Give me your hands if we be friends

If it weren't so cliched and over-done, Midsummer Night's Dream would be my favorite Shakespearean play by far. As it is, it still makes it to my top five. I can verify from experience it's one of the few works of the Bard that will really get high school kids laughing together at the right times, and I have an untested theory that your house plants will grow thicker and fuller if you just read some of Titania or Oberon's best lines over them five minutes a day. I once came across a Freudian reading of the play that drew all sorts of evocative parallels between it and the myth of the minotaur, and I've never read it the same way since.

My wife and I saw a Shakespeare in the Park production of it in Barrie Ontario this summer. When our kids asked about it, I gave them a former-English-teacher's synopsis of the plot. They were so intrigued, they asked me about a month later to read Act V to them. We laughed together at the right times.

Then one afternoon my ten-year-old son, whose current hobbies include doing stop-motion animation movies with his Lego sets, asked me if I'd give him a hand with something. He'd started setting up a Lego version of "that play by that guy..." and he was hoping I'd help him with it. You've heard of hockey dads? I guess I'm a bit of a Shakespeare dad: I said yes.

It actually grew into something of a family project-- even our six-year-old got a part (a paraphrased version of the lion's part). And, all biases aside, I'm sure she would have done Mr. Shakespeare proud.

So, hoping it brings a bit of culture and light to terra incognita, I present to you the first all-Lego staging of: Bottom's Dream. (As you view, please bear Theseus's advice in mind: Nothing can be amiss when simpleness and duty attend to it).