As DSF gets ready to celebrate its Tenth Anniversary, we thought it would be fun to take a look back at how one of Delaware’s favorite summer traditions go its start. Each month until this year’s Festival, we’ll hear the memories of a participant in the inaugural production of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (2003).
GREG ROBLETO – “Bottom”/Executive Director
I remember the first meeting in Molly Cahill’s parent’s house living room. Molly announced she wanted to start this company and put on a play and those in attendance, I’d say about 4-5 of us all agreed it should be done. None of us were all that clear on how to do so, but with the generous support of the Cahill family we were guaranteed a budget, and somehow Molly and Jen Thompson (the director of that first show) found a space at a nearby church for rehearsing and convinced Archmere to let us perform on their lawn and utilize their art building as our backstage.
The set was a black box. It was six stage risers assembled together to make the stage with five panels covered in black set up behind to make a back wall. There was one trellis in the middle that was the only real touch of scenery on the stage. We also performed indoors in the Archmere auditorium when the weather was poor. I believe we once moved the show from outdoors to indoors as it started to rain in the middle of a performance – set, actors, audience and all.
[Most of] the actors were relatively young – high school, college and just out of college ages. The real risk-takers were Jim Keegan and Pam Huxtable (playing Oberon and Titania respectively), they were adults in that they had homes and lives and kids and yet they still agreed to come be part of this production. Their belief in our ability to make this happen energized us even moreso to see that it did.
There was no technical staff that I recall, beyond one student from Archmere, Justin Hoffecker, who knew his way around a tech booth and roped a few of his high-school friends to help out. He did not join the team until just a month or so before we opened. He wasn’t the last piece of the puzzle either. Gary, who played The Lion, was the final addition to the cast, joining only weeks before the first performance.
Jen was a very patient director. She listened to the actors and worked together. I recall at one point helping her run the lover’s quarrel scene. I watched, gave feedback and helped re-block where some things weren’t working just right. I think that scene turned out very well, it was probably my favorite part of the performance, outside of my own scenes.
I played Bottom, and loved the opportunities to ham it up as the lovable, misguidedly confident Mechanical. I enjoyed all the scenes with the fellow Mechanicals and fed on the uproarious laughter during the play within a play that that troupe puts on at the end of the show. But it was the Bottom’s Dream scene that meant the most to me. In this scene it is just me on that makeshift stage that we put together a week ago and had to fix at intermission. It’s just me under the lights that I only figured out we could rent a week before that, being heard on the speakers we had on loan from a friend. It’s just me looking out at all those wonderful people who must have actually read the coverage in the News Journal or saw our poster in a store window, and amazingly actually decided they wanted to see this show from a company that didn’t even exist three months ago. It’s just me as Bottom retelling of a wonderful dream I had; and finding the inspiration by reflecting on the wonderful dream we all had – Molly, Jen, myself and the whole cast and crew – to perform our own outdoor theatre that summer, and in retelling Bottom’s Dream, I was living my own.
