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"There's no such thing as 'England' any more...welcome to India brothers]"(1)
IN JULY 1991 I WAS ENGAGED AS A TEXTUAL ADVISOR for a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream performed by the Shakespeare Santa Cruz repertory company (hereafter SSC). In a camp rendering of Shakespeare's text, director Danny Scheie sought to illuminate what he viewed as the sexual politics of the text. Featuring a variety of pop-culture motifs (ranging from 1950s American teenage attire and behavior to Disney's Snow White), the production obstructed any possibility of seeing the play as merely a romantic idealization of courtly behavior (though it did reinforce the centrality of marriage as a solution to social discord). While segments of the production were noteworthy for their playful disruption of tradition (particularly in treating the young lovers), the production also exhibited disturbingly unexamined acceptance of some sexual and racial stereotypes in its treatment of Titania and Hippolyta. Knowing that a camp Titania and Hippolyta would prove crowd-pleasers, the director was untroubled by the implications for the construction of race and gender of casting a black male as Titania and costuming him in a pink tutu and pink wig, or presenting Hippolyta as a stereotypic Wagnerian Valkyrie (thick blond braids, horned helmet, spear, etc.).
The director made a more radical and problematic decision with the Indian boy. Whether the Indian boy appears onstage at all is generally of little consequence, since he has no lines and would function as little more than a stage prop, part of the spectacle of Oberon and Titania's first meeting in the play. The director of the SSC production, however, chose to have the Indian boy make an appearance.(2) Normally this choice would scarcely merit a review note, let alone an entire essay. Yet, like the directorial decisions behind the representations and interpretations of Hippolyta, Oberon, Titania, and Theseus, the appearance and casting of the Indian boy bore ideological significance worth examining. First, the director, in a break with both textual and theatrical tradition, cast an adult male as the changeling: the "boy" was in his early twenties, six feet tall, tanned, and naked except for a gold lame loincloth. Second, in both the costume designer's drawings and on the stage, the Indian boy was culturally and racially...