Hermia
"Nothing but low and little!"
This week, something a little different… my friend, director Emma Rosa Went, is preparing for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She brought up some difficulties she was having with casting the role of Hermia, and her thoughts about the character fit so perfectly in the context of this newsletter, I couldn’t resist making her elaborate. You can read more about Emma’s work on her website.
Remind us who Hermia is?
Hermia is the young Athenian woman who starts A Midsummer Night's Dream by refusing to marry the dude (Demetrius) that her Dad (Egeus) wants her to marry, and instead insisting on marrying the dude that's she's in love with; a sweetheart named Lysander who for some reason her Dad is not excited about. The action of the play starts because Hermia is given the incredibly wack ultimatum of either marrying Demetrius because her Dad says so, or literally the death penalty, so she does the spunky and correct thing by attempting to elope with Lysander and run away into the woods, where of course, all magical hell breaks loose.
Why is she hard to cast?
This is an interesting thing that I'm finding! She's hard to cast for a few different reasons—firstly, she is juxtaposed with the other young female lead in the play, Helena, who is in many respects a broader comic character. Helena starts the play by being obsessively moony over Demetrius (her ex-boyfriend!?) and then essentially leading him into the woods to chase down Hermia and Lysander in a weird bid to win his affection back. The fairies end up enchanting and confusing and leading astray this whole quadrangle of lovers (both accidentally and on purpose) during the night, so Hermia is put in the slightly bummer position by the play of starting out very sweet and sincere in her love for Lysander, and then turning into the girl that both boys become cartoonishly repulsed by when they in turn get wildly hot for Helena because of all the magical fairy-juice. This basically means that Hermia has a different kind of comic opportunity than the other three, who all at some point are asked by the text to display the most outlandish, most heightened version of what being in love in supposed to look like—the boys under the influence of fairy juice, and Helena just under the influence of her own desire. Whereas, Hermia has to go from sweetness and sincerity into outsized jealousy and rage, rather than outsized erotic passion, which can also be very funny, but in a slightly different key than the other three. In the comedy of criss-crossed desires and romance-gone-awry, someone has to end up rejected through no fault of their own, and even though ultimately Lysander is restored to her and everything comes out right, that person is Hermia.
What I think this means, is that she's presented with a slightly difficult line to walk tonally throughout the play. In Act 1, she needs to play some very innocent and somewhat sing-songy rhyming text with real emotional sincerity, then she needs to get abandoned by her lover and manage the fear of that without becoming either so dramatic that it takes us out of the play we're in, or so histrionic that we feel the actor is commenting on her situation rather than simply acting it, AND she needs to embrace the wrath and the outrage of her position in the famous 'lover's fight' scene without trying to play the same game as three other distinct (arguably much wilder) comic personalities. Because so much comparison is made between the two women (short/tall, often dark/fair, and fierce/cowardly) I think what Hermia actually needs to be is an actor who is willing to excavate the character as something more three-dimensional than just 'not Helena.' And this is hard, because that could be whatever the actor makes it!
Shakespeare obviously gives us lots of pairs of lovers, and they're usually in exactly the mold you're describing: a slightly more vivid, well-defined character, and another one who hews more closely to the tropes of what a lover should be. Beatrice and Hero, Rosalind and Celia... and yet, we do frame the play around Hermia's plight rather than Helena's (I mean, insofar as any of the problems of Act 1 matter by Act 5)... as a director what are you anchoring yourself in to define Hermia as more than not-Helena or generic second lover?
Yes! Right, this is exactly it-- it's so rare the play actually turns on the needs or choices of that second lover type, so I think what I keep coming back to is that in this maelstrom of confusion and changefulness, Hermia just always knows exactly what and who she wants. Her dismay is at what she perceives as everybody else's changing, but she starts the play knowing what she wants and then her journey is about pursuing and fighting for what she knows to be right; that her and Lysander need to end up together. When everyone else is swept up in the various enchantments of the evening, Hermia almost gets to be an audience avatar, the one at the center of the chaos who is like "...the hell is going on!?" as in moments like the big finale of the fight scene where everyone else has run off and Hermia looks back at the audience and says "I am amazed, and know not what to say." Essentially, she's the emotional center of gravity in the play, because without her we might lift off into a place where the consequences of things don't matter as much and aren't felt in the moment. And of course, Helena's journey of knowing who she wants and going after him and getting him restored to her in the end is similar to this, but Hermia's is fully contained by the play rather than starting out before the play—she's in love and secure in her relationships, and then everything shifts around her in this incomprehensible way, and in the end she gets the payoff of not only getting her boy back, but her Dad and her community approving of her choice, so essentially what Hermia gets in the end is the better version of 1.1 that she should have had. So yes, I feel like that initial truthfulness and conviction that she displays right away in the beginning is just what you have to keep building from and is kind of the lodestar of the whole romantic plot.
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