A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Enchanted Forest

Who we are:

We are a group of amateur actors dreaming of starting a theatre compnay called heARTistry, Inc. The first real step in reaching this goal is producing a play independently.

Which play:

We have chosen William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream for many reasons: 1) Since there aren't any copyrights for Shakespeare's works we have cut a significant cost there. 2)One of the directors has worked on this particular show before, and both are very familiar. 3) The way the characters are grouped in the play makes it easier to schedule actors who may have conflicts. 4) The play, like many of Shakespeare's other works, lends easily to being contemporized. This way costuming is much easier, instead of trying to find period attire for an entire cast of 20-25 people.

What we need money for:

The biggest expenses for us are going to be the script and costumes. We need at least 30 scripts printed, which could cost $200 easily. We are going to bind them ourselves in three prong folders for our actors and giving them the option to upgrade if they want to. For costuming our biggest cost will be for the fairies in the play and also for the play within the play which we want to portray in a traditional manner. If we can, we want to also try to get cast shirts for our actors as a souvenir and a thankyou for volunteering to do the show for us.

Where is the show?!

Our venue is called the Enchanted Forest Sanctuary located in south Titusvillle, Florida. The "stage" is going to be in a beautiful, completely natural butterfly garden. The Sanctuary is letting us put on our play without having us pay for the space which is wonderful but, the area we have chosen is unconventional. The garden has concrete paths and a boardwalk which we may use as our stage, we can not go into the flower beds at all. Being that our venue is first and foremost a wildlife sanctuary, we are going to have to be extremely cautious not to disturb or upset the environment. We found out that in one of the beds there is a gopher tortoise burrow and we hope he'll like the show from his front door.