DVD Extra: Who More Engilds the Night
This is a DVD extra for anyone thinking, “I don’t see what that had to do with Shakespeare.”
Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of my favorite plays. I saw it as a high school sophomore done professionally and I was enraptured by the whole thing. Since then, I have seen it done at the high school, college, and professional levels, and it is always hysterical. I have even worked on, and acted in, two productions. So I love this play.
Now, you know the basics. Shakespeare, comedy, play-within-a-play, triple wedding ending. Obviously, this is not a full-on parody-someone should write one, but it won’t be me- so a bunch of the plot was excised. You should read the play, or better yet, see it live, because I can’t do it justice.
There are three interconnecting stories:
*Titania and Oberon, Queen and King of the fairies, are fighting, so Oberon tells Puck to create a love potion and make his queen fall in love with a terrible monster.
*An amature theatre group practices in the woods.
*Four young people, for purposes of their own, run into the woods and Puck gets involved.
In the third story, Hermia wants to marry Lysander, but her father wants her to marry Demetrius. Meanwhile, her best friend Helena is in love with Demetrius, and when Hermia confides in her that she and Lysander are going to elope, Helena tells Demetrius and they both follow the first two into the forest. Oberon-the King of the Fairies-wants to fix this mismatch, so he dispatches Puck to use love juice to make Demetrius fall for Helena. Puck accidently enchants Lysander, and, when he realizes his mistake, then enchants Demetrius, so that both men are in love with the formerly lonely Helena. The boys decide to fight, the girls argue, and Puck steps in to fix everything. The next morning, everyone wakes up, slightly confused but paired off.
The idea behind throwing Leslie and Chris on a date together came to me when two people- benwyattandcondescendingturtles and benwyattmalwaetweep mentioned they initially thought Chris had been brought on to date Leslie. And I thought, that premise is entirely hysterical. What if they actually went on a date? And what if Ann and Ben teamed up to stop them? And what if it was like a Midsummer Night’s Dream and Ben fell for Ann and everyone had to get sorted out? And in the meantime, Ben learned to open himself up to someone, and Ann learned to assert herself when Leslie took over?
I sent over a rough draft of the first half to Rikyl, and she told me it was an intriguing idea, so I sent it to craponaspatula, where she could wonder why I sent it to her since I did not actually rent the limo OR ask her to prom. Eventually, though, we started talking ideas-she was still sending stillscape’s teenagers to prom-and when I asked her for advice on how to make the forest come alive, she was all href="http://craponaspatula.livejournal.com/1597.html/">excellent suggestions. And we were in business! But not really, because- disclaimer- no one makes any money doing this, lawyers.
I went to the bare-bones of the Midsummer story. Once I cut out the tights, the fairies, the blank-slate chess-piece characters and the extra plot-lines, what I was left with the idea that the forest, dark and mysterious, can bring out the worst and the best on people.
***
________________________________________
Here, for anyone wondering, are the allusions to the play that I included:
***
They headed for the door, passing a 20-something fluffy-haired club goer who told an attractive young woman that he would get her honey from a honey bee from on top of a thistle if she wanted it. The woman, eying him wearily, called him an ass.
Jean-Ralphio, who Ann probably wouldn’t recognize by this point, is paraphrasing Bottom, the man transformed into an ass. Titania falls in love with him, and gets her fairies to do his bidding, and he send them on weird errands. Here, Jean-Ralphio is making an over-the-top promise to a random club-goer.
BOTTOM: Mounsieur Cobweb, good mounsieur, get you your weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipped humble-bee on the top of a thistle; and, good mounsieur, bring me the honey-bag. Do not fret yourself too much in the action, mounsieur; and, good mounsieur, have a care the honey-bag break not; I would be loath to have you overflown with a honey-bag, signior. (IV.i.11-18)
***
He looked over at a sobering-up Ann whats-her-name. Bringing her along might actually be crazier than trying to stop the date.
Well, maybe.
Stopping the date was pretty crazy, really.
PUCK:
Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand;
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover's fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
(III.ii.110-116)
Lord, what fools these mortals be! is one of the best lines here, or anywhere, and it really tested my resolve not to slip in this line despite the fact that I never quote anything directly (with one exception). Still, I wanted that anything-could-happen love-drunk shenanigans feeling.
***
“Anyway, Chris, we don’t want to get in the way of… whatever these two are up to.” When that didn't move him, Leslie walked over to the hole. “What the puck is this? It has Greg Pikipkis’s name all over it.”
FAIRY:
Either I mistake your shape and making quite,
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Call'd Robin Goodfellow: are not you he
That frights the maidens of the villagery;
Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern
And bootless make the breathless housewife churn;
And sometime make the drink to bear no barm;
Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?
Those that Hobgoblin call you and sweet Puck,
You do their work, and they shall have good luck:
Are not you he?
(II.i.32-42)
Puck is a trickster fairy, given to mischief, and while I did not want to include fairies, I did want to include puns. Someone had to be making life difficult for the Pawneeans.
***
Leslie jumped in with, “And there are snakes in the woods.” When no one responded, she added, “Hate them. Snakes are awful.”
HERMIA
[Awaking] Help me, Lysander, help me! do thy best
To pluck this crawling serpent from my breast!
Ay me, for pity! what a dream was here!
Lysander, look how I do quake with fear:
Methought a serpent eat my heart away,
And you sat smiling at his cruel pray.
Lysander! what, removed? Lysander! lord!
What, out of hearing? gone? no sound, no word?
Alack, where are you speak, an if you hear;
Speak, of all loves! I swoon almost with fear.
No? then I well perceive you all not nigh
Either death or you I'll find immediately.
(II.ii.146-156)
No one is a direct parallel to a character in the play; if they were, it would break down to Ben as Lysander, Chris as Demetrius, Ann as Helena, and Leslie as Hermia, but that doesn’t quite work, because then Demetrius and Hermia are going into the woods together, and Demetrius is never interested in Hermia anyway, because he was interested in Helena before she was interested in him. Still, I wanted them to have a few parallels here.
***
“They are Spiderman and Batman. You and I, we are the Robins of life, the ones that go in and work and never get that praise even though we work just as hard. And I am not-but Leslie, she has this charm about her, this way of getting people to do crazy things for her even though I-we all know better.”
Robin was a play on Batman, but its also a name for Puck, the character who meddles in their love lives.
***
“‘Madam, I swear I use no art at all/ That he's mad, 'tis true, 'tis true 'tis pity,/ And pity 'tis 'tis true-a foolish figure,/ But farewell it, for I will use no art.’ Nothing wrong with the Bard, Benjamin.”
Chris is quoting Polonius (Hamlet, II.ii.103-106). Polonius is the advisor to the King Claudius and Ophelia and Laertes’s father. He is mostly remembered for his “To thine own self be true” line, but he is much more than that. He is given to motivational speaking in a slightly pompous way-I always love when Chris pulls out one of his personal motivational quotes-and he’s a thorn in Hamlet’s side, advising his daughter to stop seeing Hamlet. Incidentally, I have referred to Ben as Hamlet-like, when he spent half a season hesitating to ask Leslie out in much the same way that Hamlet hesitated to kill his stepfather/uncle.
Now, the part he quotes is Polonius assuring Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, that Hamlet is crazy. ”Art” refers to clever words, and so he is reassuring her, I am not using clever words, your son is crazy, it is very sad, but I am not using clever words, no I am not.
If anyone wants to do a Pawneean Hamlet, but, ya’ know, funny, with no stabbings, poisonings, executions, or drowning, you would be my favorite.
***
“What about me, Leslie? I didn’t shut down your government. And let’s just take a moment to discuss how awful it is that you did that, you… shrewd little vixen.”
HELENA
O, when she's angry, she is keen and shrewd!
She was a vixen when she went to school;
And though she be but little, she is fierce.
(III.ii.323-325)
Act III, Scene ii is one of the best scenes in the whole show, where the four lovers meet in the woods. Both men took a shot of love-juice to the eye, and both have turned their affections from Hermia to Helena. Helena thinks everyone is mocking her, and Hermia thinks they are mocking her. Everyone argues and the scene moves quickly along. Now, in the play, the women have been friends since their school days; here Chris and Ben have known each other longer and are the ones to get personal.
Leslie and Ann, meanwhile, have never fought over a man-a fact I appreciate about a television show, since that is a cheap source of tension-so I certainly wasn’t going to set them against each other over a man. But, Leslie does steamroll people on a regular basis, and she is doing something ethically and morally questionable, so they can argue about that-not over a man.
Rikyl, in addition to being wonderful, pointed out that Rashida Jones only has an inch or two on Amy Poehler, but I still felt ok letting them play the tall one and the short one respectively. And though she be but little, she is fierce. is the second best line from the show and my personal motto. I wanted a brief nod to the play’s fight, and while I couldn’t really throw in a page and half of short jokes, it seemed appropriate to nod to that too.
***
“I just really love working in my department. Did I ever tell you about my Athena camp?”
It seemed appropriate, since the play takes place in Athens, to bring up Camp Athena. And once I did I decided I wanted Leslie to have been a camp councilor, and Ben to have bonded over that. Now, I was in no small part influenced by stillscape, who was working on the epilogue to her awesome 94k word Shop Around the Corner story, which I was reading prior to it getting posted, and we were discussing the perfection of sending them off to be camp councilors at the end of the story, so I can’t possibly take credit for the idea. But, come on, they are both so the type.
***
He pulled his hand from hers, and for the briefest moment, he thought she looked disappointed. Then he reached down, and plucked a purple flower from the ground. He toyed with it for a moment, and she watched him. Then he reached over to her and placed it behind her ear. For just a moment, he thought she looked like a goddess herself. She smiled at him and he let out a breath he did not realize he was holding.
OBERON:
Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
Fetch me that flower; the herb I shew'd thee once:
The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Fetch me this herb; and be thou here again
Ere the leviathan can swim a league.
(II.i.165-174)
The play calls for love-juice from a Cupid-arrowed pansy turned purple from love’s wound, so when Ben had to put a flower in her hair, it had to be the love flower itself.
Incidentally, my original story didn’t have a kissing scene. craponaspatula read it, and her major complaint was that there was no kissing scene. “1 million bonus points if at some point Ben tucks a flower behind Leslie's ear. 10 million bonus points if this leads to touching and kissing.” And then I realized that if I did not include a love flower I would be missing a major part of the story.
***
They talked about everything, from the weird dream Leslie had had recently-that she was queen of the fairies, what was that-to the superiority of Pawnee over Indianapolis-this was mostly Leslie, though Ben had to add that he did enjoy the local snowglobe museum-to the deliciousness of cherries -and when Leslie promised to show him how she could tie the stems into knots with her tongue his thoughts went to a new and dirty place, and he really wished that they could stay in the woods forever together.
Titania is the queen of the fairies, and one of the female leads in the play. Fun fact, prior to Shakespeare she did not have a name; Shakespeare gave a name to a usually unnamed woman.
The cherries seem like a reference to the Adam Scott/Amy Poehler hanging out while filming 3x01, and while I certainly loved that bit, Demetrius has a line about cherries:
DEMETRIUS
O Helena, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!
To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne?
Crystal is muddy. O, how ripe in show
Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow!
That pure congealed white, high Taurus snow,
Fann'd with the eastern wind, turns to a crow
When thou hold'st up thy hand: O, let me kiss
This princess of pure white, this seal of bliss!
(III.ii.138-144)
Later in that scene, Helena returns to the cherries to describe her and Hermia:
HELENA
So we grow together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition;
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem;
So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart;
Two of the first, like coats in heraldry,
Due but to one and crowned with one crest.
(III.ii.209-215)
***
Ben raked his fingers through his hair. “I don’t want it to be weird. I’ll go over there, or something, I don’t want you to feel-that is to say-I will--.”
“Nonsense, Ben. You have a coat, and I don’t, and if you had ever been camping you’d know it makes sense to stick together.” Leslie got up and started gathering leaves and fashioning a make-shift ground-covering.
Ben didn’t protest. There was no point in doing so with Leslie anyway, and (if he was really honest with himself) he liked the idea of staying in the woods with her for the night.
HERMIA
Be it so, Lysander: find you out a bed;
For I upon this bank will rest my head.
LYSANDER
One turf shall serve as pillow for us both;
One heart, one bed, two bosoms and one troth.
HERMIA
Nay, good Lysander; for my sake, my dear,
Lie further off yet, do not lie so near.
(II.ii.39-44)
I liked the idea of turning the play around; Hermia wants to preserve her chastity and tells her love to sleep away from her, and in my story, Leslie does the opposite.
***
Ben Wyatt woke up on the ground, arms curled around Leslie Knope, and he wondered briefly if he had dreamed the entire thing.
I tried to throw in as many references to dreams as possible.
***
And almost immediately they fell over Chris and Ann, who were curled up together.
EGEUS
My lord, this is my daughter here asleep;
And this, Lysander; this Demetrius is;
This Helena, old Nedar's Helena:
I wonder of their being here together.
(IV.i.126-130)
I discussed the scene when Ben considers Ann in a new light with cypanache, and I mentioned that I wasn’t even sure how to bring Ann and Ben into the orbit of Chris and Leslie, and she (I assume) shrugged and said, don’t they more or less just run into each other in the woods? Her point was well-taken.
So how did they manage to fall asleep mere feet from each other? Especially since they are not being put to sleep by a fairy? Why overthink it? There’s a bit of magic in these woods.
***
Once everyone was untangled and upright, Leslie grabbed Chris’s arm and dragged him away as she said, “Chris, I want you to know, I want to make amends-”
PUCK
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.
(V.i.424-428)
It always bothered me that Leslie never apologized to Chris at the end of Go Big or Go Home; I had to include reference to her doing so. And I wanted to evoke Puck’s final monologue.
***
Chris and Leslie returned to them, smiling at each other. “I was just telling Leslie that we should all go out sometime soon,” Chris said. “I saw a flyer for some performer in Eagleton, a jazz man called Duke, or there’s a folk music band playing next weekend, The Rude Mechanicals. We met their piccolo player yesterday, he was fantastic. He’s a tailor or something.”
Now, clearly Chris is referring to Duke Silver, but also the Duke of Athens, one half of the third couple to get married in the triple wedding ceremony.
The band name comes from a description of the theatre troupe, which consists of labors, including one named Starveling, who is a tailor.
PUCK
My mistress with a monster is in love.
Near to her close and consecrated bower,
While she was in her dull and sleeping hour,
A crew of patches, rude mechanicals,
That work for bread upon Athenian stalls,
Were met together to rehearse a play
Intended for great Theseus' nuptial-day.
(III.ii.6-12)
***
“From confusion can come bright things.”
LYSANDER:
Or, if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,
Making it momentany as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!'
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.
(I.i.141-149)
Ben, who I generally assigned the Lysander role, says at the beginning of the play that “bright things come to confusion” meaning, love can turn into ruin. But, this is the ending, it is happy, because I love a good happy ending, so Ben turns this idea around.
***
It was true, he realized. In the course of a night, he had gone from lunatic, to lover, to poet.
THESEUS
More strange than true: I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
(V.i.3-23)
As Theseus says, lovers, poets, and madmen all see things that the sane do not.
***
And if that was completely boring, think but this and all is mended…
Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of my favorite plays. I saw it as a high school sophomore done professionally and I was enraptured by the whole thing. Since then, I have seen it done at the high school, college, and professional levels, and it is always hysterical. I have even worked on, and acted in, two productions. So I love this play.
Now, you know the basics. Shakespeare, comedy, play-within-a-play, triple wedding ending. Obviously, this is not a full-on parody-someone should write one, but it won’t be me- so a bunch of the plot was excised. You should read the play, or better yet, see it live, because I can’t do it justice.
There are three interconnecting stories:
*Titania and Oberon, Queen and King of the fairies, are fighting, so Oberon tells Puck to create a love potion and make his queen fall in love with a terrible monster.
*An amature theatre group practices in the woods.
*Four young people, for purposes of their own, run into the woods and Puck gets involved.
In the third story, Hermia wants to marry Lysander, but her father wants her to marry Demetrius. Meanwhile, her best friend Helena is in love with Demetrius, and when Hermia confides in her that she and Lysander are going to elope, Helena tells Demetrius and they both follow the first two into the forest. Oberon-the King of the Fairies-wants to fix this mismatch, so he dispatches Puck to use love juice to make Demetrius fall for Helena. Puck accidently enchants Lysander, and, when he realizes his mistake, then enchants Demetrius, so that both men are in love with the formerly lonely Helena. The boys decide to fight, the girls argue, and Puck steps in to fix everything. The next morning, everyone wakes up, slightly confused but paired off.
The idea behind throwing Leslie and Chris on a date together came to me when two people- benwyattandcondescendingturtles and benwyattmalwaetweep mentioned they initially thought Chris had been brought on to date Leslie. And I thought, that premise is entirely hysterical. What if they actually went on a date? And what if Ann and Ben teamed up to stop them? And what if it was like a Midsummer Night’s Dream and Ben fell for Ann and everyone had to get sorted out? And in the meantime, Ben learned to open himself up to someone, and Ann learned to assert herself when Leslie took over?
I sent over a rough draft of the first half to Rikyl, and she told me it was an intriguing idea, so I sent it to craponaspatula, where she could wonder why I sent it to her since I did not actually rent the limo OR ask her to prom. Eventually, though, we started talking ideas-she was still sending stillscape’s teenagers to prom-and when I asked her for advice on how to make the forest come alive, she was all href="http://craponaspatula.livejournal.com/1597.html/">excellent suggestions. And we were in business! But not really, because- disclaimer- no one makes any money doing this, lawyers.
I went to the bare-bones of the Midsummer story. Once I cut out the tights, the fairies, the blank-slate chess-piece characters and the extra plot-lines, what I was left with the idea that the forest, dark and mysterious, can bring out the worst and the best on people.
***
________________________________________
Here, for anyone wondering, are the allusions to the play that I included:
***
They headed for the door, passing a 20-something fluffy-haired club goer who told an attractive young woman that he would get her honey from a honey bee from on top of a thistle if she wanted it. The woman, eying him wearily, called him an ass.
Jean-Ralphio, who Ann probably wouldn’t recognize by this point, is paraphrasing Bottom, the man transformed into an ass. Titania falls in love with him, and gets her fairies to do his bidding, and he send them on weird errands. Here, Jean-Ralphio is making an over-the-top promise to a random club-goer.
BOTTOM: Mounsieur Cobweb, good mounsieur, get you your weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipped humble-bee on the top of a thistle; and, good mounsieur, bring me the honey-bag. Do not fret yourself too much in the action, mounsieur; and, good mounsieur, have a care the honey-bag break not; I would be loath to have you overflown with a honey-bag, signior. (IV.i.11-18)
***
He looked over at a sobering-up Ann whats-her-name. Bringing her along might actually be crazier than trying to stop the date.
Well, maybe.
Stopping the date was pretty crazy, really.
PUCK:
Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand;
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover's fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
(III.ii.110-116)
Lord, what fools these mortals be! is one of the best lines here, or anywhere, and it really tested my resolve not to slip in this line despite the fact that I never quote anything directly (with one exception). Still, I wanted that anything-could-happen love-drunk shenanigans feeling.
***
“Anyway, Chris, we don’t want to get in the way of… whatever these two are up to.” When that didn't move him, Leslie walked over to the hole. “What the puck is this? It has Greg Pikipkis’s name all over it.”
FAIRY:
Either I mistake your shape and making quite,
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Call'd Robin Goodfellow: are not you he
That frights the maidens of the villagery;
Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern
And bootless make the breathless housewife churn;
And sometime make the drink to bear no barm;
Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?
Those that Hobgoblin call you and sweet Puck,
You do their work, and they shall have good luck:
Are not you he?
(II.i.32-42)
Puck is a trickster fairy, given to mischief, and while I did not want to include fairies, I did want to include puns. Someone had to be making life difficult for the Pawneeans.
***
Leslie jumped in with, “And there are snakes in the woods.” When no one responded, she added, “Hate them. Snakes are awful.”
HERMIA
[Awaking] Help me, Lysander, help me! do thy best
To pluck this crawling serpent from my breast!
Ay me, for pity! what a dream was here!
Lysander, look how I do quake with fear:
Methought a serpent eat my heart away,
And you sat smiling at his cruel pray.
Lysander! what, removed? Lysander! lord!
What, out of hearing? gone? no sound, no word?
Alack, where are you speak, an if you hear;
Speak, of all loves! I swoon almost with fear.
No? then I well perceive you all not nigh
Either death or you I'll find immediately.
(II.ii.146-156)
No one is a direct parallel to a character in the play; if they were, it would break down to Ben as Lysander, Chris as Demetrius, Ann as Helena, and Leslie as Hermia, but that doesn’t quite work, because then Demetrius and Hermia are going into the woods together, and Demetrius is never interested in Hermia anyway, because he was interested in Helena before she was interested in him. Still, I wanted them to have a few parallels here.
***
“They are Spiderman and Batman. You and I, we are the Robins of life, the ones that go in and work and never get that praise even though we work just as hard. And I am not-but Leslie, she has this charm about her, this way of getting people to do crazy things for her even though I-we all know better.”
Robin was a play on Batman, but its also a name for Puck, the character who meddles in their love lives.
***
“‘Madam, I swear I use no art at all/ That he's mad, 'tis true, 'tis true 'tis pity,/ And pity 'tis 'tis true-a foolish figure,/ But farewell it, for I will use no art.’ Nothing wrong with the Bard, Benjamin.”
Chris is quoting Polonius (Hamlet, II.ii.103-106). Polonius is the advisor to the King Claudius and Ophelia and Laertes’s father. He is mostly remembered for his “To thine own self be true” line, but he is much more than that. He is given to motivational speaking in a slightly pompous way-I always love when Chris pulls out one of his personal motivational quotes-and he’s a thorn in Hamlet’s side, advising his daughter to stop seeing Hamlet. Incidentally, I have referred to Ben as Hamlet-like, when he spent half a season hesitating to ask Leslie out in much the same way that Hamlet hesitated to kill his stepfather/uncle.
Now, the part he quotes is Polonius assuring Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, that Hamlet is crazy. ”Art” refers to clever words, and so he is reassuring her, I am not using clever words, your son is crazy, it is very sad, but I am not using clever words, no I am not.
If anyone wants to do a Pawneean Hamlet, but, ya’ know, funny, with no stabbings, poisonings, executions, or drowning, you would be my favorite.
***
“What about me, Leslie? I didn’t shut down your government. And let’s just take a moment to discuss how awful it is that you did that, you… shrewd little vixen.”
HELENA
O, when she's angry, she is keen and shrewd!
She was a vixen when she went to school;
And though she be but little, she is fierce.
(III.ii.323-325)
Act III, Scene ii is one of the best scenes in the whole show, where the four lovers meet in the woods. Both men took a shot of love-juice to the eye, and both have turned their affections from Hermia to Helena. Helena thinks everyone is mocking her, and Hermia thinks they are mocking her. Everyone argues and the scene moves quickly along. Now, in the play, the women have been friends since their school days; here Chris and Ben have known each other longer and are the ones to get personal.
Leslie and Ann, meanwhile, have never fought over a man-a fact I appreciate about a television show, since that is a cheap source of tension-so I certainly wasn’t going to set them against each other over a man. But, Leslie does steamroll people on a regular basis, and she is doing something ethically and morally questionable, so they can argue about that-not over a man.
Rikyl, in addition to being wonderful, pointed out that Rashida Jones only has an inch or two on Amy Poehler, but I still felt ok letting them play the tall one and the short one respectively. And though she be but little, she is fierce. is the second best line from the show and my personal motto. I wanted a brief nod to the play’s fight, and while I couldn’t really throw in a page and half of short jokes, it seemed appropriate to nod to that too.
***
“I just really love working in my department. Did I ever tell you about my Athena camp?”
It seemed appropriate, since the play takes place in Athens, to bring up Camp Athena. And once I did I decided I wanted Leslie to have been a camp councilor, and Ben to have bonded over that. Now, I was in no small part influenced by stillscape, who was working on the epilogue to her awesome 94k word Shop Around the Corner story, which I was reading prior to it getting posted, and we were discussing the perfection of sending them off to be camp councilors at the end of the story, so I can’t possibly take credit for the idea. But, come on, they are both so the type.
***
He pulled his hand from hers, and for the briefest moment, he thought she looked disappointed. Then he reached down, and plucked a purple flower from the ground. He toyed with it for a moment, and she watched him. Then he reached over to her and placed it behind her ear. For just a moment, he thought she looked like a goddess herself. She smiled at him and he let out a breath he did not realize he was holding.
OBERON:
Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
Fetch me that flower; the herb I shew'd thee once:
The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Fetch me this herb; and be thou here again
Ere the leviathan can swim a league.
(II.i.165-174)
The play calls for love-juice from a Cupid-arrowed pansy turned purple from love’s wound, so when Ben had to put a flower in her hair, it had to be the love flower itself.
Incidentally, my original story didn’t have a kissing scene. craponaspatula read it, and her major complaint was that there was no kissing scene. “1 million bonus points if at some point Ben tucks a flower behind Leslie's ear. 10 million bonus points if this leads to touching and kissing.” And then I realized that if I did not include a love flower I would be missing a major part of the story.
***
They talked about everything, from the weird dream Leslie had had recently-that she was queen of the fairies, what was that-to the superiority of Pawnee over Indianapolis-this was mostly Leslie, though Ben had to add that he did enjoy the local snowglobe museum-to the deliciousness of cherries -and when Leslie promised to show him how she could tie the stems into knots with her tongue his thoughts went to a new and dirty place, and he really wished that they could stay in the woods forever together.
Titania is the queen of the fairies, and one of the female leads in the play. Fun fact, prior to Shakespeare she did not have a name; Shakespeare gave a name to a usually unnamed woman.
The cherries seem like a reference to the Adam Scott/Amy Poehler hanging out while filming 3x01, and while I certainly loved that bit, Demetrius has a line about cherries:
DEMETRIUS
O Helena, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!
To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne?
Crystal is muddy. O, how ripe in show
Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow!
That pure congealed white, high Taurus snow,
Fann'd with the eastern wind, turns to a crow
When thou hold'st up thy hand: O, let me kiss
This princess of pure white, this seal of bliss!
(III.ii.138-144)
Later in that scene, Helena returns to the cherries to describe her and Hermia:
HELENA
So we grow together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition;
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem;
So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart;
Two of the first, like coats in heraldry,
Due but to one and crowned with one crest.
(III.ii.209-215)
***
Ben raked his fingers through his hair. “I don’t want it to be weird. I’ll go over there, or something, I don’t want you to feel-that is to say-I will--.”
“Nonsense, Ben. You have a coat, and I don’t, and if you had ever been camping you’d know it makes sense to stick together.” Leslie got up and started gathering leaves and fashioning a make-shift ground-covering.
Ben didn’t protest. There was no point in doing so with Leslie anyway, and (if he was really honest with himself) he liked the idea of staying in the woods with her for the night.
HERMIA
Be it so, Lysander: find you out a bed;
For I upon this bank will rest my head.
LYSANDER
One turf shall serve as pillow for us both;
One heart, one bed, two bosoms and one troth.
HERMIA
Nay, good Lysander; for my sake, my dear,
Lie further off yet, do not lie so near.
(II.ii.39-44)
I liked the idea of turning the play around; Hermia wants to preserve her chastity and tells her love to sleep away from her, and in my story, Leslie does the opposite.
***
Ben Wyatt woke up on the ground, arms curled around Leslie Knope, and he wondered briefly if he had dreamed the entire thing.
I tried to throw in as many references to dreams as possible.
***
And almost immediately they fell over Chris and Ann, who were curled up together.
EGEUS
My lord, this is my daughter here asleep;
And this, Lysander; this Demetrius is;
This Helena, old Nedar's Helena:
I wonder of their being here together.
(IV.i.126-130)
I discussed the scene when Ben considers Ann in a new light with cypanache, and I mentioned that I wasn’t even sure how to bring Ann and Ben into the orbit of Chris and Leslie, and she (I assume) shrugged and said, don’t they more or less just run into each other in the woods? Her point was well-taken.
So how did they manage to fall asleep mere feet from each other? Especially since they are not being put to sleep by a fairy? Why overthink it? There’s a bit of magic in these woods.
***
Once everyone was untangled and upright, Leslie grabbed Chris’s arm and dragged him away as she said, “Chris, I want you to know, I want to make amends-”
PUCK
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.
(V.i.424-428)
It always bothered me that Leslie never apologized to Chris at the end of Go Big or Go Home; I had to include reference to her doing so. And I wanted to evoke Puck’s final monologue.
***
Chris and Leslie returned to them, smiling at each other. “I was just telling Leslie that we should all go out sometime soon,” Chris said. “I saw a flyer for some performer in Eagleton, a jazz man called Duke, or there’s a folk music band playing next weekend, The Rude Mechanicals. We met their piccolo player yesterday, he was fantastic. He’s a tailor or something.”
Now, clearly Chris is referring to Duke Silver, but also the Duke of Athens, one half of the third couple to get married in the triple wedding ceremony.
The band name comes from a description of the theatre troupe, which consists of labors, including one named Starveling, who is a tailor.
PUCK
My mistress with a monster is in love.
Near to her close and consecrated bower,
While she was in her dull and sleeping hour,
A crew of patches, rude mechanicals,
That work for bread upon Athenian stalls,
Were met together to rehearse a play
Intended for great Theseus' nuptial-day.
(III.ii.6-12)
***
“From confusion can come bright things.”
LYSANDER:
Or, if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,
Making it momentany as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!'
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.
(I.i.141-149)
Ben, who I generally assigned the Lysander role, says at the beginning of the play that “bright things come to confusion” meaning, love can turn into ruin. But, this is the ending, it is happy, because I love a good happy ending, so Ben turns this idea around.
***
It was true, he realized. In the course of a night, he had gone from lunatic, to lover, to poet.
THESEUS
More strange than true: I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
(V.i.3-23)
As Theseus says, lovers, poets, and madmen all see things that the sane do not.
***
And if that was completely boring, think but this and all is mended…