform compellingly enough so that the Uncle Freds in the audience can understand the Shakespearean language enough to follow along.

After beginning preparations in September, that will be the challenge the cast and crew focus on when they bring “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to life at 7 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, as well as April 23-25. Cost is $9 for adults, $5 for seniors and students for the April 24 performance.

“They’ve been working on it all year and I think it shows with the depth of the performances,” Ferguson said. “It’s not that it’s impossible to do Shakespeare in three months like I do with everything else, it’s just that I’m such a perfectionist it would drive me crazy not do it well.”

Ferguson, who recently announced that she will retire at the end of the school year, said the key to success is the amount of control the students have in crafting the performance.

“I think that’s how I get so much work out of them, why they’re here ‘til all hours and asking to come in to lunch because this is their work. They own it,” Ferguson said. “I’ve said this before, but I could probably sit down and design the whole show myself in a week and it would be fine, but then it wouldn’t be their show, it would be my show. The big thing I believe in is to give the kids as much say in the decision making as possible.”

The process starts with the juniors in her Shakespeare classes voting at the end of the school year on which play they will produce the following spring.

Once they return to school in September, they research and submit proposals for the directing metaphor before casting is done in November and official rehearsal begin in February.

This year’s theme puts the setting in modern-day setting, specifically at a prototypical hipster coffee shop in Portland, which is adjacent to the city’s iconic downtown park blocks that are home to the fairy forest.

“The duke is the owner of the Portland business and the directing metaphor is that the forest overgrows the mortal world,” Ferguson said. “It starts very stark and then as it changes, all of this stuff comes out and what was the mortal human work disappears into this fairy overgrowth.”

At the same time, the acting committee has challenged itself to take the three very distinct groups of characters in the play — the Athenians, the Mechanicals (who perform the play-within-a-play “Pyramus and Thisbe”) and the fairies — and slowly mix them together to create a more cohesive feeling by the finale when all are on stage at once.

Under the guidance of acting director Katie Husvar, a senior-laden cast will bring the story to life, led by John Miller as the deviously playful Puck. He will be joined on stage by classmates Gordon Walker (Oberon), Nick Jacobs (Demetrious), Hannah Dodson (Hermia), Isaac Boyd (Bottom), Hailey Collette (Hyppolita), Jake Sinicki (Peter Quince), Megan Hinson (Egea) and several others. Juniors Alex Foufos (Lysander), Elsie McConnaughey (Titania) and Luke Hartley (Thesius), along with sophomore Tatiana Lessaos (Helena) round out the main cast, with Violet Fox serving as artistic director.

Because there are similar elements, including a play within a play and physical comedy, in both the current performance and that of the comedia dell’arte-styled “The Servant of Two Masters,” which Newberg produced two years ago and took to the Fringe Festival in Scotland just prior to last school year, audiences should be in for a lively time.

In fact, there might be no better going away present for Ferguson’s last production than to inspire some enthusiastic participation from a traditionally stodgy American audience the next two weekends.

“My goal is at the end, the audience is up there dancing with them,” Ferguson said. “My history is at the theater back home and we have a tradition called pantomime, where you go not to sit and watch a play, but to participate in it and the audience sings and dances and yells and boos and cheers.”

Written by: Seth Gordon