I think of Spalding Gray in Swimming To Cambodia, unable to leave Thailand after shooting a film until he had a perfect moment. I had many of them working on my own film set, collected them like stones in a plate on my desk. But they don’t often come at the end, as if it were truly a movie.
But I found it anyway in a local production of a Midsummer Night’s Dream at Garden Café along Soi 55. Two nights before I passed the production and noticed the rehearsal, but they were set to open after I my flight. The next night I lingered outside the gate, peering in, shifting from one foot to the other. Eventually the producer came out and I explained how I wanted to see the show and if they needed audience members for their final dress rehearsal. She told me that they could use the audience for their final dress. Tomorrow at 7pm. “It is in Thai, is this okay?”
Absolutely.
So I waved goodbye to my final Thai sunset through the window of the BTS Skytrain and returned to the theatre at the appointed time.
They put up two large sheets to separate the traffic on Soi 55 from the traffic of the stage. The play began with song as the actors led us into the Garden Space, greeted by puppets twice the size of humans. I was enchanted. The play was translated, and not Word for Word, and they took generous license with the structure but I understood everything— the poor fate of Hermia and Lysander eloping, Helena’s desperate love, and of course Puck’s playful mischief. For the play within the play they picked audience members to play Pyramus and Thisbee and the Lion. I got to play the Lion for the first time ever. I’ve played both lovers in the past, but it was Bottom’s Dream I most identified with this time. I thought of myself waking from a dream, as I would in 24 hours, on the other side of the world. “Methought I was… methought I had…” and it is a precious vision of being loved by a fairy queen, fed and rubbed and doted on, and for Bottom, it actually happened though he doesn’t know it. He wakes in the woods, unsure, alone. Bottom’s solution, of course, is that he will make a ballad of it, as Spalding Grey once did too.