A Midsummer Night's Dream

About this event

Funny, seductive, chaotic, and a little dangerous, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a story about love, power, labor, land, and the intoxicating promise of escape. But what does it mean to wake up after the music stops?

Welcome to Athens, Ohio, 2012: a college town during the height of contemporary music festival culture, and a place where music, money, desire, and escape collide.

In this adaptation, Shakespeare’s Athens becomes an Appalachian mining town shaped by histories of extraction, transience, and survival, and the forest becomes a wild, electric, temporary festival ground just outside it. Contracts replace laws. Producers replace dukes. Careers are negotiated behind closed doors. Opportunity is real, but unevenly distributed.

Hermia is a rising singer who refuses to sign away her future. Her refusal to sign a contract that would bind her career—and her body—to industry expectations is not a romantic whim, but an act of consent and self-determination. Her journey takes her into a festival world of music, substances, exhaustion, desire, and blurred boundaries, where anything can happen after dark.

But this forest isn’t just a playground. It’s ancient Appalachian land with its own memory, history, and people. The fairies emerge as caretakers, workers, cryptids, and witnesses – forces of transformation who also reveal the cost of the dream.

Funny, seductive, chaotic, and a little dangerous, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a story about love, power, labor, land, and the intoxicating promise of escape.