ABSTRACT
In “Remembering Dreams,” Fran Teague recalls trying to find out more about a musical called Swinging the Dream, a show based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with artists like Benny Goodman and Butterfly McQueen. But with any detailed records of the production having been lost, she realized that, “[though] I would never know certain things,” the production’s “elusive nature was part of what fascinated me.” In live performance, memory, like childhood, is ephemeral, with each of us retaining only “what is needed or desired.” For her, “the ephemeral nature and self-conscious theatricality” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and of Swinging the Dream remind us that “we are all in the theatre, enmeshed in one another’s performance.”
