This is a brief, sample design concept for a deconstructionist production of A Midsummer Nights Dream. It was originally made for an advanced audio design class. As a challenge, rather than just constructing sound cues, I attempted to replicate what the production would sound like sitting in the audience. The following takes place in an immense, echoing warehouse.
These are some of the audio/video samples I used as inspiration while creating the concept and cues.
This is Puck's speech at the end of the play, which he again speaks into a microphone. This is also a cue highly dependent on the set. The clanking sound is puck flipping large, industrial electrical switches, turning the entire theatre into a gigantic, beeping, blinking computer. This is to take the show out of the realm of older media and end it with what most of the population is currently mired inthe internet, video games, etc. These sounds, again, should come loudly from all speakers, and be, hopefully, extremely unpleasant:
This is an example of what the magical flower sounds like. In this production, the "flower" is actually mass media, so it would be represented by a menacing looking television set that rises up from the ground, ensnared with twisted, jagged wires.
The beginning of the cue is the background sound of the forest when the lovers are asleep in Act II, Scene II. The Forest ambience is intended to sound artificial and rusty. The electronic interference is Puck pulling plugs from the sound board, which the fairies control, to change the media content of the forest. The sound of Puck singing the NBC theme is what calls the machine forth. The television appears, tunes in, and presents the some of the dialogue of the love juice speech as a piece of propaganda. Once finished, he plugs everything back in, and replaces the peaceful, sleepy song in the beginning with something romantic. The music used in the beginning is the Belle Orchestre, the end is Glen Miller:
This is an example of what preshow and intermission music might sound like. I thought it would be interesting to take songs from Shakespeare's plays and lay them over popular music of mid-20th century America. I took a karaoke version of Frank Sinatras It Was a Very Good Year and recorded the lyrics of the fairys song in Act II scene II. I wanted it to have the rusty, creepy, dystopian feel of 1950s cold war propaganda. Each song would seem to leak out of individual speakers, changing sources about every thirty seconds. It is purposely difficult to understand, as I wouldnt want the choice to be overtly obvious unless the audience is listening carefully. Ideally they would sound as if they were emanating from distant megaphones:
This is an example of what a scene might sound like in the fairy world. Puck is presenting his mistress with a monster speech as a slide presentation for a council of fairies. I thought it might be interesting if the fairies, as a whole, completely abandon Shakespearian technique and speak in the flat, dull monotone. Please excuse the voice acting...I was winging it. I purposely go in and out of Shakespearian text, sometimes reading the lines "translated". Since this is concerning the mechanicals, the images shown in the slide presentation should be appropriately offensive.
The section at the end is the effect employed whenever the fairies disappear to hide from humans. This would ideally be accompanied by an extreme, harsh lighting effect. It is a combination of industrial effects from the BBC and Network libraries, and an effect downloaded from the Free Sound Project at freesound.org. It would emanate from all speakers, and should be extremely loud and unpleasant:
