Let your imagination run free. What do you picture when you read about Titania. Look at the sets for Rivendell and Lothlorien. Don’t limit yourself. Draw what is in your minds eye, then let the techs help you figure out how to make it happen.

Have fin, be creative, try something new. One of the school plays that I was in was “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” We set the scene not in Athens, but in our local town; we used iconic icons: the local “guy in pink,” the center of town, the local coffee shop, the boardwalk. Use what you have, and don’t be afraid to shake things up a bit.

The last time I saw it was in high-summer at Edith Wharton’s house in Lenox. We all sat in deck chairs on the lawn, and the play was performed outdoors. The fantasy characters swung out of trees, appeared from behind bushes, danced around under the huge white pines. Stage the play outside.

Bottom and the mechanicals drove around in an old pick-up truck. They wore jeans, t-shirts and boots.

(The advice to “have fin” sounds fishy to me. Unless my herring has deteriorated.)

Make it look like a place where wild thyme blows; Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows; Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.

Make it a place a woman would feel comfortable sleeping, and where a hippie would look comfortable eating magic mushrooms. And where invisible faeries and sprites would look natural.

And in my opinion, keep it real. Make it look like the imagery that occurs in the head, as one reads the play, rather than crowbarring it into some new ultracreative anachronistic twist which is how it’s done more often than not now.

Shades of brown, and lots of shades of green. Lots of trees. Lots of leaves. Mushrooms. Vines. Flowers.

Fake moss, fake flowers everywhere etc. but this is just what comes to my head. When you read speeches from this, what do you picture?

The ingredients are all there its just a question of style. The style I picture is a gothic/disney hybrid like Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.

@Then you will need an enormous and talented staff.

Let’s see; wild thyme, oxlips, nodding violets, luscious woodbine. musk-roses and eglantine, magic mushrooms and invisible faeries and sprites.

Then, keep it real. Difficult to do both. In reality violets and musk-roses don’t bloom at the same time, but that in nit-picking.

You really need only suggest and the audience’s imagination will do the rest.

When the movie, “The Mona Lisa Smile” was filmed on the Wellesley campus, the director had Wellesley students tie thousands of fake flowers onto trees in order to simulate spring.

I have done that play many times. The first time I just used a cheep plastic patio-type love seat and covered it with a brown bedspread on which I had hotglued many fake flowers that I bought at garage sales. When I did a more elaborate production, I used a matress with the same brown bedspread. On the sides and back of the bower I made oversized flowers from old waste-paper baskets, serving trays, and flower pots that I found at garage sales. I cut the sides of the baskets, trays, and pots into 3 or 4 pettles and used a heat gun to melt them (they were plastic) until they spread out and took on a more natural, organic shape. I mounted them on ½” pvc pipes that I bought at a hardware store. The pvc pipe can be shaped with the heat gun, to give it a more natural looking curve. The matress and oversized flowers were mounted on a platform with casters on it, so it could be rolled on and off stage as needed. The beauty of Shakespeare and that play in particular is that nothing elaborate is needed. The visions of the settings are evoked from the language. I have always believed that the audience’s imagination is better than anything that could be built on a stage. I recommend simplicity.