by Joe Miller
Last week, the Pocahontas County Op-era House kicked off its 2026-7 season with the Rustic Mechanicals’ performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
If you’re unfamiliar with the Rustic Mechanicals, then you’re really missing out. The troupe is West Virginia’s only professional Shakespeare company, and they always put on a great show. This was the fourth Mechanicals show I’ve seen at the Opera House (and the company’s ninth show in Marlinton) and it did not disappoint.
It can be tempting to think of Shakespeare as highbrow and maybe a bit boring.
But “Midsummer” is one of Shakespeare’s funnier (and bawdier) plays. Two of the play’s plotlines turn on a triple entendre created by turning a bloviating character named “Bottom” into a literal donkey.
That’s neither boring nor particularly highbrow.
The Rustic Mechanicals were founded with the goal of making Shakespeare more accessible to West Virginia audiences.
Every element of the performance is calculated to draw audiences into the action. Some of that drawing-in is figurative – the play is staged “in the round,” with actors on the floor rather than on stage, and seating on three sides. Other times, the drawing-in is literal, as when Nate Dameron was pulled from his seat in the audience to portray Wall in “Midsummer’s” play with-in the play.
But much of the magic happens in the adaptation, which shortened the play’s run time from the roughly 2.5 hours of the unabridged version to a tight 90 minutes.
Those 90 minutes are largely faithful to Shakespeare’s original dialogue, but the Mechanicals also incorporate several modern songs into the performance.
One such laugh-out-loud moment occurs late in the play, when Nick Bottom (creative director Jason A. Young) begins singing the opening lines from “What a Feeling (Flashdance)” while Francis Flute (Mechanicals veteran Stephen Phillips) strikes Jennifer Beals’ famous shower pose from the film.
Well, I found it laugh-out-loud funny. My son and his girlfriend (both in their early 20s) didn’t crack a smile.
My guess at the time (confirmed in a later conversation) was that they simply didn’t get the reference. And that’s fair enough. I know the film only through video rentals years after its release. (I was just 11 when “Flashdance” hit theaters.)
Adapting any work is a kind of translation. Some types are translations from one language to another, while others are translations from one type of media to another. Translations are, of course, inherently imprecise. That lack of precision sits at the heart of R. F. Kuang’s 2022 novel, “Babel, or the Necessity of Violence.”
Babel is set in a world in which magic comes in the form of silver bars that are inscribed with word pairs in different languages. The magic flows from the differences between the words, the subtle connotations that are lost in translation.
Kuang’s novel is equal parts magical realism, deep dive into etymology and the philosophy of language and dissertation on the evils of colonialism. It’s a long book and gets a little lecture-y at times, but it’s worth reading for the well-researched discussions on the origins of words and how those origins shade meanings in ways that make every translation at least a little bit imprecise.
Unpicking that level of detail in language translation requires deep fluency in multiple languages—the characters in “Babel” all speak and read half a dozen or more languages.
Translation issues in other types of adaptations are often easier to spot.
The Apple TV+ series “Foundation” is a loose adaptation of a series of Isaac Asimov novels. The television show shares several proper nouns with Asimov’s novels, but little else. That’s because there is very little plot in the novels. They mostly involve long conversations conducted while characters ride around in spaceships.
Adaptations are translations that are for somebody.
When you’re adapting a science fiction series that has spaceships and far-future political intrigue, you’re making it for people who want to see those ships shooting at each other.
When you’re adapting Shakespeare for audiences in West Virginia (where the median age is 42.7) or performing in Pocahontas County (median age: 49.5), then you’re making it for people who get references to films that came out in 1983.
